‘If you like it, the odds are other people will too’
Angela Nöthlings, Ryes & Shine, Cork
When Angela Nöthlings arrived in west Cork from Germany in 1996, the range of what she describes as “good bread” on offer was severely limited.
“You could get soda bread and sometimes you could find something interesting in a health food shop but basically it was a sliced pan from the supermarket. But I grew up on a diet of sourdough and rye bread and I realised, if I wanted to eat that, I’d need to make it myself,” she says.
So she started baking at her home in Ballydehob and, for 20 years, produced two loaves a week.
“I remember the exact date that changed — July 2, 2021. I was looking for something to drown out the noise of my
teenage children and stumbled on The Sourdough Podcast, an American podcast dedicated to what they call cottage bakeries,” she says.
“I expected to fall asleep to it but it changed my life. It taught me what a micro-bakery was and it introduced a magic word — Rofco. This is a brand of oven from Belgium that’s perfect for someone getting started at home.”
In Germany, in order to sell bread or cake to the public, you have to study for four years and become a master baker. So the idea that Nöthlings could start a food business at home was a revelation.
“I thought, ‘I’d love to do that.’ But could I? How could I take what I knew about baking and scale it up? My old fan oven was temperamental, and every time I closed the door to bake, I didn’t know exactly what I would get. There was never enough steam to get bread to rise properly,” she says. “But a Rofco oven can bake 12 to 15 loaves in an hour, with precise moisture control.”
Nöthlings passed her HSE inspection and became a member of Real Bread Ireland, a group of bakers preserving traditional baking techniques. She specialises in sourdough and rye breads. Instead of commercial yeast, sourdough uses what’s called a ‘starter’, usually a combination of fermented flour and water with wild yeast and bacteria.
“It takes longer to rise, is more susceptible to changes in ambient room temperature and has to be looked after, but it yields a hugely satisfying chewy bread,” she says.
Two or three times a week, Nöthlings bakes a few different kinds of bread — a Mayfield bloomer made with 80pc white flour and 20pc wholemeal, a wholegrain German Schwarzbrot loaf and a variety of specials, such as sourdough cinnamon buns and muffins.
She sells on Wednesdays from a stall outside Henchys Bar in Cork, and on Saturdays at the Coal Quay Market, also in Cork. She says she has no desire to scale the business up, and thinks it’s perfect the way it is. “I’m in my 50s and I love doing the actual baking myself, I don’t want to employ someone else to do it. I make enough money to support my family and what I’m doing works.”
Angela Nöthlings’s top home-baking tip: “Bake what you really love yourself. If you like it, then the odds are other people will too, and if you bake things you don’t like, they’ll never turn out as well.”