Sonoma Bakery

Sonoma Baking Company's origin is a story of distance before it is a story of dough. In 1997, brothers Andrew and Christian Connole and their father Kerry decided to restore an old wood-fired oven at the local bakery in Bellata, a tiny town in north-central New South Wales, and turn it back into a working bakery.

For two years, the family made the 1,080-kilometer round trip from Terrigal to Bellata every week, mixing, shaping, and baking through the night before selling their loaves at Sydney's Paddington Markets the next day. In between, Andrew traveled to San Francisco to work with Alan Scott, a pioneer of wood-fired oven design, and to Point Reyes, where he learned slow-fermentation technique from baker Chad Robertson.

That combination of a rebuilt rural oven and imported technique became the foundation of a business now headquartered in a 2,800-square-meter facility in Alexandria, in inner Sydney, roughly a decade after the operation moved to the city full-time. What began as a father-and-sons project reviving one small-town oven has grown into one of Sydney's more visible sourdough operations, still tracing its identity to those Bellata drives.