Sour and Salt Bakery

Peeking into Eleni Adkins’ kitchen at Sour & Salt Bakery is a baker’s joy, seeing mounds of tall, golden loafs of sourdough fresh out of the oven. It looks and smells phenomenal, especially considering the time Adkins and her team invests in each loaf.

“I definitely wanted to make sourdough the focus,” Adkins says. “I love the challenge of it. Even when you think you know the process, there's other factors that come into play. I love that it is a wild yeast that you know we're feeding it constantly. You can change the flavor. If we do a cold ferment, we can increase the sourness of it, which is something that people are wanting! They say, ‘it's got to be more sour,’ which we can do. I just saw endless possibilities for it. It's such a dynamic bread.”

Adkins' story about starting Sour & Salt is unique. She opened in April 2022 as a ghost kitchen inside Philly Pretzel Factory in the Rosewood neighborhood of Columbia. Her goal was to sell a hundred loaves a week. That happened quickly; she was not just selling a hundred loaves a week, but hundreds of loaves a week in no time.

By August, the closing of the ghost kitchen space Adkins had been working in led her to move forward with opening her own brick and mortar across the street. What was just Adkins and a couple of partners then is now, a year later, a full-fledged business selling not just four to five hundred loaves of sourdough a week, but also everything from bagels to sourdough brownies to cookies to chicken salad and pimento cheese. Adkins says it can be grueling work; there is almost always someone in the building seven days a week working on something to meet the demand.

The Rosewood area itself has played a key role in Adkins’ success. Her first business client was Rosewood Market, now right next door to her bakery. The nearby kitchen equipment shop comes frequently to help with mechanical issues. And then there’s the community. Rosewood neighbors have helped grow her business from a ghost kitchen to success story almost overnight with their word of mouth and encouragement.

“We have a lot of customers who are coming in and requesting us to cut a loaf of bread in half, so that they can bring the other half to their neighbors or friends,” Adkins says. “It's just like, the community is incredible. They want us to succeed. They come and they give us little mini pep talks. They can tell sometimes we're tired. It's just been the loveliest experience.”