On any given Saturday between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m., a stroll through the Market Square Farmers’ Market will provide you with a surprising range of that most magnificent and maligned sustainer of life: bread. On one end of the market you’ll notice soft white loaves with the texture of English muffins that simply ache for sweet butter and honey, while at the other end, densely crusted and dark lengths of Swedish rye cry out for thick slabs of ripe cheese and smoked protein. In between, there are enough piles of ciabatta, rounds of sourdough, and bread snacks—from pepperoni rolls to pretzels—to fill bellies and baskets for days.

But it hasn’t always been this way.

While it’s true that Knoxville has a history of locally made bread, the bulk of those offerings were mass-produced commodities of industrial strength. In the 1970s, school children were most likely to learn about local bread by way of a factory tour of Kern’s Bakery on Chapman Highway where they witnessed the fabrication of long, tan loaves of fluffy white stuff that, once ingested, quickly turned into a pasty mouthful. These and other factories baked breads by the truckload and equipped them with healthy sounding slogans and wholesome logos, as well as long shelf lives and strange ingredients with curious scientific names.

While the visibility of freshly made, good bread at markets and groceries seems new in Knoxville, many of the people behind this apparent resurgence have been baking and selling loaves, rolls, and boules for a long time. And they’ve lived through a variety of assaults on this enduring foodstuff in the form of the Atkins Diet and a general contempt of carbohydrates, as well as more recent concerns about gluten. They’ve continued to get up early in the morning and keep their hands in the flour—either as a livelihood or as a passionate but avocational supplement to other careers. They’re a fervent lot, and, despite the commercial challenges they still face, each has a particular zeal for making and sharing this ancient staple.

Tellico Grains Bakery

On a sunny day when you don’t have anywhere special to be, a relaxing drive down the Cherohala Skyway can seem as endlessly wonderful as creation itself. The sky is big, the views are sweeping, and the majesty of the mountains is displayed in rich and varied shades of green. There are no amber waves of grain to be seen in this part of the world, but as you descend from the Skyway into the open flatlands of Tellico Plains, you’ll be in a place where wheat becomes bread.

Located in the town square of Tellico Plains, Tellico Grains Bakery sits in a historic brick building restored by owners Alyssa and Stuart Shull. In the past, the building was a divided space: One side was built as a bank, and the other side has been a movie theater and a school, among other things—including a pawn shop where, Stuart says, Eric Rudolph (aka, the Olympic Park Bomber) sold guns. Now the space features a peaceful, warm interior of gleaming, polished wood as well as excellent bread, sweet baked goods, and a smoky, crispy pizza. It’s not just a second home for the Shulls—it’s home. They not only knead the bread, fire the pizza, and rub butter into pastry dough in the bakery, they also live above it.

It was over 12 years ago when the Shulls brought their idea for the bakery from where they met in Colorado, through New York and North Carolina, and all the way to Tellico Plains.

“Originally we looked at Asheville; their baking scene was booming at the time, and we thought that’s the ideal we’re looking for, people are really interested in this good, crusty bread,” Alyssa says. “When we realized that that market was saturated, we started calling around about Knoxville and people said, ‘No, they’re just bunny bread, soft bread [eaters]—they’re not gonna want that stuff.’”

Once they got the bakery up and running (after some arduous remodeling detailed on their website), Alyssa recalls that “the places that we sought out in the beginning would say ‘We like your bread,’ but asked if we could make it a little less crusty. But that was our deal, we wanted to have crusty bread.”

While the bakery still produces lots of Old World-style bread, the range and texture of their output has evolved over time, and now softer breads help pay the bills. They regularly produce sourdough, pumpernickel rye, and herb flatbread (their most popular loaf). You can always find a honey wheat and multi-grain, and a fruit nut bread. And that doesn’t include a legion of remarkable pastries, scones, tea breads, and biscuits that fill the glass counters in their store.

But for this couple, whether the actual output matches their original dream is less important than continuing to make a product that conforms to their ideals. Alyssa stresses that “our bread is wholesome—we don’t add anything to it.” That’s also her answer to the many questions surrounding the virtues of bread consumption.

“Bread is a punching bag,” she says. “When it comes right down to it, the problem with bread that is giving people issues is all that stuff that’s added to make it last for so long. It just sits in your stomach. Our bread is highly digestible because of the sourdough and other enzymes that help you digest it.”

Another thing that makes a trip to Tellico Grains worthwhile: The aroma of the bakery is heady and appetizing, and contributes an extra level of flavor. Not that there’s a shortage of flavor in the bread—even the pizza crust is tempting to eat alone. The bestselling herb flatbread is essentially a focaccia, so it’s soft and redolent of fresh herbs and hints of olive oil and garlic. But if garlic is your passion, then the garlic herb loaf may be the stuff of your dreams; the crust is chewy but soft, and the crumb is studded with cloves of sweet, roasted garlic.

Of course, you don’t have to take the hour or so to drive there from Knoxville if you don’t want to—several local eateries including the Public House and Fieldhouse Social serve Tellico Grains products, and you can find the bakery’s bread and some of their sweet things at Three Rivers Market.

Other, larger stores have expressed interest in the Shulls’ bread, but that side of the business presents another set of challenges.

“We’re not producing a product that can just sit on the shelves for months to come. It’s preservative-free,” Stuart says. “One of the biggest problems of owning a bakery is trying to control that [freshness in stores]. That’s the beauty of it, too—it only lasts for a couple days and that’s it.”

In the course of a long conversation with the Shulls, one word you’re likely to hear more than any other—aside from bread, of course—is contentment. That comes from being where you want to be, doing what you want to do with the people you love.

“I can’t wait to get down here every day. Every day is a new day in baking,” Alyssa says. “You get to try again and hopefully make it better than the day before. When you keep that philosophy, it keeps you going.”

BreadShed Market

It’s hard to tell if Kymberele Kaser is a wild-eyed fanatic or merely sleep deprived. The owner of BreadShed Market on Broadway near Old North Knoxville works close to 100 hours a week, regularly rising at 3 a.m.—a very common hour for a baker who wants to have product ready for a 7 a.m. opening. But Kaser doesn’t seem to stop. When you visit the bakery, whether at open or close, you’re almost always likely to find her with her hands busy mixing flour and water, kneading dough, or shaping loaves.

The same intensity that defines her work also marks her conversation and her conviction about what she’s doing. The only pause she takes is when she reflects on how her father helped start her career in the bakery: “My father loved my banana nut muffins,” and he pushed her into the business by, literally, building a bakery, she says. “I’m pretty sure when he built it, it wasn’t because I was this passion-driven baker, it was for the selfish purpose that he wanted to be able to get my banana nut muffins whenever he wanted them.”

In many ways the need to share wholesome food is what gets Kaser up in the morning. Kaser laughs
and smiles a lot, but when she talks about the world of bread, she gets a little fierce.

“Food was always really important for me; quality food meant everything, we want to be healthy. But everything that’s mass produced, it’s crap,” Kaser says. “And it’s marketed under something healthy, [and they say] this is a natural bread, or some of those natural and non-natural grocery stores sell ‘artisan bread’—and it’s not, it’s full of chemicals and preservatives, and it makes me really mad because people are trusting these companies. I’m not mass producing. I can’t lose the quality.”

Kaser’s bread selection is wide and includes a number of European loaves like Swedish limpa rye, brioche, challah, garlic herb, and many more. The breads aren’t as crusty as you might imagine; in fact, many of these breads feature a soft crust and a dense, closed crumb. That makes them particularly good for home sandwich making, and if there’s a cheese or herb element, Kaser incorporates those ingredients into the bread itself for a more integrated flavor instead of leaving them on top.

Kaser opened BreadShed’s doors in May, and the business has had an interesting, but successful, first few months. Still, she observes, business isn’t quite what she expected. “I started at [Market Square] so for the last two years I’ve been selling my breads and pastries there. And although everyone loved my pastries, it was my bread that would always sell out within a couple of hours,” she says. “So when I opened this place, having that same mindset, I thought, ‘Oh, I need to have a lot of bread.’” And yet, she says that so far nearly 80 percent of her business in the store has been sweets and sandwiches.

Kaser is unperturbed: “I’m just doing what the community is wanting, and right now [in the new shop] they’re wanting a lot of my pastries and desserts and sandwiches.”

Any conversation about baking with Kaser will, at some point, turn to the community. She says that being able to open a brick and mortar presence owes a lot to the community that she found while selling her wares downtown. She says that when she started thinking about opening a store near downtown, her customers united to help her find a place.

“You have people at the market who talk to you, and they’re happy about the product, and you [think] they’re just a customer. But everyone was looking for a place for me, and it was touching and very humbling. It makes you feel more connected.”

Cheesecakes and Breads by Rick

As you explore the Saturday farmers’ market downtown and travel away from Market Square toward Market Street, look to the park side of the lane and you’ll see a busy set of booths stacked with a wide variety of baked goods: perfectly browned and salted lengths of pretzel, brioche donuts, rustic loaves of chewy ciabatta, and hand-sized bread rolls stuffed with pepperoni, garlic butter, and cheese. The booth is manned by Rick Rickerman, the baker behind Cheesecakes and Breads by Rick.

Rickerman is nodding, smiling at customers, many of whom he seems to know well. The happy atmosphere comes, in part, from the excitement of a busy Saturday downtown that’s full of people who still relish the success of the open-air market. But at this booth the buzz is amended by Rick’s genial personality and the fact that the bread is beautiful, tasty, and popular. It’s also seasonal.

Rickerman doesn’t distribute his bread after the close of the farmers’ market season, nor does he own a retail presence. Rick’s bakery sits alongside his house in the rolling hills of Powell, a picturesque cottage at the end of a country lane. Despite the quaint imagery, this CPA by day isn’t tempted to become a full-time country baker.

“I didn’t want this to be a seven-day-a-week job, which it could be,” he says. “I’m just happy doing what I do. Every single week someone asks where my store is. I’ve been there, done that. I moved down here 30 years ago to open my pizza store out in Halls; but it ties you down, it really, really, really ties you down. That’s fine if that’s what you want, but after a while it gets to be old hat.”

Baking is something that’s he’s done, he says, “since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. As my wife says it’s my passion. It’s still work, but I like it.” Rickerman, however, is no mere amateur—he’s taught baking at the University of Tennessee’s Culinary Institute, and he’s also a certified baker. But he’s not a romantic gourmand; when pressed a second time about what compels him to bake, he repeats, “I just like doing it, I like the outcome and people’s reactions.”

Rickerman’s casual and relaxed demeanor belies a serious perspective on the quality of his work.

“Before [my wife and I] were even engaged, I happened to be in her kitchen and I noticed she had some box cakes. I said if we ever get together you’re never gonna have another box cake,” he says. “I haven’t had a box cake in 41 years. I use the best flours I can get—which I think is King Arthur. I try to use good quality products, I have no artificial anything in my breads and no preservatives or anything like that.”

Still, he mixes a lot of dough and brings 15 to 17 different products to market every week—he has a repertoire of nearly 35 breads, the most popular of which is ciabatta, a rustic and very chewy loaf that he also makes with rosemary. The crust is a toothsome and pliable chew, and the crumb is open and soft, even a little spongy. That’s a great combination for sopping up sauces. You may even notice a faint taste of olive oil and, of course, the telltale flavor of yeast. Almost all of Rickerman’s products are yeast risen, though you may occasionally find a few loaves of sourdough in his booth.

Rickerman doesn’t speak of his passion in broad strokes or elevated language. He shies away from any commentary about commercial bakers, or the issues surrounding gluten sensitivity—perhaps it’s his accounting background that keeps his perspective straightforward. Yet there’s no complacency or apathy about bread and its place on the table.

“I used to tell my students this all the time: You can have the best filet mignon, the best whatever you’re cooking, but if you don’t have a really good piece of bread, as far as I’m concerned, it ruins your meal.”

Flour Head Bakery

As you drive along Middlebrook Pike, you may miss Flour Head Bakery unless you know where to look. There’s a sign on the side of a building that depicts a pile of golden baked goods, but no written identification of the actual business. Once inside, however, you’ll find immediate confirmation that you’re in the right place: a mélange of aromas, from baking bread and the sweet smell of cupcakes just out of the oven to lots of fresh flour, which sometimes wafts through the air like a mist.

The place is busy in the morning—a small and concentrated group of people clad in white aprons with hairnets or colorful kerchiefs atop their heads, kneading dough or portioning it into rectangular loaf pans or round proofing bowls, and moving it all into large ovens. There’s a whole lot of activity here, and there’s a whole lot of bread.

Of all the small, independently owned bakeries in and around Knoxville, Flour Head may be among the most widely known. That’s partly because of its catchy logo featuring a happy young lady clad in a pink dress under a flour apron, sporting a cheerful flower in her hair, and also because you can buy Flour Head bread on local Kroger shelves. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that this bakery is the brainchild of Mahasti Vafaie and Scott Partin, owners of the iconic Tomato Head restaurants.

Nowadays, Flour Head’s reach has extended beyond Knoxville and crossed state lines through a partnership with Sysco Knoxville, a major food service and supply distributor. While that’s mostly resulted in sales to restaurants and other service outlets, the expansion has put Flour Head bread on a lot of tables.

The bakery’s beginnings, however, were very small, says Vafaie.

“Initially we opened the bakery because we needed to get out of the kitchen [at the downtown Tomato Head], we were baking all the bread here,” she says. “Primarily, we wanted to serve the Tomato Head restaurants, and I wanted to make only artisan bread, just the crusty stuff, no loaves. And I wanted to make bagels.”

Her motivation to bake her own bread is painted in bold letters on a wall at the downtown Tomato Head: “Food gotta cook, don’t come out of a can!”—or an assembly line, untouched by human hands, for that matter. “It’s the base of so much of what we do here, so I guess I want [the bread] to be as good as everything else. We wouldn’t serve hummus that we didn’t make.”

Once the new facility was open and running with all the new production bakery equipment, expansion to farmers’ markets and grocery stores made sense—but then Flour Head started getting calls from other restaurants, so they decided to bake for them as well. The partnership with Sysco started after Gatlinburg’s Alamo Steakhouse expressed interest in serving Flour Head’s small Parker House rolls as their table bread. “We were delivering to them twice a week, driving to Gatlinburg,” Vafaie recalls. “Then Sysco said, ‘We’ll take them for you.’” Later, Sysco asked for more products.

As the original plans for production expanded, Vafaie notes that her ideas for the product lines evolved pretty quickly from just sourdough and crusty breads to the softer rolls and sandwich breads. But despite the expansion, the bakery hasn’t abandoned its idea of artisan quality. That’s part of the reason that Vafaie says she is still surprised by Sysco’s interest.

“It’s pretty amazing the partnership with Sysco—they’re giant and we’re pretty small,” she says. “I just didn’t think they would able or willing to work with us. We’re a challenge because we don’t have any preservatives in our bread—it either has to be fresh with a three-day shelf life or frozen.”

Flour Head now produces a wide variety of bread including chewy, rustic rounds as well as soft, white bread for sandwiches; it also offers bagels, granola, and pastries. Vafaie’s vision for Flour Head is undimmed and her faith in the growth of the local market is optimistic, even if there’s a hint of sadness in her voice as she discusses the difficulty of selling the crusty bread she most loves to bake.

“But we’ll get there,” she says, eyes brightening, “And it’s exciting for us to bake bread for other restaurants. It’s turned out to be one of the things I really enjoy about the bakery—the ability to help provide better bread to our community.”

Hillside Bakery

Hillside Bakery is a small, elusive bakery that sits alongside owner Patra Rule’s house, nestled, as you might expect, on a hillside in the lush area between Northshore Drive and the water. It’s a peaceful, secluded spot that’s as perfect a setting as you can imagine for turning organic wheat into bread and other good things.

You’re not likely to find Hillside Bakery’s facility unless you’re invited, which is just as well since the bakery itself doesn’t have its own retail operation. It’s a compact, commercial kitchen, efficiently arranged for work—and it’s full of the pleasant aromas of flour and browning loaves. The space, filled with cooling racks and proofing baskets, is dominated by a large deck oven, and there’s a door in the corner that leads to a little closet-like room where containers of whole, organic grain rest alongside a blond wood grain mill until they become flour.

Although Hillside produces a number of goods from vegan muffins to granola, its naturally leavened, sourdough bread is the mainstay that, literally and figuratively, puts bread on Rule’s table. It’s the bread that she seems most passionate about. “Most of what I make is natural, whole-grain bread. I don’t use baker’s yeast in 90-95 percent of my bread—it’s all sourdough,” she says.

Sourdough, of course, is bread that gets its rise from a fermentation starter instead of yeast. “My starter is about 13 years old, but you can make a starter in one week. It does get stronger over time, but some of the mystique [of the really old starter] is exaggerated,” she says. 

Rule works with an occasional assistant to produce a variety of naturally leavened bread that’s made from organic flour. Her main offerings includes miche, a richly crusted multi-purpose whole-wheat bread with a pillowy soft and satisfying crumb that, combined with a swath of butter, almost makes a meal. Rule’s use of multiple grains gives her bread a complex flavor that seems especially fresh, partly because the little bit of rye that sometimes shows up both complements and tames the slight tang of sourdough.

In addition to miche, Rule makes a lot of multi-grain, pain au levain (her own version of a white French bread with a little bit of stone-ground whole wheat and whole rye), and sunny flax (whole-wheat bread with flax seeds and sunflower seeds). She also sells a lot of specialty breads like raisin or Kalamata olive and herb.

Finding the bread can take a little doing these days as Rule has taken some time off in the last several months, but she expects to be back in full production this fall. You can often find her loaves at the Laurel Church of Christ on Fridays.

“I’m like a cottage industry. What I really have is my own little private farmers’ market,” she says. “Laurel used to be the location of a farmers’ market. When that group decided to leave, I wanted to stay, and I made an arrangement with the church. I’m there as their guest.”

On occasion, you’ll find Hillside breads at Three Rivers Market, and Rule can accommodate special orders. In fact, much of what she sells—either at the church or at the market—is already spoken for, though she always makes enough to have extra.

For Rule, baking is both passion and profession. She’s one of only a few local bakers certified by the Retail Bakers of America, and she is a constant student. Talking with her about bread is an educational experience. But Rule’s passion for baking isn’t just academic; she’s passionate about eating bread, too, not only as a pleasure but also as part of a healthy and nutritious diet. So it’s not surprising that she takes exception to the vilification of bread, or the defamation of gluten.

“There’s no denying that people are having a lot of immunity and sensitivity issues,” Rule says. “But the question is why we’re all having issues with things that people have eaten for hundreds, even thousands of years?

“People around the world survive on bread, especially this kind of bread—it’s very nutritious. It’s frustrating to hear some people talk about it—they want to talk about bread and gluten like it’s all equal. Bread is not all equal—this has no dairy, no sweetener, no oil. It’s flour, water, the starter, which is flour and water, all organic, a small amount of salt. It’s highly nourishing. Bread has a lot of what people need.” 

Sidebar:

The Original: Old Mill Bread Company

Despite its scenic name, the Old Mill Bread Company is actually located in a little West Knoxville strip mall called North Cedar Bluff Plaza. It looks any other storefront on the outside, but as soon as you cross its threshold, you’ll experience a paradigm shift as the wares and accoutrement signal that you’ve actually entered a little country store and café. There’s a tall hutch filled with jars of local honey and jelly, an old-fashioned wood and glass display case that shows off some of the bakery’s sweets, and dark wood tables for the folks who want to sit down to enjoy the Old Mill’s offerings.

Yet in the midst of this country charm there’s a very contemporary set of chrome metro shelving units that holds the many rows of the day’s bread selections. In fact, as you look past the display case into the rear of the space, there’s a modern bakery operation. But make no mistake, despite the fact that you’ll find the Old Mill’s bread on the shelves of nine area Kroger stores, it isn’t run-of-the-mill, processed, grocery store bread. Old Mill bread is hand-made from a handful of ingredients, and it also finds its way onto tables at the Orangery and on either side of the distinctive sandwich fillings at Holly Hambright’s eponymous restaurants.

The bread is particularly well suited for sandwiches. Old Mill produces Pullman loaves—so named because the rectangular loaf’s shape bears a similarity to a passenger rail car. The best seller is the honey whole wheat, a toothsome and filling loaf; it features a soft but firm crust and a tight, fairly dense crumb that’s pliable enough for easy sandwich eating.

Old Mill’s bread is remarkably consistent—rows of honey oat, hearty white, whole-wheat sourdough, and more are uniformly shaped and all have a beautifully brown crust. That’s the result of years of experience; the owners—who prefer to be identified only by their first names, Jim and Janet—opened the place on Aug. 16, 1995, which makes it one of the oldest local retail bread producers in operation. And during that time, they’ve kept ingredient lists short and natural: They use no processed sugar and no preservatives. The wheat, stone-ground on the premises, is certified chemical-free.

You can buy whole loaves on site, of course, but you can also enjoy some of the bread in slices via the Old Mill’s lunch menu. They also offer a popular selection of soups, some cookies, and a really terrific cinnamon roll.