Community Highlights: Meet Ashwani Kaul of Breadwaala

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ashwani Kaul.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I was born in a foodie household. Everyone cooked really well, and we always enjoyed serving others. 
For as long as I can remember, I have always dreamt of retiring into a bakery/cafe. 

I could always cook decently well, but baking felt like an impossible thing. 
My obsession with sourdough breads can be traced back to a 2016 Netflix documentary, Cooked.
The third episode, called Air, had a segment about naturally fermented breads and how these breads could be consumed by folks with gluten allergies.

In 2019, I came across Jim Lahey’s famous No-Knead Bread recipe video on YouTube. 
This recipe didn’t look too intimidating, so I tried, and voila, I made my first bread. And it wasn’t bad !!!
The first bread was baked around the 3rd week of February 2019. By mid-March, I had successfully made my sourdough starter and started experimenting with baking sourdough breads. 

I started baking regularly, getting to a point where we stopped buying breads from grocery stores. 
By March 2020, I had been baking regularly for the household, friends, family, and neighbors and had a decent catalog of pictures from all the bakes.
This is when COVID hit, and I found some more free time at hand. Family and friends encouraged me to start posting to a dedicated public profile, and BREADWAALA was born. I started sharing breads with everyone, taking fresh breads to potlucks, and gifting breads to friends. Folks who had my breads started asking if they could buy my breads, and I found that weird – why would someone pay for my bread ???

This continued through 2021 and 2022. 
I kept baking, trying new recipes, and would get commissioned to bake for a gathering here and there. 
I made a bunch of friends in the local food startup scene through the farmers market. They would be happy to trade their products for my breads, and I would feel very excited to find some value from my breads.
Through the summer of 2022, I hosted bagel Sundays for close friends; folks would place their orders by Friday, and I would bake fresh sourdough bagels on Sunday mornings. All of this was building good practice, giving something to look forward to beyond my 9-to-5. 
By the end of 2022, the market manager from Cary Farmers Market reached out asking if I would be interested in becoming a vendor for their upcoming summer season. This would be a huge leap for me; exciting and scary. 
Just the thought of scaling up my production and selling to an audience that doesn’t know me, and I was still baking from my home kitchen. 
My wife and I had another one of our serious discussions, and we decided to jump right in. 
We got all of our paperwork; incorporation and inspection in a row, and submitted the vendor application for the farmers market.

We have been selling our breads at Cary Downtown Farmers Market since July 2023. We also take online orders for pickup and delivery, and just recently got our product on shelves at Nanny Goat, a boutique bodega at RTP Hub.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Baking with Sourdough in-itself is a challenge.
The sourdough fermentation processes can be affected by many variables – change in weather/humidity, water temperature, amount of heat generated during mixing. Having to stay on top of these variables, while evolving my recipes to scale was a great learning experience.

My biggest struggle so far has been to operate from my home kitchen.
We would have to schedule production in a way to not hinder cooking for the family.
The lack of dedicated space and storage also meant that the tools and ingredients of the bakery would take over a lot of room in our home.

In addition to operating from home, I was and still am doing this as a side gig to my day job – Technology Consultant.
Juggling between the two jobs and managing priorities at home – school runs, kids’ activities – takes a lot of work.
I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this without the help of my wife; she is the manager that drives us all.

She and my kids are my loudest supporters and harshest critics.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We are an artisanal small-batch sourdough bakery based out of South Durham. We use locally sourced high-quality organic ingredients and don’t use any preservatives. The flour we use is unbleached, unbromated, and organic. We specialize in making sourdough breads for everyday use, by reducing the sourness in the breads, we make them much more approachable. We love to incorporate flavors and ingredients from across the world that work well with our breads. Mediterranean-inspired Olive Boule, Japanese-style Milk Bread, Swedish Cardamom Buns, Danish Rye Bread, and Focaccias with Indian flavors.
We think we make a pretty good focaccia and we are most proud of our signature Indian-inspired Focaccias – Methi (fenugreek) and Aloo (potato) Masala. We think we are the first in the world to mashup these flavors into focaccia.
Both of these are riff off Indian flatbreads, and our customers can’t get enough of them.
Bringing together the unique taste of Indian spices and flavors we grew up with, to the delicate soft sourdough focaccia and introducing it to our customers has been a proud experience for us.

We are also proud to surprise our customers when we tell them everything we bring to market is sourdough!
Most of the folks look for a sourdough loaf in our spread, and we take them by surprise when we tell them all loaves and focaccias were made using the sourdough method.

Our goal is for everyone to be able to enjoy good, healthy, local breads. We want everyone to be educated about sourdough breads, to understand that sourdough is a method of natural-long fermentation, which makes the bread much more digestible and nutritious.

We enjoy having conversations with our customers and sharing what we have learned about Sourdough breads. We have had a bunch of folks not wanting to try the breads because they were gluten intolerant, learned how Sourdough breads could be good for them, to try our breads and now have become regular customers. We have customers whose kids have food allergies and they only consume our Sourdough breads.

We offer a wide variety of sourdough breads for different applications – rustic loaves, sandwich breads, olive boules, cranberry walnut boules, cinnamon raisin loaves, and my kinds of focaccias.

We offer breads for purchase at Cary Downtown Farmers Market, NannyGoat RTP, and for pickup from South Durham.
We do offer shipping, which really works well for states neighboring NC, but we have shipped as far as California.

Pairing with my work experience, we also offer business and technology consultation for anyone looking to start a local food services business, and we are working on group classes for sourdough breads.

Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
I have always loved Biking and I have been riding since I was 5. I used to ride all around New Delhi and loved to explore the city from a different perspective. Riding my bike in rain has to be my favorite childhood memory.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://breadwaala.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/breadwaala
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/breadwaala
• Other: https://breadwaala.square.site/