Today we’d like to introduce you to Ellen King.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Ellen. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Ellen: It was a circuitous path to get to where I am today. My love of history played a big role. As a graduate student at the University of Maine, I did research on culinary history from the colonial time period. This included reading through old farm journals to better understand how crops, including wheat, were grown and produced. After a brief stint in the corporate world, I decided to pursue my true passion and applied to the Seattle Culinary Academy. I spent eight years working in restaurants. Really, I am a savory chef by training and a self-taught baker! I also spent time as an artisan cheese buyer at Whole Foods. When I moved back to Chicago after spending several years in Seattle, I was surprised to see that there weren’t many options for artisan bread. I started delving into cookbooks with the hopes of satiating by a desire for the type of bread I had grown accustomed to living out west. I started making bread using dutch ovens in my small apartment. This became a bit of an obsession for me and soon my kitchen overrun by flour and dough. To finance my bread habit, I started selling loaves to friends and neighbors. This group was the start of the Underground Bread Club. I would take orders and bake bread once a week. My son and I would deliver the bread by bike (he rode in the Burley) all around the Evanston area. After a while, it became too much for my small space to handle. A customer, Julie Matthei, and my now business partner asked me one day if I had ever thought of opening a retail location. Even though I knew the perils of the food business, my passion for making bread surpassed my fears of taking the next step. We opened Hewn in June of 2013.
We joke now that is was probably a good thing that we didn’t know a lot about running a business at the time… if we knew more, we probably would have closed after the first year. It was the “polar vortex” in Chicago that winter and nobody was going outside unless they absolutely had to. But, we learned from that experience. We started doing catering and wholesale to restaurants in the area. Eventually, the weather improved and people started coming into the bakery.
Over the past five years, we have seen significant growth. We expanded our store in 2016 to allow for more production and retail space. And, we now have 20 employees after starting with six when we opened.
Opening a business takes significant work and perseverance. I am thankful to have a wonderful team of bakers who share our passion for baking with locally sourced, stone milled and organic flour. We are excited to highlight this way of baking and sourcing heritage grains in our new cookbook, Heritage Baking, which will be published in October of 2018!
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Running a retail business and a food business makes every day a challenge. There is staffing, equipment maintenance, and repairs, weather issues, customer requests, invoicing and paying the bills… all on top of the regular tasks involved with baking. I never know what a day will be like. Some of the biggest challenges are related to equipment and staffing. Finding employees with the skills we need is a constant challenge. We are fortunate to have an incredible staff of bakers and front counter employees/ baristas. Equipment can also be a big challenge. I have become really adept at changing fuses, fixing faucets, racks, fans, pretty much anything that breaks I try to fix it first. I knock wood all day long because I am so superstitious when I talk about the bakery. I never take a successful day for granted and appreciate the hard work of our staff and the loyalty of our customers.
Please tell us about Hewn Bakery.
We are a neighborhood bakery that focuses on sourcing local, stone-milled grains. We are committed to producing bread that is naturally leavened without instant yeast. The grains we use are sustainably grown and organic. This translates into bread and pastries that have incredible flavor. We don’t cut corners or try to sell something we are not proud of. I think the ingredients and the process we follow to produce our bread, pastries, and sandwiches set us apart from other bakeries.
We are committed to knowing our farmers and our customers which makes our bakery a community gathering spot. We are a woman-owned – independently owned – business as well. We live in the community and appreciate connecting with our customers.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
It’s pretty difficult to choose one childhood memory. So, I will pick two, one from winter and one from summer. Growing up in the midwest, I loved the winters when we would get slammed with snow. If it resulted in a snow day that was almost better than Christmas. I lived on a street with 11 other kids and we had a sled hill behind our neighbor’s house. As soon as it started snowing, we would go out and start building snow ramps that we would sled down. This was before all the high-tech water repellent gear existed so my brothers and I would wear as many layers of clothes that we could find and spend the day outdoors. We’d go home when the sun started to set around 4:30 and our cheeks would burn for the first 45 minutes once we got inside.
In the summer, we had a neighborhood pool that my brothers and I would ride our bikes to. We would take $5 with us and I would buy a “Like” cola, and a piece of pizza for lunch (I was a kid in the ’80s). We would swim all day in a small 25-yard pool and come home sunburned and exhausted. We would repeat this every day in the summer. I did not know what summer camps were until I became a parent.
Contact Info:
- Address: Hewn Bakery
810 Dempster St.
Evanston, IL 60202 - Website: www.hewnbread.com
- Phone: 847-869-HEWN
- Email: julie@hewnbread.com
- Instagram: @hewnbread
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hewnbread
- Twitter: @hewnbread
Image Credit:
All photos taken by John Lee Pictures and reprinted with permission from Chronicle Books
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