Viva la bread!
Oak Park woman started a bread revolution, and you can be part of it
Oak Park resident Marilyn Mack Pilchowski wakes up at 4 a.m. and walks into her kitchen to start working on her passion project. Over her stove hangs a sign that says “Sweetbird Kitchen,” a name that honors the English bulldog she and her husband rescued. She starts her bagel dough and, while it is rising, she preheats her oven and starts baking her wild yeast sourdough loaves around 4:45 a.m.
Baking is something Pilchowski does beside her full-time job as a worker’s compensation claims examiner for a large international third-party administration. The idea arose in December 2019, when her husband was recovering from hospitalization.
“I needed something to do with my hands while we were both off work,” Pilchowski says. “It was also a way to feel like I was giving back some kindness that we were shown during my husband’s time in the ICU and during his recovery.”
Pilchowski has been perfecting her sourdough recipe for many years. On top of each round and generous-sized loaf she etches a heart. The heart represents Pilchowski’s big-hearted love for gifting bread.
She baked a lot of bread while she was perfecting her recipe, so Pilchowski was giving it away to immediate family and friends. Once word got out how good it was, others wanted to buy from her, too. So Pilchowski began offering a loaf or two a day for sale, enough to pay for her flour, and she would give away as many loaves as she sold.
The community response to her bagels and sourdough bread has been extraordinary.
“I put one post on a local Facebook fo
rum and within four hours had over 200 requests for bread and bagels … and the number just keeps growing,” she says.
One of her customers who is also a friend started a private GoFundMe account, raising $500 for the Sweetbird Kitchen. With this money, Pilchowski was able to gift both St. David’s
Food Pantry and the Wobbly Kitchen in Detroit. Another customer gave Pilchowski her mother’s Dutch oven, which helped her increase her baking output. Another couple refused gifted bread, instead paying for two loaves and donating $100 to St. David’s Food Pantry.
“Truly and honestly I have never been so humbled and grateful in my entire life,” Pilchowski said in response. “It feels like this is just bigger than my heart can handle.”
Now she is saving up for an outdoor bread oven. She plans to teach herself how to bake in a wood-fired oven and increase her output to make additional loaves.
To join the bread revolution and learn how you can buy, give and receive bagels and sourdough bread, visit Pilchowski’s social media pages, Sweetbird Kitchen on Facebook, or bulldogsandbread on Instagram.