By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
When Brad Yaniga and his wife, Christina, were expecting their first child, they decided they wanted to eat healthier.
“We looked at all the foods we ate,” Brad Yaniga explained recently. “It’s too difficult to make everything you want to eat, but we decided to make the things we eat the most. I was unwilling to give up bread, so I started to make it myself.”
Their son, Mylan, is now 10, and Brad Yaniga’s bread making has developed from a simple white bread to a side hustle. The University of Toledo graduate has a full-time job as an engineer at the BP Refinery in Oregon.
For the past few months, Yaniga has been baking a white Italian style sourdough in the kitchen of The Clay Pot in downtown Bowling Green. It’s the latest turn in his commercial baking endeavors.
“I knew making my own bread was healthier than what was in the store,” the 40-year-old from Pemberville said. “I developed an interest. It sent me on a journey.”
Store-bought bread can have dozens of ingredients, while artisan bread can be as simple as flour, water, and salt. From that first white bread he turned to other recipes including special breads for the holidays and challah.
About six years ago he started his own sourdough culture that serves as the base for the bread he bakes at Clay Pot.
Using sourdough as a leavening is a challenge. It’s much easier to depend on commercial yeast. But, he noted, people have mastered sourdough for centuries without the benefit of YouTube instruction.
“Along the way I learned about the health benefits sourdough,” he said.
Yaniga also sought out the best flour. He sources his organic white bread flour from Central Milling in California.
“I like the openness that Central Milling has from field to milling to me, what they do and don’t put on their fields,” he said.
He uses some rye flour in his sourdough culture. That comes from Knueven Creamery and Market in Gilboa.
All this, he said, does add to the cost, but based on his own testing adds to the quality as well.
Yaniga first moved his bread baking from home a few years ago when he baked in the Sofia Contreras commissary kitchen in Toledo. Then he was filling special orders and selling bread through Shared Legacy, a community supported agriculture enterprise.
That proved far too time consuming. “I was burning the candle at both ends.”
The challenge with doing a side business, he said, is that it can’t grow so big that it interferes with his main job, because it can’t replace that income. And finding the space needed to bake is a difficulty.
He backed off on that until he arranged with Chef Boby Mitov, to bake for The Clay Pot.
On Sunday afternoons when the restaurant is closed, he bakes about a dozen loaves, one that he takes home, and one he leaves unbaked that Mitov uses for pizza dough. The rest is served though customers may be able to buy a loaf of bread.
Yaniga also still takes special orders., such challah, German stollen, and a Czech nut bread as well as pastries. He can be reached at painneuf.com.
