TURKEY & SHARKEY
TURKEY & SHARKEY BAKERY
MADE BY HAND AND PAW IN SAN FRANCISCO, CA
I STARTED BAKING BREAD IN ECHO PARK, LOS ANGELES IN 2018. It was around the same time I had STOPPED DRIVING ACROSS TOWN each day FOR WORK AND BEGAN FREELANCING FROM HOME. With a little extra time around the house, I developed this passion for baking bread. LITTLE DID I KNOW THIS PASSION WOULD BECOME ONE OF THE BIG TRENDS OF a global pandemic AND THE THING THAT SUPPORTED ME THROUGH IT all – IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE.
Video by Matt Reamer
Before sourdough had taken over the internet in the early pandemic days, there was something called procrastibaking. This was baking for people who worked from home and needed a reason to stretch from the computer every now and then. And That’s where I began – in between writing and meetings. Between chores and errands. I often had to take my dough on errands, stretching in a Target parking lot or at the beginning and end of a dog walk.
I read all the blogs, bought all the books the blogs say you should buy, and found internet forums and message boards way before I even thought to look up a recipe on Youtube. I made my starter near the heater and then never turned it off for fear it would get cold and die. I never put my starter in the fridge. I fed it, used it, baked a loaf, and fed it again. For nearly 6 months I never stopped baking bread.
at the end of 2019 I moved back to San Francisco to work at Airbnb, bringing not much more than my dog Turkey, a bag of clothes, and all my baking tools. The oven in my new house was too old, so I would drive loaves over to a friend’s house in the early morning to use theirs. Most days, I’d be at their house for hours before anyone even woke up. I’d bring bread to work each Thursday, setting it out for whoever sat in or near our department.
OUR GARAGE BAKERY ON SF.EATER.COM
WHEN THE PANDEMIC HIT, I USED BREAD AS A WAY TO KEEP IN TOUCH WITH EVERYONE from work. I began making a half dozen, then a dozen or more loaves. I’d pack them into stamped brown paper bags, load them in a bus bin and drive them all over the bay, delivering one $10 loaf at a time. EVENTUALLY, MY old CAR COULDN’T HANDLE THE DELIVERIES, and my baker brain couldn’t either. MY GIRLFRIEND suggested we OPEN up THE GARAGE AND try SELLING TO neighbors walking by. The street we lived on HAD BECOME A “slow STREET” – A STREET WITH LESS TRAFFIC, SO MORE OPEN TO PEOPLE WALKING AND RIDING bikes.
IN OUR FIRST WEEK, IT TOOK TIME, BUT WE SOLD OUT BY NIGHTFALL. But week by week it kept growing. More people were looking for something to do. Pop-ups were popping up all over the city. Everyone was trying to figure out how to make this pandemic thing work. So each Sunday we opened the garage door. the menu grew week by week – adding pizza dough, everything bagel galettes, new jersey crumb cake, and dark rye loaves. Soon others joined – my girlfriend started a jam company, her friends made cookies, and butter, and sold tea and chai. we had makers and vintage dealers. we had a 70-year-old house band. We even converted the whole thing into a pizza parlor for Halloween, selling over 50 pizzas to people from our neighborhood.
BY THE END OF OUR 9-MONTH RUN, WE HAD LINES DOWN THE BLOCK, multiple restaurant accounts, and WRITE-UPS IN THE SF CHRONICLE and EATErsf, BUT the thing that meant the most was building this SMALL WEEKLY MARKET WITHout any plan. We surrounded ourselves with good people and just watched OUR LITTLE CORNER on page street blossom into a true COMMUNITY.
early on, our friend Evan wanted to make a short film about what we were doing in our studio apartment kitchen. At the time I was only making a dozen or so loaves a week. later I would go on to make more like 60 loaves a week, Plus 15 Rye Loaves, 2 dozen galettes, 2 sheets of crumb cake, and hundreds of balls of pizza dough.
The oven was always on. we used the fridge to chill the dough and bought a mini fridge for our food. bins were washed in the bathtub so showers got skipped. for months I slept on top of the covers, worried if I got too comfortable I’d miss an alarm and burn the bread. when the bread didn’t rise or something went wrong i would cry and scream and want to quit. I listened to too much NPR and saw a lot of sunrises worried about what was happening in the world, but I kept making bread through it all. The structure of feeding the starter, watching the dough, shaping, baking, cleaning, and repeating. It was the anchor I held on to.
it takes a lot of things coming together at just the right time for this to happen. One of those things was meeting my friend Avi naim. Avi created the Turkey and Sharkey logo while bored at work. And later, for my birthday, he gave me the stamp that would go on to stamp over 1,000 bread bags. And when Turkey got sick towards the end, Avi sent me more designs to make t-shirts and tote bags to raise money to help pay for his surgery. He took my silly hobby and help make it real.
