Filling a need for fresh bread

For Moser, whose passion for baking bread in her free time turned into a business some two years ago, moving her business’ baking operations from her San Mateo home into the industrial mixers and ovens at KitchenTown marked a leap in her ability to produce the hundreds of loaves the bakery produces for farmers’ markets and delivery each week.

But now that she’s setting her sights on opening a bakery just west of Draper University on East Third Avenue, Moser’s longtime dream of opening a neighborhood bakery is becoming a reality. Moser and her husband Robert Moser are currently renovating two spaces — formerly home to a Cricket Wireless store and Morrison Corporate Travel agency — to become a local bakery and coffee shop for Peninsula residents by the end of the year.

“I’m really excited about being able to present ourselves in a space and presenting an experience to our customers,” she said.

Having grown up in Germany and lived in European cities previously, Moser remembers what it was like to walk to her neighborhood bakery or grocery store to buy fresh bread in the mornings. When she first started baking bread as a hobby in 2013, Moser had just moved to Daly City from Germany and was working from home as a translator. While her husband drove to the Peninsula for work, she found herself wishing there was some place she could walk to for fresh bread.

“I was sitting in the fog and there was nothing within walking distance,” she said, of the contrast between Daly City and the European cities where she lived previously. “It’s just such a typical thing that there are little bakeries in every neighborhood and you just … in the morning you get up and go to the bakery.”

Inspired to try baking at home, Moser bought Tartine Bakery founder Chad Robertson’s book and set to work on making her first sourdough starter. After baking her first loaf, Moser said she tumbled down a rabbit hole of baking, experimenting with new bread recipes and giving loaves to friends and family for fun.

It wasn’t until she heard the story of Josey Baker, founder of the Mill cafe and bakery in San Francisco, that Moser started thinking about devoting her time to starting a local bakery serving San Mateo and Burlingame, a part of the Bay Area that she didn’t think had the clustering of bakeries one could find in the East Bay or San Francisco.

Though she was able to set up a small operation in her home, demand for Moser’s bread quickly surpassed what her oven could produce, so she reserved a weekly night shift at KitchenTown in June of 2016. She said she started going to KitchenTown more and more after she secured a spot at the Burlingame farmers’ market, expanding her production to include pretzels and French pastries in addition to a variety of bread loaves.

Moser said her business’ acceptance into to the College of San Mateo farmers’ market in January of 2017 marked a big step for Backhaus Bread. Now that her staff has grown to six, she said they bake hundreds of loaves and well over 1,000 pastries for weekend farmers’ market days.

She said learning how to refine bread recipes with her staff is one of her favorite parts about her business, though she admitted baking is an endless learning process that can be exhausting at times. Because ever-changing factors like weather and humidity can affect how a loaf of bread turns out, she said baking requires a little bit of improvisation every time she pulls something out of the oven.

“It’s definitely a challenge to not lose track of the goal and the things that are going well because when you’re constantly presented with new challenges and new things that you have to learn,” she said. “It’s easy to have bad days where you’re discouraged and you say, ‘I’m not going to be able to handle this’ … but it’s also a lot of fun.”

Moser said the word Backhaus is German for bakehouse, which was a central location where farmers and villagers could bake their bread. Because one of her uncles in Germany owned a farm with a backhaus, Moser saw how the spaces could become a community gathering space, a feeling she’s hoping to foster for those who come to her bakery when it opens.

With plans to offer baking classes and events during the holidays, Moser is hoping her bakery not only becomes among one of the stops for local residents looking for fresh bread but also a place where they can share in each other’s company.

“We want to be that neighborhood bakery that I missed,” she said.

anna@smdailyjournal.com

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