Origin Breads in Madison, WI

Kirk Smock, Owner

Origins

My wife, Kathryn, and I were living in Guyana (where Kirk was a travel writer). I complained about not being able to find bread. I dabbled with yeasted doughs and learned the love of taking flour and water and turning it into bread and sharing it with people. Guyana provided that foundation. From there we moved to New York City. That’s when I bought local grains and different flours in greenmarkets. Then I started reading about sourdough and whole grains. I was amazed by the different flavors you could get from fresher flours. Later, we moved to Mozambique (where Kathryn worked in child health care) for four years. There, it’s very much a bread-based culture. It’s a former Portuguese colony, so people bought Portuguese rolls. We packed up our sourdough starter and found a stone mill we could use in South Africa when we went there. Over those four years, I baked a ton. A seed had been planted.

Then we moved back to Madison where my wife’s parents are. I talked to a guy who ran a local stone mill, looked for shared-kitchen options. If I wanted to scratch that itch, that was the time. I got a Belgian Rofco oven. It was a low investment. I wondered if I would do it as a hobby when I had writer’s block. Then I gave up my part-time job. It was just me for 18 months. I mixed everything by hand, juggling fermentation, running out quickly, making deliveries.

We opened in October, 2016 with a corner space in a spare kitchen. I bought another oven so I could do 24 loaves in an hour. I started doing farmers markets, then signed a lease on a 1900-square-foot place. Three years in, I took out a loan, found a bigger space, got a mixer, a bigger oven. We set up a four-deck in March, 2020. Once I got that oven, there was no turning back.

Company Mission

Everything we do is a true sourdough, naturally-leavened product. All our grains are regionally grown. There are a lot of benefits to sourdough and doing a long fermentation to transform the flour, yeast and water into a nutritious, healthy, flavorful bread. We don’t use commercial yeast in the kitchen.

I wanted people to understand what locally-sourced and naturally-leavened means. What is spelt flour? What is rye flour? Madison has enough bakeries selling white bread and white-flour pastries. There’s clearly a bigger market for that than what I’m doing, but it wasn’t the business I wanted. If I was going to open a bakery, I wanted to know the farmers and their farming practices. And the same with pastries and pizza. A lot of people think pizza can’t have a good texture if you’re using whole grains. We make a pizza dough that wows people with flavor and texture for our weekly pizza nights.

Signature Products

For breads, we call it the sprye loaf. That’s made with spelt, rye and wheat flour. We developed a way to put these three delicious grains into a loaf of bread. It’s a lighter loaf with higher hydration. On the weekends we do a spent green loaf. There is a certified organic brewery in our building. Knowing how many grains are left over from the brewing process, really wanted to figure out a bread that incorporated those. You call it spent beer grain bread, and people don’t like the word spent. Beer led them to believe the bread would taste like beer. So we put poppy seeds on the outside of the loaf. There’s a bit of maple syrup in there to offset the richness of the grains, so we called it Miss Maple Poppy Stout Bread. People started buying it. That’s marketing.

Our croissants are made with sourdough. They have whole grains, so they’re heavier than what most people are used to. We do chocolate croissants and we make all our own chocolate as well. We do a rotating nut one. That changes from pecan to pistachio to almond. We make the frangipane in house. Then we’ll do bagels and different danishes with cheeses.

Equipment ‘Must-Haves’

I really love our four-deck electric oven. For me, a home baker for 12 years doing all the home-oven hacks, moving to the Rofco oven was a step up, but it was finicky. You had to rotate the breads. With gas, you can’t set individual decks. It’s all one temperature. Our bakery is fueled by renewable energy, so we bought some solar panels. You can set the individual decks. If we’re doing pastries in there, we can also do cookies and breads. The big oven is from Polin, an Italian company.

Production Tip

As you’re starting out, it’s a long process that can easily control your life. With the sourdough starters, you can go down the rabbit hole, being so precise with taking care of them and feeding them. That can be difficult to fit into a production schedule if you don’t have a bakery that’s running 18 to 24 hours a day. We have a walk-in cooler that’s kept in the 40s to 50s depending on the time of the year for fermenting the breads. We also change the feeding schedule with the starter so the overnight starter can go into the walk- in at 50 degrees, and it can sit in there for 15 hours and be at the right spot for mixing the next day.

Future Plans

We were recently approached to open a café, a second location. But we’re in a pretty good place. We do a lot of wholesale to grocery stores and restaurants. We do a couple of farmers markets, including the large one that draws up to 20,000 people on Saturdays. We want to build out the retail side of things. Hopefully this winter we’ll add sandwiches. There’s still room for growth where we are. I have a family and it already consumes a lot of my time.

Photos by SV Heart Photography/Destination Madison

For more info, visit https://www.originbreads.com/

(This article appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)