A Wisconsin bakery committed to baking small batches of long-fermented sourdough breads using 100% organic grains grown and stone milled in Wisconsin.
ORIGIN Breads is a Madison, WI bakery launched by Kirk Smock in 2016, committed to using only freshly-milled, organic and local flour, and natural leavening. These choices grew from a home baking obsession, and an idea that there were already enough bakeries that used standard ingredients. Kirk started with a simple vision of baking small batches of long-fermented sourdough breads using 100% organic grains grown and stone milled in Wisconsin. The bakery was just Kirk, mixing bread by hand in a leased kitchen. The size suited the enterprise because the regional grain economy was slowly growing, too.
“I didn't really know if it was possible, but I was small enough to feel like I could give it a go,” Kirk said (pictured here, third from the right, with his team). Growth followed, seeing them expand from the Dane County farmers’ market, to now being in eight grocery stores and co-ops, with eight employees. At their facility, people can walk in to purchase products and see the processes – mixing, shaping, lamination, baking. Wednesday pizza nights with AGC member Giant Jones Brewery—who happens to be in the same building—are another invitation for the public to connect with ORIGIN.
In the beginning, however, these layers of work and intersections were not even imagined. When he started out, Kirk sourced flour from Gilbert Williams at Lonesome Stone Milling, who was lining up farmers and bakers so that there would be a direct link, differentiating fresh flour from that of industrial mills. This approach had all the right intentions but made baking tricky; each time a batch of wheat changed, which could be monthly or more, bakers had to learn to work with the new lot of flour. Working at a very small scale, Kirk could adjust the hydration, timing, and handling of his dough, but having so much variation in the main ingredient was tough to manage. As the local and regional milling industry has matured, mills have moved toward blending grain to help even out protein levels and other characteristics that affect flour performance, whether at home or in a bakery.
Late in 2019, the bakery moved to where it is now, taking up a corner of a large warehouse in downtown Madison. At the time, Kirk and two other bakers worked around a single bench – now there are four benches, and most everyone does every task, from mixing through baking. The team has come from a range of experience, some in commercial baking, and one, Joe Kelly, has extensive experience with another bakery that focuses on fresh, local flour, Red Hen Baking in Vermont. Coincidentally, the Northeast is where Kirk first met the long fermentation sourdough breads he grew to love.
Necessity drove him to baking while living in Guyana because he couldn’t find any good bread. The next place he and his wife lived was in Brooklyn, and this is where the ingredient and method lightbulbs began to light him up. A bakery called ScratchBread, which no longer exists, got him hooked on sourdough, and he found Farmer Ground Flour, through shopping at Greenmarket, the city’s farmers’ markets, in 2009. He carried his interests in natural leavening and flavorful flours to Mozambique, where the whole grain, stone-ground flour he used came from South Africa.
Kirk baked bread for an outreach stand that AGC ran at FarmAid in 2019; ever since, he enjoys how the network fosters, and then deepens, relationships along the grain chain. The baking trials of the last few years were strong opportunities to meet peers. “I feel like there's this connection with a lot of bakers both in and outside of Madison, and we're able to talk through a lot of things,” said Kirk. These ties continue, and help bakers work within and beyond their bakeries—for instance, thinking about how to encourage other local bakers to use more local grains and sharing thoughts about the low-key outreach that their baked goods do on a daily basis.
The pizza is a way to discuss regionally grown and stone ground flour to the audience of dedicated pizza people. If someone asks about the flour, and where they get the 00 – which is a grind of white flour often used for pizza, the team can talk about what goes into the dough, flour-wise and otherwise, and help plant the idea that you can make really good pizza with, as he said, “this stone-ground flour that you buy here that's grown in Wisconsin.”
The exchange channels ORIGIN is finding, and the AGC network helps provide, are significant, Kirk said, and makes him feel like we're part of a bigger community. “Hearing from other small business owners in the food or service industry and farmers,” he said helps him understand everyone’s challenges. “When I talk to John and Halee [of Meadowlark Farm and Mill] and hear about the stresses of the weather and looking into their eyes as they talk about being worried about climate change – having that connection helps you have more grace with things that don't go right,” said Kirk, and creates “this shared understanding we're all in this together.”
For more about ORIGIN Breads see the short film Local Grains and the February 2024 article in The Cap Times.
