Longtime educator, mother and homemaker, Liesl Mefford, 54, decided she needed something in her life just for her. After teaching for over 30 years and her teenage sons nearly grown and busy with their own lives, Mefford turned to baking, something she’s always loved to do. Sourdough bread slices shown here: Ginger peach, classic, and everything bagel.
“I told my husband, I need a full-time job or a hobby and since I haven’t had a hobby in almost 20 years, I was going to try that first,” Mefford said laughing. Mefford threw herself wholeheartedly into learning how to make sourdough bread. Just a few months ago, she was making 10 loaves of sourdough bread a day, delivering her trial and errors to friends and neighbors — taking meticulous notes on what worked and what didn’t.
Mefford would stroll the aisles of the grocery store, looking for inspiration on flavors, bringing home ingredients to try. “It was a little out of control,” Mefford said. “But I was having so much fun dreaming up new flavor combinations and some of them were delicious and interesting and some of them were complete fails, but I had to keep trying.
I had so many ideas that I just had to try them all.” This gigantic kitchen has all kinds of tools that a baker would need. Yaki-Mama Bakery officially launched July 2, with over 50 flavors of custom sourdough bread along with sourdough cinnamon rolls and various treats.
Mefford operates Yaki-Mama Bakery from her home kitchen in West Valley, o.
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