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While waiting for a loaf of warm and fluffy — yet crunchy — sourdough bread to come out of the oven, Morgan Vogel starts kneading another in her Park Point apartment.

The Syracuse University senior picked up sourdough bread baking over winter break, and created her homemade bread baking business Flour Power in December. For Vogel, the business combines two things she loves: cooking and designing.

Vogel currently sells each loaf of bread for $12, and customers can request orders on the company’s Instagram account or through contacting Vogel directly. In addition to a classic sourdough loaf, she also sells various flavors, such as garlic and herb, cinnamon sugar and herb focaccia. She also recently made a sundried tomato and Parmesan sourdough.

The senior said she has always enjoyed baking and decided to experiment with sourdough during this past Thanksgiving, when she received a sourdough starter from a friend. She baked a few loaves and was proud of how the batches came out, leading her to post pictures of the bread on her Instagram account. This then drew the attention of her friends at SU.

Vogel, a communication design major in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, saw baking bread as an opportunity to expand her portfolio. At home, she sat around the dinner table with her parents, Adrienne and David, and went back and forth about what to name the company. The name Flour Power eventually came to her.

“I thought about the name for the company for a while, and we’re taught naming exercises in class so it wasn’t that hard to come up with a name, but I just thought about things that I like,” Vogel said.

When she got back to campus, Vogel started baking in her Park Point kitchen. The senior hand-delivers the sourdough when it’s warm to preserve the freshness of the loaves and add a personalized touch to her business.

Vogel makes various flavors of sourdough bread including garlic and herb, cinnamon sugar and herb, and sundried tomato and Parmesan. Courtesy of Morgan Vogel

After class, Vogel’s afternoons are spent baking orders that customers have placed. For her, the hardest part of the process is maintaining the sourdough starter, which can often be “temperamental.” A sourdough starter is made by combining flour and water and letting it sit for many days. The starter acts in the place of commercial yeast in the bread, helping it rise.

The process of making a loaf of bread generally takes around five days if a new starter is used. But Vogel reuses her starter and keeps it out in open air on the kitchen counter, which helps save time, she said.

When she reuses her starter, it takes around 24 hours to make one loaf of bread. Following a master recipe, she measures all the ingredients, mixes them and lets them rest for an hour. Vogel then kneads the dough three times over a span of six hours before letting it sit overnight.

The recipe Vogel uses is from a blogger she follows on Instagram named Elaine Boddy. The base ingredients consist of Vogel’s sourdough starter — named Jane Dough as an homage to her obsession with crime — as well as flour, water and salt. Vogel normally feeds the starter daily, but due to a ramp up of orders, she has pushed to feeding it flour twice a day.

“It’s so fun to watch the starter grow and see the chemical process take place,” Vogel said.

Zach Brenner, an SU senior, has been friends with Vogel since their freshman year. They both lived on the same floor in Brewster Hall, and after he learned that Vogel had started Flour Power, he reached out to buy bread.

Vogel found the recipe she uses on blogger Elaine Boddy’s Instagram. Courtesy of Morgan Vogel

Brenner texted Vogel and asked her to choose what type of bread he should buy. He trusted her because he knew that she’s an experienced chef.

“I hope she keeps doing well and that she enjoys it, works well on it and that makes her happy,” Brenner said. “I hope that it succeeds as a business, and I think it would be good for Morgan to be part of a successful business and learn those skills. She works really hard and she’s really talented.”

After hearing Flour Power sells roasted garlic and herb bread, SU junior Anna Fleisher knew she needed to buy a loaf. Fleisher, a self-described “big savory girl,” reached out to Vogel and put in an order for the roasted garlic and herb sourdough.

Since getting the loaf, Fleisher has recommended Flour Power to her friends. And after posting a picture of the bread on her Instagram story, Fleisher had people texting her asking where she got the bread. If she had to recommend one flavor for Vogel to make, it would be rosemary.

“I’ve recommended it to so many friends,” Fleisher said. “(Vogel’s) making the most of it and I just hope that she continues with it because it’s really good and she has a talent for it.”

Published on February 23, 2021 at 8:49 pm