How a Tahoe baker became a sourdough sensation during the pandemic

by Julie Brown

Midday on a Tuesday and Heather Zikas was cleaning up, among other chores, and also milling some flour, which is a perfectly normal thing to do at the Zikas household in Lake Tahoe.

Zikas is the founder and owner of a bakery service called Tahoe Bread Company. She used to bake sourdough bread in her kitchen oven. She said could make about three loaves at a time, but that wasn’t nearly enough to keep up with demand as word spread about her bread. So about a year ago, just before the pandemic interrupted everything and sent us all home, Zikas, her husband and her father converted half of their garage into a bakery. She got a bigger oven, a cottage bakery license, and a mill. Just in time.

Around the same time, about a year ago, I had a panic attack in the grocery store. Perhaps you did, too. Maybe you, like me, thought the world was ending, and so you rushed to the grocery store with a bandana wrapped around your head because we had not yet made our own masks with the sewing machine collecting dust in the closet. Maybe you, like me, rushed to the bulk aisle and scooped up as many dried beans as you could find, dried beans that are still in a plastic bag in the pantry. And maybe you, like me, raced next to the baking aisle because you were determined to make the most of this time at home.

Perhaps you had ambitions to finally do something with the sourdough starter that’s been sitting neglected in the fridge all these weeks. Yes, you were finally going to bake sourdough loaves and find a moment of reprieve in this mad, mad world. Go back to simpler times. Who needs a grocery store anyways? But alas! How could it be?! The entire shelf of bread flour is stark empty. Because we all thought we’d bake sourdough, at exactly the same time.

Read the entire article at SFGate: https://www.sfgate.com/renotahoe/article/Tahoe-bread-company-sourdough-16004088.php