Up at four, since 2017.
Nora Castillo baked her first sourdough in a Cherry Street apartment with an oven that ran forty degrees cold. She sold loaves to neighbors off a card table on Saturdays. Within a year the card table had a line, and within two the line had a storefront.
Sunday Bread is still four people and one oven. We don’t ship, we don’t franchise, and we don’t bake a second batch of bread when the first sells out. What we do is make the same bread, the same slow way, five mornings a week.
How a loaf gets made
1. Thursday, 9pm
The leaven gets fed. It’s the same culture Nora started in 2017, and it’s never missed a meal.
2. Friday, 6am
Mix. Then four hours of folds, by hand, every forty minutes. No machine does it gentler.
3. Friday, 2pm
Shaped, scored, and into the walk-in overnight. The cold is where the flavor comes from.
4. Saturday, 4am
Into the oven at 500 with steam. Forty-eight loaves an hour until the shaped dough runs out.
The line is part of it.
Saturday at 6:55 there are usually a dozen people outside, holding coffee, talking to whoever’s next to them. We hand out the heel of the first loaf to whoever’s at the front. It’s the best part of the week and we’d never sell it.