Harriet Willis discovered the key to happiness during pandemic lockdown: bread-baking.
“During lockdown, people wanted to find comfort, and what’s more comforting than fresh-baked bread? It just soothes the soul,” said Willis, 56, of Mechanicsburg. “I found my passion. I feel really calm and happy when I bake, and it gave me the idea that maybe I could make a living doing this.”
Willis knew what it took to launch a small business—she previously owned a mortgage-broker business. And her background is in sales. Most recently, she worked as a Harrisburg-area restaurant server at Char’s Tracy Mansion and Tavern on the Hill. Willis never prepared the food she served, but the pandemic prompted her—along with many of us—to rethink career choices.
“We learned that jobs are not secure,” Willis said. “I decided that I’m going to do what makes me happy and not be reliant on working for a corporation.”
Harriet Willis
Self Starter
Microbakeries, Willis learned, are the biggest trend on the baking scene. They’re also called cottage bakeries, referencing their place as a cottage, or home-based, industry. In Pennsylvania, there’s a procedure to follow, including permits, inspections and licensing, in order to become a cottage-licensed bakery.
It took Willis about 18 months to convert her garage into her bakery, gather baking pans and equipment. Another Round Lemoyne’s secondhand restaurant shop provided nearly everything she needed at half the cost, and then she found herself in a pandemic-induced supply chain holding pattern for more than a year until her brand-new oven arrived.
And she really needed that oven in order to produce her style of bread—artisan sourdough loaves of buttermilk, harvest grain, rye and cranberry walnut breads, plus focaccia, English muffins and biscuits.
“I fell in love with sourdough baking,” said Willis. “It has very beneficial probiotic qualities that come from the starter.”
Sourdough starter, through fermentation rather than yeast, is what causes sourdough bread to rise.
“Once you make bread with it, you always keep some of it to maintain your bread-baking,” Willis said. “My current starter is two years old, but some people have starters that are over 100 or 1,000 years old. In fact, my starter originates from a starter that came from San Francisco—I ordered it online.”
As she waited for her oven’s arrival, Willis developed a completely unexpected side hustle.
“The Simply Bread Oven was founded by a Belgian man who lives in L.A.,” Willis said. “He missed his sourdough bread, and he couldn’t find any bread ovens in the U.S. made for micro-bakeries, so he decided—being a product developer and engineer—to build one. Myself and 23 other bakers across the country became early adopters before his prototype, and we bought into the company.”
She was such a believer in the company that she took a part-time sales job.
“I get to talk to other bakers all day,” Willis said.
Her very own oven arrived a year and three months after she placed the order.
“It was worth the wait,” she said. “It’s a commercial oven with steam-injected decks. You can inject steam, and you don’t have to open the oven door to do it. The steam helps the bread to rise and form a nice big belly, or ear, in the bread.”
Bread and Butter
Hattie’s Bread Box Bakery launched on Oct. 1 through a pop-up shop at Mechanicsburg’s Route 174 Roadside Market. Even though it was a rainy weekend, with the remnants of Hurricane Ian saturating central Pennsylvania, her bread sold out in three hours.
“She didn’t even have it out on the table and people were buying it,” said Steve Paulus, market owner and third-generation farmer. “Harriet’s bread fits in with what our store is all about—giving space to a lot of small business owners who don’t have a storefront or the location we do.”
Over the past 10 years, Paulus has built up relationships with about 50 small family farms and small businesses like Hattie’s Bread Box Bakery.
“I believe in Hattie,” Paulus said. “After that first weekend, I told her, ‘You hit a home run with your bread. Now, can you keep up?’”
Customers can also order bread online and pick it up directly from Willis’ home-based bakery. In front of her garage is a custom-built, fully insulated pickup station—like a large breadbox—hence the name, “Hattie’s Bread Box Bakery.”
While her initial customer base is primarily through word-of-mouth (or maybe it should be called taste in the mouth), Willis is gearing up to hit her goal—300 loaves of bread, weekly. She plans on offering sourdough pumpkin and sweet potato breads through the holiday season. And she’s developing recipes for sourdough cinnamon rolls, sourdough chocolate chip cookies and sourdough brownies.
Baked into Her DNA
Discovering her love of baking also reconnected Willis to her childhood home—in one of America’s “foodie” meccas, New Orleans.
“My great-grandmother was a baker, and, as a kid, I liked to bake,” Willis said. “All my family would say, ‘You’re a good baker,’ and I would sort of scoff it off’”—until now.
And working from home is something she’s grateful for, every day. She’s called central Pennsylvania home since 1987.
“It’s wonderful, very cool to get up in the morning, get my coffee, and start baking right here in my home,” Willis said. “I also really like that my house was built in 1950 by a man named Harry Pence, and I’d like to think that Harry would like the idea that I’m self-employed and working in the garage that he built. My son’s name is Harry, my grandfather was named Harry, and there’s a beautiful continuum of things.
For more information, visit hattiesbreadboxbakery.com.
If you like what we do, please support our work. Become a Friend of TheBurg!
