20/08/2026
Part 3 – Taking the Leap
So, we took a leap. We thought: we're already baking bread for ourselves every other day... why not bake a few extra loaves and let other people experience really fresh bread too?
We registered as a food business, created a very basic website and decided to give it a go. And then something surreal happened.
We got our first order through Facebook.
Someone we didn't know was actually willing to pay us for a loaf of bread we'd made in our kitchen. We were ridiculously excited, but we were also nervous before baking every single loaf. Suddenly it wasn't just our bread anymore. Someone had paid for it and was expecting it to be good.
Slowly, one order became two, two became four, and eventually we were baking around 10 extra loaves a week—which felt like a lot at the time. Especially because we were still baking everything in two Dutch ovens.
Ten loaves meant roughly five hours of baking.
We celebrated every single new order as a little success, and to be completely honest, that's something we still do today. :) We're genuinely grateful every time somebody chooses to place an order with us.
But then we remembered something. Whenever we'd visited Bolsover Artisan Market, there was one thing we'd always struggled to find—fresh bread.
So naturally we thought: "Hmm... maybe we should take some bread there?"
Looking back, this was probably one of the most pivotal decisions we made.
There was just one small problem. How much bread do you take to your first market?!
We had absolutely no idea. I think we eventually decided on around 40 loaves.
Then we did the maths. Two Dutch ovens, two loaves at a time, forty loaves...
That would mean something approaching 20 hours of baking.
Maybe we needed a bread oven. 😂
So, specifically for that first Bolsover Artisan Market, we bought our first proper bread oven. Suddenly, instead of spending an entire day baking, we could bake dozens of loaves in just a few hours.
Problem solved!
Well... how do you actually use a bread oven?
I never imagined that one day I'd need to know how to open-bake sourdough directly on stone. And trust me, it's not quite as simple as taking dough out of a basket and dropping it onto a hot stone.
That lesson was painfully learned through multiple failed batches.
Eventually we figured it out, which naturally revealed the next set of problems.
Where do we find fridge space for 40 loaves? How do we mix enough dough for 40 loaves? That's around 34kg of dough. And how do we even transport 40 loaves?
Every time we solved one problem, another one appeared. And, strangely enough, I think we're still doing exactly the same thing today 😂
But somehow, we figured out enough of it to get ready for our first proper big bake.
Bolsover Artisan Market.
And I still have flashbacks from that first one. 😂
That's a story for Part 4.
