While Tuesdays are generally a little quieter for most businesses around the North Fork, it’s the busiest day of the week for Carissa Hope, the baker behind NoFo SoDough. Her day starts at 5 a.m., making her husband a maple latte for work before churning out a minimum of 12 sourdough loaves, 45 chocolate chunk cookies, and three dozen of her decadent chocolate chocolate cupcakes.
“I’ve done vanilla,” Hope explains of her signature combo. “But there’s something about the chocolate chocolate. It just hits.”
Because her dough and batter require a minimum of 24 hours to ferment for prebiotic benefits, the prep work actually kicks off on Sunday nights when she feeds her starters. Monday morning is for mixing up batters and doughs. By the time she finishes her Tuesday baking, she has dedicated two and a half days to the process. And then she still has to deliver everything.
Despite her demanding kitchen schedule, Hope is actually a full-time graphic designer. Her journey to supplying some of the North Fork’s favorite community hubs wasn’t an intentional business plan. She was merely trying to find a dietary loophole to help manage her own sudden health issues.
Hashimoto’s and the “Sad Period”
When Hope, now 32, was in her mid-20s, her weight inexplicably spiked from 125 to 170 pounds. She was officially diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune disease that attacks the thyroid.
On a mission to find answers, she looked everywhere for help. A wellness doctor and chiropractor helped her discover that carbohydrates and gluten were triggering severe thyroid inflammation. At her most inflamed, her doctor said she looked like a “marshmallow.” This led to a highly restrictive elimination diet that she describes as a very dark time in her life.
“I had seen another doctor who literally made me give up everything. Everything. Seeds, nuts, anything gluten, anything dairy… we call that my sad period because I was just depressed on the couch, like no fun, no nothing,” she laughs.
The Sourdough solution
Unwilling to permanently give up her favorite foods like pizza and pasta, she frantically researched alternatives and discovered sourdough. She learned that the long bulk fermentation process required to make authentic sourdough essentially “eats up the gluten,” making it highly digestible for her body.
Although her first few baking attempts came out “like a hockey puck,” she stuck with it and perfected the process. Once she started incorporating homemade sourdough into her daily diet, her inflammation subsided and the weight naturally fell off.
With excess starter “discard” piling up, the NoFo SoDough founder began experimenting with sweets. Pancakes, muffins, cookies… you name it, she made it from sourdough.
“I was like, ‘This has to be some magic loophole,’ you know, and I just got really good at it,” she says.
She currently uses three starters, and like any devout sourdough baker, they all have names: Bubbles, Bubbles Junior, and Stella. Her best friend gave her the first successful one, Bubbles (which later spawned Bubbles Jr.). Her husband Christian, who is an electrical contractor, was later tipped on a job in Mattituck with a starter from England that is reportedly 400 years old.
“I thought she deserved an older name, you know,” Hope laughs, explaining why she chose “Stella” for that one.
A sweet delivery
We meet this one-woman operation at Barrow Food House in Aquebogue as she arrives with three boxes of her latest batch of sourdough chocolate chocolate cupcakes. Chef and co-owner Kyle Romeo whisks the fresh boxes away to cold storage, marveling at her dedication to the craft.
“Doing pastries, to me, is crazy because it takes so much work and effort,” Romeo says, noting that his wife and co-owner, Amanda Falcone, is also a baker. “It takes way too much love and time.”
Romeo returns to hand over Hope’s check and a surprise to-go box, which she opens to reveal a sandwich loaded with mortadella, burrata, pistachio pesto, oven-roasted tomatoes, and greens on ciabatta. Her husband had stopped by for lunch earlier and pre-paid for her favorite order.
Barrow is basically a second home for the newlyweds; they’ve been regulars for five years and even hosted their engagement party here. Now, Hope is their very first outsourced vendor.
Putting the ‘bread’ in bread and butter
Her next stop is a restock at Bread and Butter & Bottle, a reimagined market and liquor store on Sound Avenue in Riverhead that was formerly Wegert’s deli. The newly opened community hub, owned by mother-daughter team Diana Roesch DiMenna and Tess DiMenna, offers a curated selection of locally sourced products, and Hope is thrilled to be on their shelves.
A near-empty metal rack sits against the coffee bar, and the baker gets to work packing it with the usual: plain loaves, challah, and chocolate chunk cookies. This week, there’s a new addition to the lineup: a pillowy soft Sourdough Pizza Focaccia Bread. As one of the firsts to sample it, I can confirm this robust, rosemary-studded creation is insanely delicious.
She never planned on knocking door-to-door to pitch her goods. Instead, a successful appearance at a dog dock diving event at Greenport Harbor Brewing Co. sparked organic interest from the community.
“I always had the kind of mindset of, build it and they will come,” she says. “If people enjoy the product, then they’ll want it, and I don’t want to have to chase people.”
Your local sourdough dealer
While baking consumes a lot of her time, it is not her full-time job. She runs her own graphic design company, Blue Wave Creative Agency, which allowed her to build the NoFo SoDough brand from scratch.
The result is a vibrant departure from the typical rustic farm packaging. Her signature chocolate chunk cookies are sealed in iridescent holographic bags, topped with pink and black checkerboard labels featuring her own custom typography.
“I wanted something that stood out amongst the standard ‘farm country’ aesthetic,” Hope explains. “I wanted to disrupt and I wanted to be loud.”
Her official tagline is “your local sourdough dealer,” and the bold packaging is already making an impression. As she later noted, people around town now refer to her as “the red sourdough brand” and she loves it.
As we each grab a small cup of house-made gelato from the Bread and Butter ice cream case, Hope admits that juggling two demanding careers requires constant recalibration. Because branding and baking prep are both so time-consuming, she says finding the perfect balance between the two has been “one hell of a journey.”
The next batch
For now, the business operates on a wholesale and online pre-order model with a one-week lead time, delivering across Long Island and Queens. Her immediate goal is saving up for a massive commercial bread oven and fully remodeling her 1980s kitchen.
Her 10-year dream? A NoFo SoDough mobile truck.
Aside from the weekly drops at Bread and Butter & Bottle and Barrow Food House, she is also in talks with another east end market, and will be at the Mattituck Street Fair on July 11, while continuing to apply for every festival she can to organically spread the word.
Both of our meetings end the same way: Hope handing me a brown paper bag filled with NoFo SoDough treats to try. I share our embarrassment of riches with some friends at a barbecue, including a sampling of cookies, muffins and, of course, those chocolate chocolate cupcakes you can get at Barrow.
While it’s not a perfect fix for all gluten-intolerant people, if she can share her revelation with even one other person, she’s just happy to spread the sourdough love.
“Once I figured out that it worked for me, my whole life changed,” she says.
And as I finally take a bite of that chocolate chocolate cupcake, I have to agree with her… it really does hit.
We love NoFoSoDo!