Raising Grace Bread made to order

By Robert Williams

Editor

Rhonda Geis, Frazee Class of 2006, has joined the boom in the cottage license industry concentrating strictly on sourdough products in her new business Raising Grace Bread.

The need to start the business was to combat empty nest syndrome and appease her ADHD symptoms when her fourth and youngest son started school.

“I have four boys and my youngest started kindergarten and I just couldn’t sit home and do nothing,” she said. “I needed to contribute and not just be a stay-at-home person. I didn’t feel like being a stay-at-home mom when there’s nobody to mom anymore. I can only rearrange the living room in so many ways and clean out the fridge so I had to have something to do. So, I started baking and started sourdough.”

On a quiet Friday morning, Geis sat in her kitchen with good friends McKenzie Hedlund and Kailee Montean describing her process and sampling her fresh out of the oven bread products.

“It was a love-hate relationship at first, and I started making all my friends treats and secretly getting all the steps in process,” Geis said.

Positive feedback from her early baking gave her motivation to continue, but she needed a name for the business that was in the planning stages.

As a fan of puns, Geis started with Bake it Happen.

“I wasn’t feeling it,” she said.

She wanted to include her initials R.G., somehow.

“Faith is important to me and I started with Raising, well bread rises, okay, and every time before dinner we say grace,” Geis said. “I mulled on it and thought I actually really like that and it developed into Raising Grace and I added Bread and it blossomed into that.”

Geis was not fully ready to go full public with her new business and secretly created a Facebook page and kept it secret for two months.

“I didn’t tell any of my friends and went and did all the stuff and got my cottage license and kind of just sprung it on everybody,” she said. “It took off right before Easter and took off like wildfire.”

Geis does not consider herself just a baker as she has extensive cooking experience, if only counting feeding her own immediate family.

“I have always been a dabbler in everything; I can and I’m in the kitchen a lot,” she said.

Much of that time is spent keeping her husband Thomas, a fellow Frazee graduate, and four boys, ages 15, 14, 11 and six fed.

“I’m busy,” she said. “And I don’t know how to cook a small amount of food ever. It’s just not possible. But I can and we’ve been avid hunters so I grew up with the processing and always did the canning thing. Preparing my own stuff just came naturally.”

Some of her most popular items have been bagels, jalapeno cheese bread and strawberry cream cheese puffballs.

“And the day she announced that she was going to do cinnamon sugar doughnuts it went right off,” Hedlund laughed. “I had to wait two days for my order.”

As she described each of her specific recipes, she had a matching example in a decorative tray to sample. The going rule is one must sample everything before leaving.

She even has a recipe to use her discard dough that turns into chips made with parmesan and Everything Bagel seasoning.

“I don’t want to just throw it away,” she said.

Geis also has a load of unique combinations like her Bloody Mary Loaf.

“Bloody Mary mix, Worcestershire sauce, horseradish, olives, pretty much everything that would go into a bloody mary but in bread form,” she said. 

One recipe she bailed on was coffee-chocolate chip. It sounds like an instant winner, but upon exiting the oven it was proven to be the opposite.

“Sometimes the acidity level with whatever I’m using just doesn’t work,” she said. “Sometimes it doesn’t rise so it looks like a pancake loaf.”

In that case, the bread gets donated to the chickens on the family farm.

Experimenting with different flavors is what keeps baking sourdough fun.

“That’s what I love—give me an idea, I’m bored today,” she said. “I’m always open. Someone just give me an idea to try.”

One friend who is a fan of margaritas got what was asked for in a tequila-included margarita loaf.

“It tasted like a lime margarita,” Geis said.

“That was delicious; it didn’t last the day,” said Montean.

Other popular flavors run from savory to sweet with examples like spinach-artichoke or raspberry cream cheese.

The growing cottage business has also created idiosyncrasies in the Geis kitchen. Perhaps because she lives in a house full of men, Geis has named her sourdough starter Edith, which sits in a big jar on her kitchen counter.

“Because we eateth her,” Geis laughed at her pun.

Her kids refer to the dough as Edith and there are stories upon stories about Edith and her condition.

Thomas turned the furnace off for the season and it caused issues with Edith.

“He is very adamant about heating the house for more than nine months a year and it was storming out for three days and it was 50 degrees in the house,” Geis said. “Edith won’t rise; you’re killing me here! I was getting a littel pissy with him because Edith was struggle bussing here and I went and got a heating pad and was babying my starter.”

The relationship between dough and baker goes even deeper.

“I’ll be in the kitchen talking and my husband will ask who I’m talking to…,” said Geis. “Edith.”

Access to a successful Edith rising and Rhonda’s Raising Grace Bread menu can be found on her Facebook page by searching Raising Grace Bread and orders can be placed there, including special requests, or by phoning 218-841-3990. Geis does bake to order for items on and off the menu.

“I’ll try it, full disclosure, give me 14 hours, but if it doesn’t rise, hey, it didn’t turn out,” Geis said.

With experimental or new items, Geis creates a mini loaf first to test it before delivering to customers.

“With four kids, one of them is sick or one of them is in sports so I’m mom taxiing all the time,” she said. “Basically, I’ve been meeting people in town.” 

The Geis kids are Detroit Lakes students, which allows DL to be a central meeting point for Geis to deliver her goods. She is flexible in making deliveries having traveled to Cormorant, or wherever her customers can meet. On a nice day, her farm in rural Lake Park is a short and nice drive away.