Good sourdough only requires three things, says Liz McCarthy. Flour, water, and salt. Oh, and attention.
“You have to take care of your starter. If you don’t, it will not make good bread,” says McCarthy, 55, a longtime resident of Deschutes River Woods, where she has her small home-based Rooted Bakery at 19126 Kiowa Road. She takes orders online through Tuesday afternoons, prepares the sourdough-based products on Wednesday, then bakes on Thursday — one of her days off from Safeway, where she’s worked as a meat wrapper for 30 years.
Rooted Bakery customers pick up their orders on Thursdays, which is also when McCarthy fills the Chia roadside stand at the end of her driveway. She opened it over Memorial Day this year and already has a strong following.
“Oh, my goodness, she makes the best brownies, she makes the best chocolate chip cookies. She gives them out as little goodies when you order and come pick it up. They’re to die for,” says Beth Marchel who first noticed the Chia stand on her regular runs through the Deschutes River Woods neighborhood. She recently completed the Bend Half-Marathon and the Dirty Half-Marathon and says her regular Rooted orders help fuel her. “I run for ice cream and sourdough bread and brownies and cookies.
“I first ordered the cheddar jalapeno, and then the next time, I ordered a loaf of the sourdough. It’s the best sourdough I’ve ever had,” Marchell adds. “I only have had store-bought sourdough products before. This is so much better.”
McCarthy and her husband of 25 years, Jason, stock and organize the stand, where they recently added a miniature refrigerator to keep items fresh. She’s experimenting with different flavor combinations, such as the cherry-almond miniature cakes she recently introduced. She also stocks The Royal Bee honey from local beekeeper Emily Palmer. McCarthy, who has two grown children and five grandchildren, says she started her bakery because she was looking for something to occupy some of her free time.
“I don’t want to be that busy, but I’m not an idle person. I don’t idle well,” she says with a chuckle. “This gives me something to do and it makes people happy.”
She first decided to make her own sourdough starter a few years ago to use for her personal baking. Little did she know how it would evolve. She bakes all items on her menu using her “Chia” sourdough starter, which she named after the popular terracotta plant figurines that you simply water regularly and watch as chia seeds sprout.
“I love to cook and I love fresh food,” she says. “I decided to do my own starter. It took me, literally, a full year to even get good bread.”
With a friend as a regular taste tester, she finally produced a good starter, she says, and that friend encouraged her to sell bread made from it, hence Rooted Bakery’s origin two years ago. She then opened the roadside stand after realizing that many customers were missing her Tuesday order deadline but were still clamoring for her homemade baked goods.
This article appears in Source Weekly July 31, 2025.
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