In the kitchen of her 86-year-old father’s home, Mary Field is putting the final decorative touches on her flower garden focaccia. She lovingly places strips of sweet red pepper petals around a kalamata olive flower center and adds a green onion stem and leaves to each loaf, before sprinkling them with cheese and sea salt. Rarely a day goes by when she doesn’t bake. Her two-year-old business, Simply Sourdough, is exploding. Field goes through up to 100 pounds of flour every week and is a regular vendor at four weekly area markets. She usually sells out of her baked goods, which include baguettes, artisan boules, and several varieties of pretzels. She also accepts pre-orders on her Simply Sourdough Facebook page, and sets up her table at local festivals. Her love for everything sourdough was born about five years ago in Alaska. Field, a River Falls native who works as a paraprofessional at Rocky Branch Elementary School in River Falls, began spending her summers in Homer, Alaska, where her eldest son is a commercial fishing boat captain. Field rented out her River Falls home and moved in with her father in Ellsworth for the school year, an arrangement she says is mutually beneficial to both her and her dad. Her Alaskan summers involved rustic living in a one-room cabin, with no running water.

See SOURDOUGH, Page 9

Mary Field received a sourdough starter while living in Homer, Alaska. She uses it in her new business, Simply Sourdough.

Photo by Beth Cedarholm Sourdough

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“It’s the best thing I ever did for myself,” Field says of her summers in Homer. “I grew so much as a person. I hauled my own water, used the outhouse, chased away my own critters, and baked bread in a teeny tiny little oven.”

Field’s tiny cabin oven ran on propane, and her sink attached to five-gallon buckets of water and operated with a foot pump.

Field’s life changed one day in Alaska, when, bored, she approached a friend who ran a bakery and asked if she could have a little of her sourdough starter. The friend obliged, giving her some starter – along with a few baking tips. Soon Field was baking up a storm and filling up everyone’s freezer with sourdough bread.

When it was time to fly home to Wisconsin, she placed a small amount of the starter in a Ziplock baggie and stashed it in her fish ing boot in her checked suitcase. She jokes that she “smuggled” the starter home. “The worst thing they would have done is taken it away from me,” she explains, but she was unsure how TSA would handle something that was bubbly, fermenting, and alive. “I just didn’t want to explain bubbling white stuff to security.”

The priceless starter survived its flight home, and, back in Wisconsin, Field continued baking and presenting her breads to friends and family. Eventually, friends started telling her “It’s great, but I have enough. You should really try marketing this.” Thus, Simply Sourdough was born.

Then the pandemic hit, and, unable to return to Alaska for the summer, Field began baking in earnest at home. She started selling her baked goods at the River Falls Farmers Market and Rush River Brewery’s Market, where she quickly became a popular vendor.

While Simply Sourdough is only two years old, Field has loved to bake since she was a child helping her Grandmother Hattie in the kitchen. In addition, she has spent much of her career in the restaurant and hospitality business, serving as manager for the Afton House and working in various dining establishments as a server and bartender. “I’ve done it all,” she says, “but I just wanted to be my own boss. I knew I wanted to do something with cooking, baking, or restaurants.” Yet Field says Simply Sourdough “really just fell into my lap. The stars all aligned, and its growth was very organic.”

Everything she bakes, from her dark chocolate cherry rye bread to her cardamom cinnamon rolls, is made with her original Alaskan starter. Field enthusiastically touts the health benefits of sourdough baked goods, including the fact that the fermentation process breaks down 97 percent of the gluten. In addition, fermentation breaks down the sugars in the bread, creating a bread with a glycemic index much lower than commercial bread and an ideal choice for individuals watching their sugar intake. Sourdough baked goods also contain gut-healthy probiotics.

Field affectionately points to the massive glass jar of sourdough starter sitting on her counter. She recalls that on her last trip to Alaska in May, she worried about leaving her starter at home. “I was so concerned about my starter. It’s like leaving a child.” But she said she fed it before she left on her trip, and it was just fine when she returned 10 days lat er. “It feels like my baby.”

Field says that she’s often up until the wee hours of the morning preparing for markets. “I’ll bake until midnight, or sometimes one, two, or three a.m. and then have to be out the door and set up for a market by 8 a.m. Then I come home and sleep,” she says.

In addition to the long, sleepless hours, there have been a few challenges as a new business-owner. During the early months of the pandemic, when everybody was baking bread and flour was in short supply, she would hit every Target in the Twin Cities metro area in an effort to score as many 5-pound bags of King Arthur Flour as possible. And now, she says she is trying to remain competitive while dealing with surging food prices. “I think everybody understands that this is just the way it is right now.”

As Simply Sourdough continues to grow, Field has set new business goals.

She now has a space in the food-ready area at the St. Croix Valley Business Innovation Center, which provides incubation space and support for new entrepreneurs. Getting accepted into the center was a huge step for her business, she says. At the center, Field shares commercial cooking space, including ovens, with two other new business owners. She also keeps her industrial kitchen mixer at the center and says she does about half of her baking there.

She says she hopes to eventually hire someone to help with her baking and packaging, and she is working to get her commercial license, which would allow her to sell goods to restaurants and stores. Still, she can’t imagine that she will ever stop selling at the markets. “The last thing I want to do is make a bunch of bread, load it into the back of the truck and just wave goodbye as it’s shipped ou. The markets are what I really enjoy,” she says. “I love that interaction with my customers.”

Field admits that while she is still passionate about baking, that passion has evolved as her business has grown.

“Now it’s less about the baking and more about expressing my creative side, trying new things, and growing the business. But the heart of it is still there. Thank God my grandmother taught me to love baking.”

And Field is intent on carrying on the baking tradition with her own grandchildren. She boasts that her 5-year-old grandson, River, can “roll a pretzel as well as I can.”

Mary Field’s Garden Focaccia is a big seller in her cottage business, Simply Sourdough. Photos by Beth Cedarholm

During the pandemic, Mary Field began baking with an Alaska sourdough starter. It soon evolved into a successful home business. Photo courtesy of Mary Field