What Wide Awake Bakery is known for
Founded by baker Stefan Senders with Liz Brown and grain grower Thor Oechsner, this Trumansburg bakery uses grain milled nearby by Farmer Ground Flour. Its nine-ton wood-fired oven, stoked with its own woodlot's timber, bakes loaves like the sifted-wheat 'Gary's Bread.'
Stefan Senders founded this bakery with his wife, Liz Brown, and their friend Thor Oechsner, a Newfield grain grower, building it around a partnership between farm, mill and oven rather than sourcing flour from a distributor. Oechsner's grain is milled nearby by Greg Mol at Farmer Ground Flour in Trumansburg before it reaches the bakery — a short supply chain by design, not circumstance.
The bakery bakes in a wood-fired oven built with roughly nine tons of brick, steel, stone and insulation, designed with builder Billy O'Brien to move and hold heated air through a network of internal spaces. It's fired with local wood, some of it pulled from the bakery's own woodlot by Liz's horse, Reno, about three times a week — a detail that says as much about the operation's scale as any production number would.
Among the roughly 200 bread varieties the bakery has produced, Gary's Bread — a sifted wheat sourdough — carries a specific tribute: it's named for Gary Redmond, founder of the regional food distributor Regional Access, and has become one of the bakery's most popular loaves. The bakery sells from its Trumansburg production site and a retail storefront on Franklin Street in Ithaca.
Best for — Wood-fired bread from locally grown grain
Ithaca, NY
Where next
- Le Perche Bakery & Bar — Hudson
- Fairmount Bagel — Montreal
- Levain Bakery — New York
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