DeRusha Eats: Brake Bread
ST. PAUL, Minn. (WCCO) -- Inside a St. Paul commercial kitchen, two friends are forming more than just loaves of bread.
Micah Taylor is a web designer, and Nate Houge is a songwriter. Together, they form Brake Bread.
"Bread is all about, like, time and tension and finding out the balance between them," Houge said.
For Houge and Taylor, the balance is between their jobs, this job and their families.
"We both drop our kids off at school in the morning, so it's like, well then, this is our bake schedule," he said.
They make the dough on Tuesdays, bake on Wednesdays then get on the bikes that afternoon.
"We've just been seeing it through, rain or shine, whatever we get," Taylor said.
But how much of the appeal is the bread, and how much is their story?
"I think the story is a big part of it," Hogue said. "I mean, people love the story of two guys out on bikes doing what they love, because who doesn't want to do what they love?"
After years of baking bread for friends, they asked their St. Paul neighborhood in January if anyone would sign up for weekly delivery.
"We put it on the West Seventh Community page and we said 'Hey, is anybody interested,' and I think within a couple hours we got 40 people that were interested," Hogue said. "So we were like, 'OK, we'll start with twenty of you (laughs).'"
They rotate through four styles of bread: there's the Classic Cruiser, the Granny Cruiser, the Single Speed and the Flip Flop . Subscribers pay a little more than $4 a week to get delivery to the front porch.
Limitations inspire these two. They only deliver to one neighborhood, they only bake one day and they use an oven that doesn't have a steam system. Due to the third limitation, they use Super Soaker squirt guns to give their bread the perfect level of moisture.
"Especially in this time and age of instant gratification, this takes time, investment, a little love," he said. "I like that idea."
They just started delivery last month and are already brainstorming how they could reach more people.
One idea is hiring bike delivery people for the summer to bring bread to areas outside of St. Paul's West Seventh.
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