About

About The Bakery

Our Stone mill

Hillside Bakery, located in Knoxville, opened in July 2002. In addition to our stone-ground flours, the bakery creates, mixes, and bakes every product offered for sale.

Our customers appreciate the high quality of our breads and baked goods. We are grateful for their loyalty throughout the years. It is a pleasure seeing familiar faces at every pickup.

Great bread demands great ingredients. Our commitment to organic and the finest quality ingredients remains steadfast. To ensure we have the finest flour, we stone grind in the bakery for each bake. Our grain suppliers have been reliable for years.

On rare occasions a fruit, nut, olive or other secondary ingredient doesn’t measure up to our standard. In that case we don’t bake that item.

Our primary providers:

Three Rivers Market – Organic grain, flour, nuts, oats, various ingredients and spices

A & B Distributors – French chocolate disks and Kosher Salt

Costco – Organic Dried Fruits, honey, maple syrup, extra virgin olive oil, sugar, olives

Kroger – Organic Applesauce, chocolate chips, various ingredients

Azure Standard – Organic grains, seeds, various ingredients


Scaling Sunny Flax dough
Dough proofing
Member, BBGA
Shaping dough

Here are some articles on slow fermented bread.

From The Guardian
The rise and rise of sourdough bread
As evidence grows that slow-fermented bread may be easier to digest, we look at its history and potential health benefits.

“And then some baker, somewhere, around 6,000 years ago, noticed that the flour and water mix he’d left lying around forgotten was doing something odd. It was bubbling, fermenting; it was expanding; it looked off. It smelt a bit funny. He stuck it in the oven nonetheless – waste not, want not – and became the first human being to sniff that wonderful aroma: the smell of baking bread. The taste and texture were different too: his bread was chewier, it had a more interesting flavour. Perhaps he began experimenting himself; maybe he told other bakers. But however it happened, the new baking technique caught on, was developed, and gradually spread all around Europe and the Middle East.”

The Real Problem With Bread (It’s Probably Not Gluten)
by Tom Philpott, Mother Jones

“Yet people have been growing, grinding, leavening, and baking wheat since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago. It remains the globe’s most widely planted crop, serving as the main staple for a third of humanity. Is it really conceivable that it could have been slowly killing us all along?
… “Rather, [Stephen] Jones believes that the true problem with bread is how we make it. In commercial bakeries, rising time has been winnowed from hours or even days down to mere minutes, thanks to fast-acting yeasts and additives.
… “I conducted my own experiments with Jones’ method. I had drifted away from bread in recent years; it made me feel uncomfortably full. But when I made slow-fermented whole-wheat bread with a sourdough starter from Jones’ lab, I felt great—as I do when I eat loaves made by the increasing number of bakeries that use traditional methods and shun additives.”