Bakery owner also contributes to locally grown charity
MARS — A few years into her growing interest in baking, Heather Sprague realized how many works of literature — nonfiction and fiction — include references to bread. In the late-2010s, the bookworm had been trying to combine her love for baking, which had come to engross much of her working life, with her love for reading, which is when she came up with a novel idea.
Nine years after striking up her own business, Sprague spends three days a week in her shop on Pittsburgh Street where the aroma of fresh bread emanates from loaves that share their names with books that sit across from their shelf. Sprague owns Novel Breads, a bakery and bookstore where readers can get a more sensory experience with the books they take from the shelves.
Some of the breads Sprague has sold have come from experiments she thought of after reading a book, she explained.
“I have a gentlemen’s black bread, which is a dark Russian, rye, kind of pumpernickel but a little richer, and I got that because I read ‘A Gentleman in Moscow,’ and they reference black bread in there, so it got me curious about that bread,” she said.
“I read ‘Where the Crawdads Sing,’ and (the protagonist) lived on corn flour, corn critters, so I made a cornbread, and for her 16th birthday, her boyfriend had given her a caramel cake, so I combined caramel and corn and made a caramel corn cake.”
The current home of Novel Breads is normally open Thursday though Saturday, but Sprague’s work as a baker is constant. After sharing a kitchen space with the Speckled Hen in her early years in business, she found a kitchen on Butler’s Main Street where she can bake weekday mornings to have enough stock to sell at her shop in Mars and at farmers markets around the region.
Her goal is to eventually have a shop that can do it all, because she has still never lost the lust for the kitchen side of the business.
“I want to get into a space where I have everything under one roof, for the sensory experience alone,” Sprague said. “I hope to always have my hands, literally, in the dough, because (of) that personal connection.”
Even people who have not stopped at the small bakeshop may have eaten bread Sprague has baked. She is a frequent donor to the Evans City Community Food Cupboard, which has food distributions the first and third Friday of each month.
Marilynn McElhinny, director of Evans City Community Food Cupboard, has known her for years. She was involved in Sprague’s Girl Scout troop when Sprague was young. McElhinny said the bread supplied by Sprague has been well received by clients of the cupboard, who wouldn’t normally have access to fresh bread at a food pantry.
“They’re delighted because she gives us a nice assortment of breads, so the day we have them we are able to give everyone a loaf, sometimes two loaves,” McElhinny said. “Bread is one thing that wasn’t on the list that we could order, so that was really a nice bonus for the families.”
McElhinny said the Evans City food cupboard serves around 45 families each month, and Sprague makes and drops off 12 to 15 loaves every few weeks. So there is pretty much always enough to go around.
“Often there’s 20 loaves,” McElhinny said. “That makes it nice because we can give every family a loaf.”
And Sprague’s work in the community is aided by her now yearslong involvement in Neighbor Loaves, an initiative by the Artisan Grain Collective that lets customers contribute to food pantries through their local bakeries.
People can chip in to Neighbor Loaves at Novel Breads. She said she uses money from store and online donations to get grain from local suppliers.
Each Neighbor Loaves loaf purchased from Novel Breads is donated to the Evans City Community Food Cupboard or the Fishes and Loaves Program in Saxonburg, according to Novel Breads’ website.
Sprague said Chatham University contacted her about Neighbor Loaves, and she used the initiative to get even more involved with her surrounding area.
“The whole idea is not only to provide a loaf to people in need, but also keep the bakeries going, keep the farmers who were growing the grain going, and the millers,” Sprague said. “So part of the requirement was to make the loaves with at least 50% locally grown and milled grains.
“I was already using Frankferd Farms over in Saxonburg, their stuff is organic, so that’s the other advantage. Solar-powered mill, they grind all their grain as well.”
She also pointed out that September is Sourdough September, a semiofficial recognition of the month that encourages sourdough users to promote themselves. Sprague said she always bakes with sourdough, and learned how to use starters more than 25 years ago.
As a baker who makes all of her breads from sourdough, she said she has come to look at the main ingredient, a sourdough starter, as a living thing, because it has to be “fed” in order to have the correct properties to make bread.
“Because it is living, it has to be fed often, but a lot of people overlook like water, temperature, the quality of water,” she said. “When I’m feeding my starter, there’s always some extra left in there and it’s still active, so I keep that and sell it, you only need a quarter cup to get a starter going, but it takes you half the time.”
Sprague said she has even taught baking classes focused on making the most of a sourdough starter. A sourdough starter is how she got her start in baking, after all.
Despite using one type of bread to make, more or less, every edible item in her shop, she said she takes pride in the variety of baked goods she offers. Her signature items are English muffins, but she also sells loaves of many flavors, including the breads inspired by flavor ideas from the books she reads.
She said people who want to start baking bread should not fear the work that goes into keeping a sourdough starter, but rather work with it until they have a handle on how it works.
“Part of my doing this is I want to introduce people to what sourdough can be and what flavors can go together,” Sprague said. “Sourdough isn’t just one type of bread like a baguette, it can be very sour to moderately sour.”
For more information on Novel Breads, or its Neighbor Loaf initiative, visit the shop’s website at novelbreads.com.
