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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.

“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.”

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, offering porch pick up opportunities twice a week for customers. She also attends many local markets, pop up shops and bazaars.

“People often think of sourdough bread as plain, which is great and lovely, you can’t go wrong with plain sourdough,” she said. “But once you try applewood smoked gouda or ginger pear or a peanut butter cookie loaf, or one of my other flavors, you forget all about the plain.”

Mefford’s kitchen has always been the workhouse and center of her family’s life. From raising her children, hosting holidays and entertaining over the years, Mefford’s double ovens felt like a splurge and a necessity.

“I don’t know what I would do without them now, I put my ovens to work,” she said.

While her kitchen is seeing fewer family meals these days, her space has never been busier or more alive. Yaki-Mama Bakery has taken over. Her kitchen is large and airy with lots of sunlight. Her ample counter space went from housing children’s art projects and snacks for school to bakery supplies and giant tubs of bread dough. Mefford even constructed a ‘dough greenhouse’; a custom shelf and tent that she can place her bread dough in so that the temperature rises to a perfect 78 degrees, the ideal for making bread.

“I tell people I got bit by the bug,” Mefford said. “Sourdough is so quirky. It’s always a bit of a science experiment and something you’re constantly tweaking and adjusting. That’s the fun of it I think, you never know quite what you’re going to get, but the end result when it all turns out just right is absolutely thrilling.”

Sourdough is a bread made by the fermentation of dough using wild lactobacillaceae. Lactic acid from fermentation imparts a slightly sour flavor and improves the shelf life of the loaf. A starter is developed over several weeks made from water and flour. As the starter begins to bubble and ferment, its ready to be used to make bread. The process of making sourdough bread is multi-faceted and requires several steps. The most important being keeping the sourdough starter healthy and bubbly. Without this crucial first step, the bread doesn’t rise properly.

Mefford learned to make sourdough from her friend who lives in Arizona. She did a couple of Zoom classes where the two made bread together and from there it was full speed ahead.

“My house looks a little more like a bakery than it does a regular kitchen and dining room these days,” Mefford said. “But I love that I can turn my home into something special to me. You don’t need anything fancy or have all the best gadgets, to pursue something that makes you happy. You can start small, in whatever space you have.”