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Meet the Newcastle couple who connected over sourdough 'culture'
By Alex Morris January 31 2026
Musicians, bakers and baristas Niamh Bellicanta and Tim Evans bonded over a shared love of culture.
The couple met while working at Newcastle's Piratti's Bakery on the corner of Bolton and King streets in 2021, and six months ago they opened Theydy's, a community arts and ecology hub at the Clyde Street Arts precinct in Hamilton North.
"Culture has two meanings here," Bellicanta says.
"There are a lot of cultural activities that happen here. One of those is music. Sometimes, people who are running workshops hire out the space for a day, and we have some textile things here, like this loom, which is Tim's.
"The other culture that's happening is that we're baking sourdough. We're using a four-day slow ferment process, and we're open in the mornings, on Friday morning so far, for sourdough bread and pastries, and we're doing sourdough pizza in the evening."
…
Home bakers are finding devoted customer bases that allow them to stay home with family and still make a decent living — but they do have get up in the middle of the night.
Marcelle Malkin wakes up at 3 a.m. to start work in her sourdough bakery in Fort Mill, S.C. But she doesn’t have to go far. While her husband and children sleep, she mixes dough, shapes loaves and bakes bread, all in the basement of her home.
It’s not a small operation. The bakery produces 400 loaves a week, distributed at 11 locations around the booming suburb of Charlotte, N.C. Ms. Malkin owns two bread ovens. Five part-time employees work in her home, including one who comes in at 7:30 a.m., so Ms. Malkin can take her children to school.
Ms. Malkin’s operation, Fort Mill Sourdough, is one of a remarkable number of microbakeries proliferating across the United States, in big cities and small towns alike. Sky-high commercial rents and the impossible math of how to care for children while running a business have created the need for home-based bakeries. Flexible state licensing, digital tools and a hunger for sourdough — which many consumers believe is healthier than mass-produced bread — have created big opportunities for home bakers.
A new type of business, and a new way of buying bread, is taking shape.
When she and her family moved from Westchester, N.Y., to South Carolina in 2021, Ms. Malkin left her job in private equity to stay home with her children. The bakery started as a means of earning “Costco money.” Now, she says, her business matches her previous six-figure salary working in finance.
“Two years of waking up at 3 to 4 a.m. every day — I have tendinitis, I have a problem with my shoulder from shaping dough,” she said. “I still absolutely love it. I hop out of bed.”
Home Bakeries Go Legit
When Bonnie Ohara started her microbakery, Alchemy Bread, in Modesto, Calif., in 2014, she had no dreams of grossing six figures. There was no model at all, only her skills as a baker and a need to support herself while remaining at home with her children.
Ms. Ohara spent much of her life below the poverty line. A working artist, she discovered her knack for baking sourdough when she was trying to stretch the flour allotments she received through government assistance, which supported her and her two children, with a third on the way.
After the passage of the California Homemade Food Act in 2013, which legalized the practice of producing some types of food for sale in the home, California was starting to issue permits for home food businesses. Ms. Ohara got the first cottage bakery permit in the Central Valley and went to work.
“I was a pregnant lady with two kids and 12 loaves of bread on a cargo bike, biking around town,” she said. “I was trading loaves of sourdough for $5 bills, putting them in my jacket pockets, going by the restaurant supply store, getting a 50 pound bag of flour and putting it on my kids’ laps and taking the cargo bike home to make more bread.”
She began posting photos of her bakery to Instagram, then a growing social media platform, writing her captions like diary entries. “The pictures make it look idyllic — small children reading picture books and fairy tales and sourdough bread — it’s very homey.” Soon, she had a large following.
It wasn’t quite as idyllic in real life. “There is a level of stress that comes with this that is hard to relay to anyone of that constant work type feeling,” she said. But of the options available to her, Ms. Ohara said the chance to generate income while caring for her children was by far the best. Her bakery grosses as much as $95,000 a year.
“I’m a product of a couple of bigger problems,” Ms. Ohara said. “If there was great child care and opportunity for great flexible work, I wouldn’t have ended up creating my own job in this way.”
Pandemic Bakery Boom
Cottage bakeries tend to sprout up after someone starts spending a lot of time at home. Usually, this is a private, isolated occurrence — a layoff, the birth of a baby. In 2020, millions of people got stuck at home. And many, many cottage bakers were born.
Ms. Ohara started hearing from them, and she doled out advice on podcasts, in videos and on social media. Her 2018 book, “Bread Baking for Beginners,” sold wildly.
Jill Nguyen remembers seeking out Ms. Ohara online as she sought to create her own microbakery. She lives in Washington D.C., and in 2020, she worked at a political tech company. She discovered sourdough baking, and, unlike many of her fellow Americans, never got sick of it. She launched a part-time cottage bakery, called Capitol Jill Baking, and went full-time with it in 2022.
I did my first-ever pop up in 2023, and 300 people showed up,” she said. “I had this moment where I was like, ‘I guess I’m not going back to an office job.’”
Customers preorder loaves every Sunday, and each week has designated a bread pickup day and a pastry pickup day. Like almost every baker interviewed for this story, she uses a platform called Hotplate to manage orders.
The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2020, offers users a smooth way of sending text alerts for “drops,” or preorders, to anyone who has signed up for them. (The platform charges a service fee, either paid by the baker or passed on to customers) The preorder model cuts down dramatically on the waste that plagues a traditional bakery business. And it creates excitement. Ms. Nguyen’s drops sell out in five minutes.
Ms. Nguyen’s bakery also grosses six figures. But she emphasizes that she’s not in it for the money. She works as many as 15 hours a day, six days a week.
What I’m doing matters. People are happy,” she said. “If I wanted to get rich, I would have stayed in tech.”
The Influencers
On Instagram and TikTok, videos of women in flowing dresses pouring out huge buckets of fermented dough, baking bread in their professional ovens and arranging loaves on adorable custom-built shelves for pickup, all from their home kitchens, have racked up millions of views over the last couple of years.
Sourdough, a trend once confined to big, liberal cities, has undergone a cultural shift, as the Make American Healthy Again movement spurs more Americans to pursue simpler, homemade foods, and as mega-influencers like Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm put the bread at the center of their lifestyle content.
The origin stories of these social-media-focused bakeries are nearly indistinguishable from those of their earlier peers: a knack for bread, a desire or need to work from home and an urge to connect with community both online and off.
What changed was the nature of social media. Videos could build massive audiences. They also were a lot more work.
In 2023, Macey Merlak posted on a Nextdoor group in her neighborhood in Sugar Grove, Ill., asking if anyone would like to buy some bread. She’d seen some microbakeries online, and thought she might want to try selling some of her sourdough.
“Within days, I was absolutely booked,” she said, adding, “I was shocked by the response.”
Her business, Little Pearl Breads, grew rapidly over the next year, selling 100 loaves a week at its peak. Within months, she’d invested in a bread oven and a professional-grade mixer.
Her Instagram account grew astronomically, too, racking up 100,000 followers in nine months for her videos that shared her journey as a microbaker. She put together her own e-books and took on marketing deals with brands. She also connected with an almost entirely female network of cottage bakers around the country who shared tips and advice.
But as she tried to keep up with the demands of making content and selling bread every week, Ms. Merlak burned out. She has two children under 5, and her main goal with the bakery was to have a side business while staying at home with her children. “Being a stay-at-home mom becomes difficult with work on my plate.”
She still bakes bread for her bakery, but only once every other week. Now, her main work, and income stream, is social media. Her sourdough recipe book alone brought in $150,000 in revenue, and she recently signed a six-figure book deal to publish three cookbooks.
Her social media is now filled with not only bakery content, but also lifestyle content, with brand deals woven in. She’s one of a number of microbakery influencers who emphasize their Christian faith. “I don’t think my content is explicitly for Christians,” she said. “I’m sharing my life, my bakery and my faith is all part of who I am. I’m very unashamed of that.”
Parker Cook is among the few men who are bona fide microbakery influencers, with more than 150,000 followers on Instagram. He has noticed that he sticks out a little in the space. His bakery, Basil and Bloom, operates out of Rigbee, Idaho. He sells about 200 loaves a week at the local farmers market, and works closely with his wife.
“We don’t have those traditional husband and wife roles — I do most of the cooking and I’ll do the laundry,” he said.
Sadee Bone said that her social media accounts both “romanticize” Sadee’s Sourdough, her microbakery in Oklahoma, and poke fun at the online tropes of lifestyle influencing. To her, cottage bakeries offer a better option to women staying at home than many other income streams, but it’s still a model that works for a much wider swath of people. “Cottage baking, it’s like, it’s not an M.L.M.,” she said, referring to multilevel marketing practices. “I think it’s way more empowering and not a scam.”
The Future
The reality is most sourdough microbakers aren’t making six figures — but their bread is often in high demand, and they find unique meaning in the work.
Yania Justiniano started baking sourdough bread for her son, who is autistic and has a textural sensitivity to food as part of his diagnosis. He could tolerate eating only bread and pizza, so she resolved that the bread should be good.
A former New York City bus driver, she works as a transportation supervisor and lives in Nyack, N.Y. Under the name the Sourdough Sweet Spot, she bakes her bread once a week for the local farmers’ market, and it always sells out.
“I wish I could do it full time,” she said. “Unfortunately, I don’t get medical insurance or a pension from the bakery.”
But she doesn’t want to open a brick-and-mortar bakery. For one, her customers like the transparency of a home bakery. “They say, ‘Oh, I like your bread better — your bread is homemade.’”
Similarly, Ms Ohara, the longtime microbaker in California’s Central Valley, said working from home freed her from so many of the hassles of running a traditional business.
Of her friends with storefront bakeries, she said, “I never look at what they’re doing in a day and feel envious.” She added, “They’re letting someone go, hiring someone new, training someone, dealing with customer service — the mechanics of running a business kind of take over.”
Running a microbakery lets her remain focused on the craft. “If I opened a brick and mortar,” Ms. Ohara said, “at a certain point, I wouldn’t be a bread baker any more.”
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