The Mindful Loaf

The Mindful Loaf We are a husband & wife baking duo that specializes in sourdough and baked goods crafted with care using locally sourced Maine Grains flour.
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The self serve stand in Steuben is stocked every Sat & Tues @ 10am, order ahead online at www.themindfulloaf.com

25% off at the stand today and we have a wide variety of bakes left! All fresh out of the oven yesterday morning: sourdo...
06/17/2026

25% off at the stand today and we have a wide variety of bakes left! All fresh out of the oven yesterday morning: sourdough loaves, bagels, a couple focaccia, a couple packs of English muffins, plus cookies and scones 🍞🍪

Come see what you will find @ 96 Dyer Bay Road, Steuben - open until 8pm - self serve, honor system - cash/check/card/venmo are all accepted

Let's talk bread for a moment 🍞 (one of my favorite things to do 😉)To be quite honest: I haven't been pleased with our b...
06/16/2026

Let's talk bread for a moment 🍞 (one of my favorite things to do 😉)

To be quite honest: I haven't been pleased with our bread the last couple of weeks. There have been quite a few loaves that I've not let see the light of day after baking 🙃 and the loaves that did make the cut, while still good, haven't quite been *perfect*

There are so many factors that change a loaf of bread - temperature, humidity, proof time, hydration (% of water in the dough), sourdough culture strength, gluten development...the list honestly could be close to endless. No two loaves or days in the kitchen will ever be the same or produce the same results, but we do what we can to wrangle all of these factors to produce something predictable.

We had SO many factors hit almost all at once that compounded and changed the way our dough handles: moving into the new bakery space and going from baking 30 loaves at a time to nearly 90 (completely upending our kitchen routine and overloading our current dough refrigerators), changing from developing gluten almost entirely by hand to utilizing a commercial dough mixer to do the heavy lifting, swapping from baking in conventional ovens to using a masonry deck oven, PLUS on top of all of that, going straight into the crazy summer heat almost right away after making those changes.

I can say fairly confidently that we could have easily handled any one or two of those factors and swiftly adjusted the recipe/process to account for it, but when so many things change all at once it can be tough to narrow down what exactly needs to happen to get back to the beautiful, perfect loaves that I KNOW (and expect) we can produce.

The good news is: I can say with a degree of certainty that, over the last few weeks of making tweaks here and there, I think we're back to the standard that I expect from our bread.

We've changed our hydration ever so slightly (to account for the humidity in the air - you would be surprised how little water it takes to entirely change a bread dough!), we have added a FIFTH fridge to our arsenal (to take some of the load off of the current dough fridges which were struggling to combat the heat when fully loaded with warm dough), plus a few other small adjustments here and there.

After making these tweaks, all of today's loaves came out GORGEOUS - there wasn't a single one that I held back because it wasn't quite what I wanted (the first bake where that has happened in about three weeks).

So if you've grabbed a loaf in the last week or two, and something seemed a bit different about it - in all transparency, it was. But going forward we should be 🤞 back to our usual standard of loaf! 🩵

As of 1pm we still have at least a few loaves left of each sourdough variety (including a pretty good supply of Classic ...
06/16/2026

As of 1pm we still have at least a few loaves left of each sourdough variety (including a pretty good supply of Classic loaves!) so it’s a great day to stop in on your way home from work or if you’re out and about this afternoon 🩵🍞

The self serve sourdough stand in Steuben will be open at 10 this morning and if you’re lucky, you may even score a pack...
06/16/2026

The self serve sourdough stand in Steuben will be open at 10 this morning and if you’re lucky, you may even score a pack of our NEW bagel flavor: cinnamon crunch! 🥯

Our classic chewy sourdough bagel topped with a crispy, buttery layer of brown sugar cinnamon yumminess. These are also now available for ordering online! www.themindfulloaf.com

We’ll also be well stocked with all sorts of other fresh bakes:
🍞 sourdough loaves (classic, honey whole wheat, seeded, cinnamon raisin swirl, and Sundried tomato & Basil)
🥯 sourdough bagels (plain, everything, sesame, poppyseed, jalapeno cheddar, cinnamon crunch, and variety packs)
🩵 sourdough English muffins (original, cinnamon raisin, and blueberry)
🍞 sourdough focaccia (rosemary sea salt or parm garlic & herbs)
🍕 sourdough pizza dough balls
🍪 plus assorted cookies and scones
All baked fresh just this morning 🥰

You can find us at 96 Dyer Bay Road in Steuben, open 10am - 8pm, self serve & honor system, cash/check/card/venmo are all accepted

It seems yesterdays post caused a little confusion so let me clarify 😊We are *NOT* nixing pre-orders altogether - you CA...
06/15/2026

It seems yesterdays post caused a little confusion so let me clarify 😊

We are *NOT* nixing pre-orders altogether - you CAN still order all of the sourdough items ahead of time, like bread, bagels, English muffins, sweet rolls, etc. as well as cookies and scones.

The only things leaving the pre-order options are the Saturday specialty baked goods (like cake slices, eclairs, shortbread bars, etc). These will still be available but as first come first serve only.

Why the change? Here’s the gist of it:

We schedule literally every single minute in our kitchen and there’s just no room for error or delays - but life happens, and perfectly on schedule days are few and far between. That means that if we’re locked into baking a set list of additional sweets due to orders, and something goes wrong (or we run out of an ingredient in the middle of the night and have to wait for the store to open which happens more often than I’d like to admit 🙃) we have to work to the point that we almost don’t even have a chance to eat or sleep.

So that leaves us needing to find some flexibility in that schedule for the sake of not burning ourselves out, and the solution for now seems to be to nix pre-orders on the sweets. We will make sweets based on what we can, what we have time for, and what you all seem to like the best.

So definitely still get pre-orders in for your sourdough items! 🩵

Also - our website is having issues and we aren’t able to update some of our menu items for the week. I’ve been trying with no luck - so if you see something listed with the wrong date, just pretend it says this upcoming weekend! And if you are looking to order something and don’t see it on the website, please send a message - chances are, whatever this glitch is has kept me from being able to put it up (specifically true for cookies and scones 😖)

06/15/2026

Yay! we love posie stand season 💐❤️

We were CRAZY busy yesterday but there are still a few things left for you to snag today for 25% off! Come see us @ 96 D...
06/14/2026

We were CRAZY busy yesterday but there are still a few things left for you to snag today for 25% off! Come see us @ 96 Dyer Bay Road in Steuben for:

Sourdough bagels
Sourdough english muffins
Cookies
Scones
a small assortment of other baked goods & sweets

There's only a couple packages left of each item, so don't drag your feet too long getting going this morning 😅

Thank you all for what was yet another record setting weekend for us, with over 80 loaves of bread gone in one day 😳🩵🍞Ne...
06/14/2026

Thank you all for what was yet another record setting weekend for us, with over 80 loaves of bread gone in one day 😳🩵🍞

Needless to say, that also means a record setting number of hours to prep and bake it all: we spent nearly three days straight in the kitchen, stopping only to eat a quick meal and to sleep (and on top of that, leading into our bake night we were only able to spare enough time to sleep for 4 hours). We are making a few small adjustments to our current system to try to keep this reasonably manageable for us while also trying to produce enough to mostly satisfy demand.

For the time being, our Saturday baked goods lineup will be first come, first serve only (not available for ordering ahead)

Any baker knows that not everything turns out to plan, and if we find ourselves short on time in the kitchen or find that a batch of something didn't meet our standards, we need to be able to have the flexiblity to say "oh well" and move on rather than scrambling to make/remake something that we really don't have the time or energy for. Maintaining constant 14+ hour days in the kitchen simply isn't realistic.

There will still be a variety of baked goods availabe on Saturdays, such as whoopie pies, pastries, truffles, and cakes - but we will be focusing our energy first on making sure we can fulfill the demand & orders for sourdough, and then filling in the gaps with what time/energy we have to spare with an assortment of baked goods.

I'm sorry to have to make this change and we hope to continue having the same level of variety on the baked goods table, but we need to find some flexibility in our schedule *somewhere* and this happens to be the only place for that (aside from simply baking less, but I think anyone, us included, would say this one small change is better than having less sourdough available)

I can't say "thank you" enough - being this busy is not a problem I thought we would ever have when we started this amazing journey just over a year ago! 🥰

Online ordering for cookies, scones, and sourdough items (breads, bagels, english muffins, and sweet rolls) is still available @ www.themindfulloaf.com

This morning was a whirlwind but we were able to put up the open sign at 10:06 am! Not too shabby for scrambling to fini...
06/13/2026

This morning was a whirlwind but we were able to put up the open sign at 10:06 am! Not too shabby for scrambling to finish everything right up to the last minute 😅 thank you to the line that waited patiently for us to open 🩵

Today's bake is brought to you by over 70 combined hours of work from Mike & I over the last three days/nights. Whew!

But alas we are OPEN and have bread, bagels, focaccia, english muffins, sweets (cookies, scones, cake slices, eclairs, tarts, brownies, blondies, pound cake)...for now 😉 you know the drill, it may be gone soon! Classic sourdough is already almost gone and we had FOUR totes full of loaves to put on the shelf 😳

We’re moving as fast as we can this morning but it looks like we may be a few minutes behind schedule - if you come by a...
06/13/2026

We’re moving as fast as we can this morning but it looks like we may be a few minutes behind schedule - if you come by at 10 and we’re not open yet, give us a few minutes! Hopefully we’ll be right on time or at most 15 minutes later than usual getting things all ready for you.

We didn’t finish our prep until noon yesterday and had to be back in the kitchen by 5pm last night in order to bake everything in time - needless to say, the caffeine ran out a long time ago and we’re running on fumes 🥱

Here’s a high note: check out the Blueberry Lemon Cream tarts that will be in the fridge when we open!

Address

96 Dyer’s Bay Road
Steuben, ME
04680

Opening Hours

Monday 7am - 8pm
Tuesday 10am - 8pm
Wednesday 7am - 8pm
Thursday 7am - 8pm
Saturday 10am - 8pm
Sunday 10am - 8pm

Telephone

+12076319355

Website

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