Life is short, and fresh-baked bread is one of its great pleasures. One of the few hills I’ll die on is that there’s simply no reason to settle for bad bread, the sort with zero personality that seems to have achieved immortality on grocery store shelves. What are they putting in that stuff, anyway?
Fortunately, Knoxville’s abundance of talented local bakers makes that particular mandate increasingly easy to follow. They’ve been keeping us well supplied at farmers’ markets, groceries and coffee shops for years, and lately more of them are putting down permanent roots.
This week, I followed my nose to three new bakery storefronts.
Two opened last week: SoKno Sourdough just off Sevier Avenue and K Brew Bakery beside its Broadway location. A third, Kopita Bakery, has been slow-opening over the past couple of months inside the downtown hotel it shares with sister restaurant Kopita, at Union and Gay.
This is excellent news for bread people. And by “bread people,” I mean people.
Let’s follow our noses inside. First stop …
SoKno Sourdough
SoKno Sourdough isn’t new, but its storefront is. Well, sort of … customers could get into the bakery before, but only through what owner Stephanie Carlson described as a “speakeasy entrance situation” that wasn’t exactly ideal.
Located just off Sevier Avenue at 2006 Barber St., between Redbud Kitchen and Hi-Wire Brewing, SoKno Sourdough now has regular storefront hours, so you can walk right in and get your fix.
I stopped by toward the tail end of the grand opening on Aug. 7. It had already been a day: a morning ribbon cutting, 40 loaves of bread baked, walk-in customers to tend to and deliveries to prepare. They were also gearing up for a First Friday event that evening featuring the art of Maggie Brannon, with all bakery proceeds benefiting Young-Williams Animal Center.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, Stephanie multitasked her way through telling me a bit about her bread journey.
“In 2020, I jumped on the sourdough trend along with all of the rest of Instagram,” she said. “It just made sense to me, and then strangers started paying me money for bread. So I just kept going, and then all of a sudden it became this. I started from my house in our spare bedroom that I converted into a bakery, and then moved to Maryville for about 18 months, and expanded there enough to be able to build this out.”
These days, SoKno Sourdough is producing quite the output. In addition to loaves, they roll more than 300 bagels a day (Stephanie sent me home with a rosemary sea salt bagel, which was DIVINE) plus focaccia, English muffins, pizza crusts, baguettes and more. You can find their goods at a number of groceries and coffee shops around town, and now, of course, you can stop by the storefront too.
Hours are Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., and Wednesday from 3 to 6 p.m.
Stephanie is also president of the Old Sevier Merchants Association, whose business owners have kept their chins up through a major streetscape project that has Sevier Avenue in a bit of a hot mess for now, but promises a much more inviting corridor for walking, biking, driving and lingering when the dust settles.
“Even though the construction’s happening, it’s good to be here when we are, as we grow,” Stephanie said. “And then when the construction is done and the rail trail opens, it’ll be like ‘let’s go.’”
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