Resident starts cottage bakery to sell homemade bagels

Sept. 24, 2020 | Danielle Eaton
daniellee@thereminder.com

WEST SPRINGFIELD –  Janet Blake, a jewelry designer and graphic designer living in West Springfield, is a self-proclaimed bagel lover.

Having grown up in Upstate New York and spent time in New York City, she said she’s had some very good bagels – something she’s missed since moving to Western Massachusetts. She said when COVID-19 hit, her jewelry business slowed down since craft and art shows across the country that she attended in previous years were cancelled. This, Blake explained, led her to return to experimenting with a variety of bagel recipes, something she’d done over the years.

“I think I got started because I’m a bagel lover, I’m not a baker by trade,” she laughed. “I’ve been trying different recipes for years.”

For quite some time she said she’s been joking with her husband about starting a bagel shop in West Springfield. “I’ve been teasing my husband for years, joking about opening a bagel shop,” she said.

While at home during the pandemic, Blake said she returned to making bagels. However, not long after she started making bagels again, supplies such as yeast and flour were in short supply. “I couldn’t find yeast or flour, I ordered flour online and started researching sourdough,” she said.

Sourdough, she explained, was used “before commercial yeast” to make bagels “hundreds of years ago.” She said creating bagels are a three-day process. On the first day she creates the levain, or sourdough starter, which she leaves to ferment and grow. On the second day, she makes the dough, which rises, is folded later in the day and then rises more overnight. On the third day, the dough is cut to size, shaped like a bagel and then rises more. After all of that, the bagels are boiled, seeded if needed and then baked. Blake called it a “pretty intense process.”

After researching sourdough, Blake said she began putting queries out to the community to gauge interest. She said the reaction to her query was “overwhelming.” She said, “Bread is like a comfort food, there was such a huge reaction.”

However, she still didn’t have a plan – just an idea. It was upon learning about cottage bakeries from a podcast that her little bagel shop, Comfort Bagel, came together. A cottage bakery, Blake explained, has roots that go back to Europe when people would buy their bread from small bakers down the street. “It has almost a romantic notion going to back to Europe. Small towns in Europe got up every day and picked up a fresh loaf of bread rather than going to the grocery store and buying bread,” she explained. “It’s geared towards people that enjoy fresh bread.”

She said a cottage bakery is essentially a retail kitchen, but operated out of the business owner’s home rather than rented space.             While every state, town and city have their own laws surrounding cottage bakeries, she said before operating her own cottage bakery, Blake had to complete several food safety courses and undergo an inspection from the West Springfield Board of Health. She said she had to take a course and undergo a test on safe food handling, and pass allergen training. After all that work, Blake said she was finally licensed as a cottage bakery in West Springfield. Blake said she is “the only person in West Springfield to own and operate a cottage bakery,” that she knows of.

In Massachusetts, cottage bakeries are only legally allowed to sell baked goods, “nothing that can spoil,” she said. Blake said she also has “to adhere to the same rules and regulations a retail shop would,” only she bakes from her home instead of a storefront. However, she said there are some precautions she needs to take while she bakes from home.

“I have to keep my ingredients separate from what I feed my family with, [and take] extra precautions with hair nets, aprons, cleaning and supplies,” she said.

She said one key point of a cottage bakery in West Springfield was that she was not allowed to conduct business from her home. Instead, she offers delivery within a five-mile radius from her home. She said this was intentional, though, as she wanted the bagels “to be fresh” and “a little tiny bit warm.” She said, “If I go too far it kind of defeats the purpose.”

Once Blake was officially licensed, she posted to a local Facebook forum letting people know. She said, from there, interest for her bagels only grew. Shortly after launching her website, she was sold out. “It was crazy, I had no idea. I thought this would be a side gig where I’d do a few dozen here and there, test the waters,” she said.

While she said she was initially nervous, within hours after her first bagel delivery she said she’d received “such amazing feedback from people.”

“People have been so kind, leaving reviews [and] sharing with their friends,” she said.

Soon Blake’s bagels were so popular she was sold out on her website for the entire month of September. “I literally went from 47 to over 1,000 page likes in a week. I’m booked up solid, I just hit 400 orders,” she said. “I’m sold out through the third week of October, it’s going really well.”

Blake’s bagel flavors include cheddar and chive, sesame, everything, cinnamon raisin, tomato basil, cheddar jalapeño, cinnamon crumble, plain, poppyseed, garlic, onion, asiago Parmesan, salted rosemary, whole wheat everything, cranberry orange, and blueberry.  She said while her recipes are creative, she can’t claim responsibility for them.

“I don’t think I’ve innovated any of the recipes, they already existed. I worked on a plain bagel recipe, [and] went online to the bagel masters,” she said. “I did a lot of experimenting, [they’re] a combination of a lot of different recipes I put together.” Blake added that her idea for the rosemary bagel came from a comment on Facebook, and she agreed that it’d taste delicious.

She said she’s always thinking of new recipes and ways to incorporate new ingredients. Blake said in the spring she “really wants to try rhubarb,” but there are a lot of elements that need to be considered when baking with new ingredients. “The things that have a lot of moisture mess with the dough, it’s a learning process,” she said. “I’m learning as I go.”

She said a storefront was “not going to happen now,” but maybe when “we come through the other side of COVID.” In the meantime, she is looking into potentially renting a commercial kitchen space to better accommodate the demand. This, she said, may allow for potential customers to pick up their orders, but needed to do more research to see if this was possible.

In the meantime she thanked those who had ordered, and asked people to be understanding and patient. “This is a small batch business, you really have to love bagels and be willing to wait a bit,” she said. “If there’s a lot of interest, we’ll get bigger and can service more people in the future.”

Those interested in ordering bagels can find more information on the Comfort Bagels Facebook page, or go to https://comfortbagel.com.

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