Madison, WI bakery a favorite for breads and pastries while also milling and actively engaging in grain breeding efforts.
Madison Sourdough Company is a bakery and café run by Andrew Hutchison and a team of 54 employees, most of them full-time.
Since 1993, this enterprise has been bringing sourdough bread to an eager audience in Madison, WI. The original owners had such a strong response that they outgrew their initial place, and created a robust wholesale operation. In 2000, this iteration became overwhelming, and the owners closed, but reopened as a bakery/café in a strip mall in 2003. Andrew started to bake there after he graduated from UW-Madison in 2006. A few years later, he and a co-worker bought the business and returned to the neighborhood where the bakery first began.
This is where Madison Sourdough (MSCo) has been ever since, serving breakfast and lunch—the croissant breakfast sandwich is a classic—and offering bread and baked goods. The café spans two storefronts, allowing for counter service, seating both indoors and out, and a room for the baking and milling magic to happen in the back.
Though Andrew studied painting and got a degree in fine arts, the idea of returning to baking bread, a job he’d done previously, appealed to him. Soon after starting at Madison Sourdough, he took a trip to France that helped commit him to the craft. Meeting a few French bakers and seeing how they worked was galvanizing, especially when he worked alongside them, shaping and baking bread for a few days. This focus on classic French pastries and naturally leavened breads continues, and Andrew was honored with a James Beard nomination in 2023. However, Madison Sourdough is interested in more than repetition.
“I think we've just been trying to do better and better, over and over again,” Andrew said. In 2012, that meant seeking out local grains. Lonesome Stone Milling, one of AGC’s founding members, was nearby, so Madison Sourdough began sourcing from mill owner Gilbert Williams. Within a few years, the bakers wanted more control over the whole grain flour production process and opportunities for creativity, so Andrew bought a mill to grind their flour in-house.
“A few months ago, we started talking with Meadowlark about whether they could make a custom flour for us. Now we're buying that, which has really taken a lot of pressure off, to not be milling 2-300 pounds of bread flour a day,” said Andrew, explaining that it was a hard decision to make because they liked the level of control they had. This custom product matches what they’d been doing themselves, sifting off only the largest pieces of bran, about 10% overall; Andrew reports that the consistency of the flour from Meadowlark’s two large New American Stone Mills is very good.
Madison Sourdough still has use for its own mill, an Ostiroller with a sifting setup, in making flours for breads and pastries. Coming soon is a cake that tips its hat to piña coladas, featuring tahini, spelt and pineapple.
Andrew and the bakery have been active participants in selecting new varieties for artisanal baking. This started in the Northeast in 2011, and expanded to the Midwest in 2014 with the teams of Julie Dawson and Lucia Gutierrez at UW-Madison. For more than ten years, scientists, farmers and bakers have been working to develop varieties of bread wheat suited to northern climates and organic systems. In recent years, baking trials have been held at MSCo, as well as several other AGC bakeries, to test the different lines in a production setting. Andrew is an Advisory Committee member on the USDA Organic Research and Extension Initiative Value Added Grains project that partly funds this work, and has traveled around the country to participate in public-facing events to educate about plant breeding and the importance of a participatory process that includes not only farmers but also end-users like bakers.
“We announced the name of one of the varieties developed through this work at an OGRAIN field day last June,” Andrew said, referring to the bread wheat that was ten years in the making, developed at UW in concert with farmers and bakers, and named for the late Paul Bickford—a valued part of the grain farming community in Wisconsin as well as co-owner of Meadowlark and mentor to Halee and John Wepking; he died in an accident in 2022.
Seeing people he hadn't seen in a while, standing in that beautiful field of flowing wheat, hit him in the heart. “As a baker, I’m into the nitty gritty of fermentation, but there's this bigger picture that is really special and important,” Andrew said.
This made him want to stay plugged into the grain community, and AGC is a big part of that. Laughing, he said our organization is good at relentless connection. “I really appreciate that because it connects us to a larger purpose in what we're doing. Baking is physical. It's not an easy type of work. You need something else that drives you. The craft is part of it for me, but we're making a difference in other ways, too. It's more than just making a loaf of bread.”
Toward that, Madison Sourdough has a new goal. Currently, about 40% of the flour and grain they use is local and organic, but the rest of the flours they use are commercial and not organic. Andrew wants to improve on that. “Switching all the way over to organic is where I want to be. That will be a big shift for us but that's the direction that we want to go,” Andrew said.
AGC is ever grateful to have the team at Madison Sourdough in our network. Keep your eyes peeled for their work, follow them to the farmers’ market in the spring, and be ready for the next Variety Showcase – the Culinary Breeding Network’s annual salute to collaborations between farmers, researchers and chefs. The fall 2025 Farm to Flavor event will be in Madison on Sunday, October 5 and is sure to be stellar.
