Katy Stroud is the founder of Crust & Crackle, a micro artisan bakery. Like so many others in the community, Katy’s lifelong love of baking turned into selling a few loaves to some neighbors, which turned into a full-fledged business venture.

This is Katy’s account of how her food is strongly influenced by where she lives, and the rewards of building a business by hand. 

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Ah, Sauble Beach, Ontario – a sort of haven of rustic charm. My husband Matt grew up here, and I moved here 15 years ago. I was born in Bancroft, and despite its tranquil lakes and rolling landscapes, many of my early days here were spent indoors, in the kitchen, cooking alongside my mom. Our house hummed with life as we raised our own livestock — two steadfast cows each year, and a throng of 80 to 100 chickens. Everyone in the family hunted. And my mom canned everything. There was an old marina on the property, and in the summer we ran it as a convenience store. My mom sold pies and sticky buns and ice cream – all sorts of stuff – out of it.

Sauble Beach has a myriad of small makers in the community – plus, new ones sprouting up all the time like wildflowers. It’s an amazing ecosystem.

We’ve recently partnered with Stone Bridge Flour; the owner and her husband grow their own soft red wheat, and so in our pastry flour we use a mix of Stone Bridge grains along with a few other grains. It’s hard to explain, but food that comes from a community like that really does taste better.

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Crust & Crackle grew out of my and my husbands love for baking. I knew my recipes were pretty good - strictly our of curiosity I put a post on Facebook “Hey, I have fresh bread if anyone is interested...” and it just completely exploded from there.

With everything that we grow, the idea is to preserve it and can it down for the winter so that we can use it for breads. This week’s focaccia is roasted red peppers with feta and herbs from the garden.

Looking at the Simply Bread oven, I love that we can go through the program on it: I can see what temperature each of the decks is sitting at, we can change the settings mid stride if something isn’t working for us and see results pretty much instantly. I couldn’t imagine having to go in half way through and shuffle loaves around or even take that extra five minutes just to spray loaves before closing the door. It gave us back time in our day; I’m no longer standing and slaving at a home oven baking eight loaves at a time in about an hour, hour and fifteen. Now I’m doing 15 loaves in just over a half an hour. Our bakes became a lot more efficient. Now we can bake everything off early in the morning, which means we’re able to get the product to our customers much earlier in the day. 

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Most of all, seeing the inspiration and influence on our kids is pretty amazing. Building any business is not easy; ours has certainly taken time. You have to work at it. You just gotta keep pushing to get your name out there. But there’s no greater reward in the world.

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