Irish Examiner│Cork ryebread success story at the Mayfield microbakery
First published in the Irish Examiner on 31 January 2025.
“I would always say to customers, ‘I’m going to bring you to the dark side!’” Angela Nöthlings of Cork microbakery Ryes & Shine, dedicated to making rye sourdough bread, is passionate about sharing her love of rye. The breads she makes in her home kitchen in Mayfield are a delicious litany of hazelnut dark rye and cider rye boules, dense loaves of sunflower rye bread, Borodinsky rye and the Blas na hÉireann winning Therese’s Schwarzbrot. There’s even the paler poppy seed-speckled Mayfield bloomer which also contains – you’ve guessed it – rye.
Like wheat, rye is a cereal grain but it is higher in fibre, lower in gluten, contains a variety of micronutrients – particularly B vitamins – and it has a very distinctive flavour. Having grown up eating rye bread in her native Germany, Nöthlings desperately missed it when she moved to West Cork’s Ballydehob in 1997. “There was no good bread,” she says, “What I liked at the start – the Brennans and the soda bread – it just wasn’t the right bread for me.” In desperation, she rang home. “I asked my Mum because she had always made it in my childhood. Then I made a starter and started baking bread. Honestly, the process wasn’t very refined, it was really just kind of put together.”
The 1990s US surge of interest in sourdough had led to many books being published and Nöthlings managed to track down a few, including Nancy Silverton’s Breads from the La Brea Bakery and The Village Baker by Joe Ortiz. It took experimentation, but she was able to improve her technique and make naturally fermented bread that she was happy with, using just the basic ingredients of flour, salt and water.
With two daughters and a job as an art therapist working with the HSE at Cork University Hospital, baking was very much an at-home occupation, until Nöthlings had an a-ha moment in July 2021. Looking for a relaxing night time listen, she stumbled across The Sourdough Podcast, a popular California-based podcast presented by Mike Hilburn. It was an instant hit. “I listened to it and I couldn’t fall asleep. The two words that completely stood out for me were Rofco [a small Belgian-made oven designed for baking bread] and the most magical word: microbakery.”
Although without an official definition, microbakeries are, by their very nature, small scale enterprises, often run by one person baking in their home kitchen for their local community. Although she knew that people outside the family did like her bread, selling it was not something that had ever occurred to Nöthlings. To set up a bakery in Germany you must be a bäckermeister, a master baker, and that certification takes years of apprenticeship and study.
Energised from the discovery, Nöthlings put out feelers amongst her colleagues at CUH to see if anyone would be interested in buying bread and she immediately had her first customers: “At work, I said ‘would anyone like some sourdough?’ Six loaves was my first order.” While she initially worked with a domestic “shitty oven” in her Mayfield kitchen, she quickly realised that she needed to upgrade. Using Kickstarter, she raised the money for her longed-for Rofco oven, moving on to a more professional level. While setting up her business she also credits Cork’s Local Enterprise Office and her local environmental health officer with having been “really supportive.” She also became a member of Real Bread Ireland, a network of fellow bakers, millers and growers, meeting fellow Irish microbakers who pooled information via a WhatsApp group.
While customers initially collected their pre-ordered bread from the door of the house that she shares with her partner and two teenage daughters, gradually Nöthlings started to spread her wings. Within a year of starting she had set up a Wednesday stall in the outdoor seating area at Henchys Bar in St Luke’s with the support of owner Paddy Reilly. In 2023, after 22 years of working with the HSE, she left her job to become a full-time microbaker and started selling her wares at the Coal Quay Saturday market. Her bread is also available at McSweeney’s Shop on Gardiner’s Hill. Little by little, Ryes & Shine has become known for the quality of its rye loaves and the other good things that Nöthlings bakes.
While all Nöthlings’ creations are delicious, she also takes nutrition very seriously. “We, as bakers, are responsible for the nutrition of our customers,” she says, quoting Joe Fitzmaurice of the Riot Rye Bread School in Cloughjordan, Co Tipperary – and fellow Real Bread Ireland member – where she did a class in the early days of her bakery. She mills local grains from Dunany Flour in Louth and uses organic rye from the Netherlands and organic regeneratively farmed flours from Wildfarmed. Cork-grown vegetables from her Coal Quay market neighbour Caroline Robinson make an appearance in some limited edition breads and the seeds and nuts that she includes are all soaked overnight to make the nutrition more bioavailable.
Getting people to try the bread is the first step in getting them over to the dark side and Nöthlings says that samples are crucial for that. “I like the hesitant look that they get,” she says. “They take a piece, put it into their mouths, chew and then it’s like ‘what’s that?’ The surprise! Suddenly they realise the layers of flavour that the bread delivers. That’s often the key moment for people and they take [a loaf] and nearly always have to come back because they see how well it keeps, how satisfying it is to eat it. So it’s about getting them to try.” She’s noticed that the rye bread can be more digestible for people who are sensitive to wheat, as there is less gluten in rye, and she has a diabetic customer who buys the Schwarzbrot every week as, he told her, it’s the “only bread he eats that has no influence on his blood sugar.”
No matter what the weather, Nöthlings – armed this time of the year with a woolly hat and flask of coffee – is at her Henchys’ and Coal Quay stalls every week after days spent soaking and fermenting and kneading and shaping. Her loaves cost between €5 and €6 and, she says, “sometimes people are a little bit surprised about the cost.” It’s not something that she feels that she has to justify, however. “I always say ‘how much is a pint of Guinness? That’s gone in half an hour. This will feed you for the week and it’s proper nutrition.’”
