Love bread? Here are 5 places to find great loaves at the NJ Shore

Puzzles, bicycles, treadmills, swimming pools and trampolines: All of these surged in popularity during the pandemic. 

Then came sourdough. Stuck at home with nothing but time, home bakers dove into the world of homemade bread, tucking containers of their prized sourdough starters – called "the mother" – into corners of their refrigerators and trying to remember to refresh its flour and water (that's called "feeding") every few days. 

But time is marching on, and you've probably grown tired of keeping that bubbling glop in your fridge "alive." Fret not, there is great bread to be found all across the Shore, from challah to sourdough. Here are five places to find it.    

Benchmark Breads, Atlantic Highlands

Before becoming one of Monmouth County's most sought-after sourdough bakers, Travis Coatney started out like a lot of us, making bread at his Middletown home. 

He was admittedly obsessive about it, most likely because of prior (and still occasional) work as a craft beer brewer. Baking and brewing require a scientific understanding and attention to detail most consumers never consider.

"There are so many similarities between brewing and this. You have to be able to develop it," Coatney said. "Every day it's different."

Coatney, 35, first offered his homemade bread to family and friends, but when he and his wife Betsy began receiving orders from people they didn't know, "we thought well, there's something here," he said. 

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Selling home-baked goods wasn't yet legal – New Jersey's cottage law, which permits such sales, went into effect just weeks ago – so the couple needed a commercial space. In February, they landed in a prep kitchen below Gaslight restaurant in Atlantic Highlands, which has just enough room for Coatney to mix, proof and bake his naturally leavened sourdough and soft sandwich loaves.

He bakes between 500 and 600 loaves each week, employing a 36-hour process from dough to finished loaves, and baking between 20 and 30 at a time in his deck oven. The sourdough is left plain or dusted with seeds, the finished bread delivering crusty tops and a chewy, lightly tangy crumb.

Coatney sells his bread through his website, offering twice-weekly pickups at Gaslight's sister restaurant, Copper Canyon, plus local delivery. Customers also can purchase loaves at E. Holland Sundries in Bradley Beach, The Blonde Shallot in Little Silver, and the soon-to-open The Baker's Grove in Shrewsbury. Benchmark Bread is on the menu at Cardinal in Asbury Park, Anjelica's Restaurant in Sea Bright, Almost Home in Middletown, and The Whitechapel Projects in Long Branch.   

Go:benchmarkbreads.com, Benchmarkbreads@gmail.com.

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MKT Eatery, Surf City 

You don't have to be a physics professor to bake great bread, but it doesn't hurt. 

Rafael Morillo's talk of sourdough is equal parts science (he taught at the University of Delaware and in his native Venezuela) and passion, and those who order pizza, buy bread, and take baking classes at MKT Eatery in Surf City benefit from both his academic and baking experiences.

Morillo, who is the baker at the Long Beach Island restaurant owned by his daughter, Cecilia Morillo, and her husband, Andy McClellan, got the baking bug as a college student. After a long career in teaching – all the while baking bread for meals with family and friends – he became a student again, studying bread-making with the American Institute of Baking. 

Today, the 72-year-old Ship Bottom resident spends each day tending to his sourdough starter, created years ago with bacteria he harvested from flowering plants on the northern end of the island. (In sourdough, live cultures act as natural leavening agent.)

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"Sourdough is a method of making bread; it's not a bread," Morillo said. "It's different from a cook. A cook, he can taste a sauce and say 'it needs more salt.' You can't do that with bread."

The restaurant, which closes for the season in late November but will offer fresh bread on Saturdays, sells Morillo's sourdough bread by the loaf and employs the dough in its pizzas. He also makes baguettes and focaccia; the latter are used for panini.

Fans also can find his sourdough on the menu at Wally's and How You Brewin', both in Surf City, and his baguettes for sale at Agnello Market in Barnegat Light and The Cheese Shoppe in Surf City. 

The bread Morillo bakes for Wally's is tangier than his usual recipe; the flavor is accomplished by tweaking the amount of water in the dough and its temperature. 

"You can change the parameters to get the culture to do what you want," he said. "Great sourdough bakers know how to do that."

After all these years, what does Morillo like most about bread?

That's simple: "What isn't there to like?"

Go: 600 Long Beach Blvd., Surf City; 609-494-3400, mkteatery.com.

Nick + Sons Bakery, Spring Lake

Kindness and wholesome ingredients offered close to home: That’s the dream Nick + Sons Bakery owners Nick Heavican and Nick Brophy sought when opening their two locations in Spring Lake and Brooklyn.

They specialize in sourdough bread, which is fermented naturally and made with organic grains and flours. Heavican's passion for natural ingredients is rooted in his childhood memories of watching his father farm in Nebraska.

“I have an appreciation for really fine, organic ingredients,” Heavican said. “Knowing where food comes from, how [the farmer] treated the food – those kinds of things have always been important to me. My love for ingredients comes from home.”

Their menu features seeded sourdough, basic sourdough made with einkorn (an ancient grain) and olive rosemary sourdough. They also sell a bread made from pieces of croissant cut off during the layering process, which then rise into small loaves of buttery white bread.

Heavican started Nick & Son’s as a small wholesaler of baked goods after having a life-altering experience abroad. He was a fashion photographer for more than 20 years, and while traveling through Iceland on his way to London for work, he stumbled upon the bakery that changed everything.

“I tasted some bread in Iceland … and I said I have to learn how to do this, so I asked for a job the next morning,” he said. “I went back a couple months later to intern for 2½ weeks. And (even though) prior to that I’d never baked a thing in my life, I fell in love with baking at that point.”

He knew he wanted to change industries, but he wasn't sure how. He tried to find a job in the business when he came back to New York, but couldn't. 

So he opened his own bakery. But he knew he couldn't do it on his own, so he partnered with Brophy to open the Brooklyn location three years ago. The Spring Lake location, not far from Brophy's Sea Girt home, opened in July.

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“Our partnership is this golden ticket (because) Nick and I (use) exact opposite sides of the brain," Heavican said. "Things that would take me two months will take him five minutes and vice versa. We really complement each other, and I couldn’t do it without him.”

“My (Brooklyn) neighborhood really needed this thing I saw when I was in Iceland, this sense of community and a place where you could have a chat with somebody,” Heavican said. “It was really missing a bakery, so we jumped in to fill that void and it’s been a great experience. Not only for us, but for the community."

Above all else, Heavican said his business is about kindness and good service.

“It makes the bread taste better. It has nothing to do with the recipe, it has to do with being nice,” he said. “We all have a good time in the bakery. It’s a place where we work hard, but we have fun, too.”

Go: 304 Morris Ave., Spring Lake; 732-243-3176, nickandsonsbakery.com.

Kneaded by Lady J, Brielle

Lavender? Elderberry? Chocolate?

These are just some of the flavors you might find at Kneaded by Lady J in Brielle. Originally more of a chef than a baker, owner Joyce Hetherington is dedicated to adding creative flavor profiles to her dough creations.

“I was never a baker. I was always purely a chef, so I’m really into all different, diverse foods, things you don’t find normally — flavor combinations that are just wild,” she said. “I go really deep with my flavor complexes because dough is dough, so I just try to reinvent it — and that’s what makes us stand out.

"We’re revitalizing bread,” Hetherington added.

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One of these adventurous concoctions is her chocolate peanut butter bomb (a chocolate sourdough base stuffed with peanut butter and chocolate chips), which Hetherington calls “a bread version of Reese's.”

She also makes a lavender honey wheat bread, a balsamic and fig sourdough (classic sourdough stuffed with dried figs and balsamic with a fig, lavender and elderberry glaze), and cinnamon rolls (made with challah bread and topped with maple glaze).

Hetherington also specializes in customized charcuterie boards, for which she uses plenty of cheese. By the end of the week, she has leftover pieces, so in an effort to prevent food waste, she throws them into a loaf called "The Hot Mess.”

Hetherington has become a master of the craft in a short time, after only getting into bread baking during the COVID quarantine. Wanting to spend more time with a friend, they baked together every day until she was hooked.

"We baked our bread and then I was hooked, that was it,” she said. “You didn’t see me. I disappeared for months.”

Hetherington opened a studio where she could sell her breads and share her newfound gift with others through classes and parties. Visitors of all baking abilities can learn how to bake bread from start to finish, or decorate dough Hetherington makes, just for fun.

While walk-in orders are accepted, Hetherington prefers online orders in advance on her website. Her menu, which is updated on Mondays, is always changing. 

“I love that it’s a revolving menu because I love being creative," she said. "I don’t want to be mundane with the same things every single day."

Go: 713 Riverview Drive, Brielle; 732-592-9229, kneadedbyladyj.com.

Big Apple Bakery, Stafford 

There’s nothing like grandma’s cooking, which is what Joe Urciuoli of Big Apple Bakery in Stafford is trying to replicate.

This European-style bakery offers not only an assortment of breads from rye to semolina to kaiser to ciabatta, he also makes grab-and-go meals, cakes, pies and an array of cookies, including Italian delights like biscotti, and classics like black and white cookies.

“We do everything from scratch, and it’s a big production,” Urciuoli said. “Bread is baked every morning, so if you’re here at 8 o’clock, it’s still warm.”

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Having owned the bakery for eight years after the former owners ran it for nearly 30, Urciuoli had a vision, inspired by his Italian grandmother’s home cooking, to provide a place for people to buy freshly baked breads, delicious sweets and home-cooked, unprocessed meals.

“I remember when I was a kid eating breakfast in the morning, and it smelled like sauce all throughout the house because she was cooking all day long," he said. "That’s what I’m trying to do here, bring back how it used to be."

While he has gained an appreciation for old-style cuisine, Urciuoli didn’t start out in the food industry. He worked on Wall Street in finance, so he had to “learn everything from scratch,” he said.

Big Apple Bakery  makes specialty breads, like Crow Bread (composed of cranberries, raisins, oranges and walnuts), Irish soda bread, which they debut around St. Patrick’s Day every year, and Jewish round and braided challah.

“We kind of do a little bit of everywhere in Europe,” said Urciuoli, who thinks the success of his bakery is primarily thanks to nostalgia.

“A lot of older customers remember the way it used to be, before supermarkets controlled everything, when mom would send you to the corner for bread and then to the butcher for meat,” he said. “We’re an old-style, small business, mom-and-pop shop with different kinds of things to offer. And it’s all made here, so it reminds them of when they were young.”

Go: 595 East Bay Ave., Manahawkin section of Stafford; 609-597-7802, thebigapplebakery.com.