With the beginning of the new year, renowned bartender Jeffrey Moll, Jr. recently rolled out a new, perhaps unexpected business: Upper Crust Bread, which specializes in naturally leavened sourdough loaves.
The baking company is the culmination of an impulse that started as an interest in better eating and evolved into a love of baking naturally leavened bread. “I started getting into fermentation, slow food, and just trying to change my diet to be more focused around non-processed food,” Moll says. “It was a snowball effect that led me to bread-making. I started doing it as a hobby, and then I started to get better at it.”
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Moll, who works at Planter’s House and was named to SLM’s A-List as one of the city’s top mixologists in 2015, eventually began bringing his bread to the bar for colleagues to try. “Everyone seemed to like it,” he says. “Over time, people started encouraging me to try selling it, which is not anything I had even considered—I just thought it was just a fun thing to do.” As the pandemic took its toll on the restaurant and bar industry, however, Moll started to think about baking as another source of income.
Today, Moll offers weekend-only pickup or delivery, which allows him to balance baking with work at Planter’s House. Each week, customers can place online orders through 10 p.m. Thursday. He then starts baking around 5 a.m. on Fridays, when the process of readying the dough begins in earnest, with the bread being baked on Saturdays. Moll says customers don’t seem to mind waiting until the weekend for orders. “I never seem to have any lack of interest,” he says. Customers can then pick up orders on Saturday afternoons from Moll’s home kitchen in South City, or he’ll deliver within a 10-mile radius on Sunday mornings. (Read the ordering instructions on Upper Crust’s website.)
Upper Crust currently offers more than a dozen varieties of bread, ranging from $7 to $11 per loaf. The menu includes a subcategory of breads made with specialty flours, including sesame semolina, rye with caraway, buckwheat, and rugbrod (a Danish dark rye loaf flavored with stout and pumpkin, sunflower, and flax seeds). The colorful “Off the Beaten Path” range features a turmeric and poppy seed loaf, paprika and rosemary, and Ube bread (baked with purple yam).
Moll recommends that first-time customers start with the Country Loaf and explore from there. “It definitely showcases what a naturally leavened sourdough style bread really is,” he says. Most of Upper Crust’s breads are based on a sourdough starter—it’s even the basis for sweeter items, such as banana bread, as well as rye chocolate chunk and black sesame cookies.
The best-selling bread, however, has been the sourdough-based focaccia. “Focaccia has been unexpectedly the most popular,” Moll says. “I feel like the straight sourdough loaves are really what showcase someone’s skill, but I’m just happy to get whatever I’m making into people’s hands.”
In the future, Moll hopes to grow the business. He’s considering a stall at a local farmers’ market and, if the selection expands, to continue focusing on savory breads. “The sweets are just there like fun little add-ons,” he says.
“It’s a very simple adventure,” Moll says. “I just want to create some awareness and reverence for this kind of bread and eating more things that are healthy or natural.”
