Rise and Grind: A Baker's Journey from Hobby to Hustle
Five small brown bags of freshly baked bagels were waiting for me when I walked into Shona’s Food Company to meet Michelle Peterson. Honestly, my heart leapt at the sight. I’d only seen these bagels and drooled longingly over them on Instagram, and now here I was, gazing down at real, live bagels! Could it be true that these were all mine? Before I had the chance to casually cough on the bagels so Michelle would send them all home with me out of necessity, she walked up to the table and handed me a Sweet Meg (an Americano with sweetener), saying, “Honestly, I don’t even think I have a story to tell.” I often hear this from people who make amazing things but don’t think of themselves as gifted.
I first met Michelle at Shona’s Food Co. when she started helping Shona run the register and make coffee drinks. Soon she was helping in the kitchen making pie crust, puff pastry and Shona’s famed shortbread. Then suddenly she was running “Michelle’s Companhia de Comida”, a Portuguese comfort food pop-up, while Shona crossed the pond to England to visit family. “This is all happening so quickly,” I thought, my head swimming as I popped another Pastéis de Nata (Portuguese custard tart) into my mouth.
It was when I started seeing bagels pop up in her IG feed that I knew I needed to discover just where Michelle was headed because I knew wherever it was, I wanted to follow – potentially eating bagels along the way.
Michelle grew up in Pennsylvania in the small borough of Palmerton. Her parents were Portuguese immigrants and Michelle often visited Portugal as a child. While the tourist attractions of Lisbon and Porto gathers the majority of a visitor’s attention, Michelle recalls spending time in local restaurants in the small villages where her grandparents lived, and it’s the 10-euro blue plate specials that catered to the locals that she enjoyed the most.
Michelle eventually met her future wife, Korey, in Pennsylvania in 2015. They lived together in New Jersey, where they later married and had their son Asa. Korey lived in Washington as a child and wanted to return, so together they headed west and settled in Centralia in 2019.
A Look Back at How It Started
Like a lot of people who find fulfillment in making food for others, Michelle has a long history with food, but it hasn’t always been healthy. Before seeking treatment and starting anti-depressants, a rough day dealing with mental health issues meant looking to food as a way of comforting herself, but it wasn’t always with food that was good for her, and she used food to fill a void.
What can start out as a deficit can sometimes shift to be one of the most positive aspects of a person’s life. Luckily, that shift happened for Michelle. Before cooking shows became reality competitions (we miss you, old Food Network!) Michelle would watch shows and experiment with recreating dishes at home. When she first met her wife, she was excited to cook for her but soon learned Korey was a locavore – someone who only eats food produced within their local community or region. She quickly took on the challenge. “Korey is who introduced me to cooking seasonally – something I’d never considered before,” Michelle recalls. “I think she probably looks back at that and realizes she created a monster,” she laughs.
When Michelle and Korey decided to start a family, they both went through fertility treatments. Michelle got pregnant with their son, Asa, and when her maternity leave was over, Korey, who was teaching at the time, stayed home with the baby during summer break and gave Michelle the option of staying home with him when she went back to teaching in the fall. Like many young parents, they faced the struggle of paying half their joined income on childcare or forgoing a second income and staying home with the baby instead. After crunching numbers, they opted for the latter which meant a bit of belt-tightening would be necessary when it came to their food budget. Meal planning and cooking to create leftovers took the place of daily grocery shopping for specific ingredients and cooking a lot of recipes on the fly.
Dealing With Dough
Like so many during the pandemic, Michelle took the opportunity of being sequestered at home to hone her sourdough skills and was soon tackling bread making. If you’ve ever tried to make bread from a sourdough starter and failed miserably, you are not alone. Thousands of folks tried it once during the pandemic and moved on, understandably.
Getting a sourdough starter going and maintaining it, much less baking bread with it, is not a straightforward process. There is a lot of trial and error and a lot of trying to understand someone else’s process through a written recipe. So much of that process is intrinsic. Once she got her starter going, she began making bread with it repeatedly, tweaking water percentages, swapping and experimenting with different flours until finally, the perfect combination “just clicked” she recalls. Being at home watching Asa allowed her to bake until the loaves were coming out exactly the way she wanted them to.
When she was happy with her basic loaf, she started adding additional ingredients like seeds, chocolate, and dried fruit, and passing them along to friends to enjoy. As a way of thanking the staff at the Summit Center for Child Development for the therapy her son Asa, who is on the autism spectrum, was receiving in Chehalis, Michelle began bringing in her sourdough bread. When the center opened its new location on McFadden Street, they planned to provide a café where parents could pick up coffee and pastries when they dropped off their children, and a staff member asked Michelle if she’d considered putting her sourdough practice to use making bagels. Challenge accepted.
“Once I was happy with where my starter was, I knew I wanted to use it to make bagels,” says Michelle. While traditional bagels use commercial yeast, a sourdough bagel uses – you guessed it – a sourdough starter. “Using a sourdough starter to make bagels isn’t anything new,” admits Michelle, “but you don’t see it done as often because it takes longer for a bagel made with a sourdough starter to rise than if you use a commercial yeast.” Baking on a smaller scale meant that Michelle could afford that longer rise time.
She started experimenting with non-traditional bagel flavors and began testing them out on her friends. Her current favorite? “I like my plain bagel because I use it as a canvas for any and every topping that pops into my head,” she laughs, but she admits she also loves a savory bagel with cream cheese or butter and jam. Pro-tip: the salted bagel with beet chutney or an heirloom tomato jam is gold. As a long-time loather of raisins in my sweet treats, I love that her cinnamon bagel has zero raisins in it. Other hit flavors: Chocolate-cherry, Lady Grey Tea, and the Naan Other Than A Bagel bagel which is an onion and turmeric bagel covered with nigella seeds, brushed with garlic ghee. Need more inspiration? There’s the garam masala bagel with brown sugar and her chocolate chip banana bagel.
Okay, so I’ve convinced you without trying them. Michelle’s bagels are delicious. So why not take her love of sourdough baking and bagels to Shona’s Food Company? She was already working there part-time. She’d done her Portuguese Pop-Up there. Where were the bagels already? As it turns out, yeast and dairy don’t play well together, and Shona’s café is in the same building as Black Sheep Creamery. If yeast should happen to come into contact with their dairy products, it could cause unwanted fermentation that might lead to off-flavors and spoilage. She’d have to find a home for her bagels elsewhere.
Don’t despair, dear reader. While the only folks tasting Michelle’s bagels right now are her family and friends (and the occasional food-writer), don’t give up hope entirely on getting your hands on them. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, she’ll be selling her bagels at the Oak Café located in the Summit Center in Chehalis, WA this fall. I don’t know about you, but fall can’t come fast enough!
Being a Queer Baker in Lewis County
Working in the food industry is tough. Rising food costs, finding affordable space, and razor-thin margins make starting a food business challenging. And while it feels insane saying this, working in a public-facing business as a queer person is even more of a challenge. I asked Michelle how being queer in a small food community has affected her. Growing up in a small town like Palmerton, PA with a population under 5,000 who were predominately white and Eastern European, she’s used to being a minority. And while Chehalis is relatively small, she’s discovered more queer people and queer allies are moving into the area. “I’m seeing a lot more pride flags than when we first moved here, so change is happening, and it’s a positive thing,” she says.
Working with the public in the early 2000s at grocery stores or restaurants, she learned to protect herself from ignorance, experiencing instances where people would accuse her of being “predatory” because of who she was, what she looked like, or who she was dating, which meant she would usually work and go straight home to the safety of family. “Now that I’m older, I don’t hide it. I really just don’t care what other people think,” she says.
Being in a safe place like Shona’s, where human connection and relationship building are always on the menu, I’m enjoying watching Michelle blossom into a maker who’s going to bring a lot to the community’s table, preferably in the form of sourdough bagels.
I’m happy to report that I did not cough on the bagels (can you imagine?), but Michelle did send them all home with me. Salted, everything, plain, and garam masala bagels, tucked away carefully in the freezer until I choose to take one out, toast it, and ascend directly to bagel heaven.
