Fresh-Baked good deeds

WRITTEN BY JOANNA O’LEARY

Ironically, it’s in early fall, when Rose Boyington starts to feel the heat. Nevertheless, the baker and sourdough specialist always rises to the occasion — and manages to make room in her heart and her oven for those less fortunate. 

Bovington runs Rose’s Sourdough bakery out of her home in Hartland, and the onset of autumn means planning for the holidays. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Year’s are naturally the special events for which even the most conscious of calories often put their diets on hold for carbs, glorious carbs — and Bovington is ready to supply them. 

Bovington traces the origins of her bacterially-inclined baking to a time when she herself had a bun in the oven: her son. Though now Bovington lovingly describes him as a “happy, sweet, silly boy,” his premature delivery at 29 weeks meant multiple challenges. 

“My entire parenting journey has turned out to be completely different than how I anticipated…there was just no way I could work a typical nine-to-five job with the extent of his appointments,” she said. 

The necessity of travel to receive effective care compounded the issue, so Bovington experimented with flexible, self-driven employment, first with home-cleaning services. She also began focusing on cooking healthy food for her family that eschewed unnecessary preservatives and food dyes. Sourdough eventually piqued her interest. 

“I had never even baked with yeast before but something about the art form and science of sourdough just really fascinated me — including that most of the sourdough breads you find in stores are not true sourdough and contain yeast.” 

The entrepreneurial autodidact soon mastered the process (“I will never forget the excitement of pulling my first sourdough loaf out of the oven”), and after a year of baking exclusively for friends and family, she started soliciting orders from the local community. The enthusiastic reception inspired her to launch her own business and Rose’s Sourdough was born. 

In addition to offering sourdough versions of standard starches such as bread, English muffins, rolls, and focaccia, Bovington has also created some unique — and particularly crave-worthy — and options. For example, her take on bomboloni, a type of Italian filled donuts, involves an extended fermentation process and a deep fry in coconut oil. The crispy yet supple orbs are then stuffed and dressed in the style of Boston cream (cream filling with chocolate glaze);  s’mores (homemade marshmallow filling topped with crushed chocolate and graham crackers); and raspberry jam or lemon curd (with optional powdered sugar, but who are we kidding).  

And never fear if a member of your household is sour on sourdough, Bovington also offers plenty of other goodies, the most noteworthy of which are her cookie butter cinnamon rolls, unctuous coils of pillowy dough whose spirals are laced with a mixture of cookie butter and biscoff cookies, then coated with cookie butter buttercream, drizzled with cookie butter, and adorned with even more crushed biscoff cookies. 

But perhaps Boyington’s greatest invention is her “Pay It Forward Loaf.” In late October amidst government shutdown, Boyington announced via Facebook that families on SNAP, especially those with children or the elderly, were warmly invited to reach out to the bakery for a free order of dinner rolls and sweets for the upcoming holidays. 

Boyington also instituted a permanent addition to her menu in the form of the “Pay It Forward Loaf,” whose purchase represents the donation of one sourdough loaf to a local person in need, plus her own match of a second loaf to a food pantry or homeless shelter. In so doing, Boyington believes she is giving back to the community that has given so much to her — the sweetest deal we can imagine.