Vanessa Whiteside
Kansas Living Magazine
On a summer day in 2024, while on a six-week backpack trip in Europe, Kansas native Alisha Nisly stood before the Notre Dame Cathedral, thinking, “Can I make this into a business?”
Sure, she loved to bake as a hobby, a skill she learned from her mom, but Nisly needed a nudge of encouragement if she was going to launch a micro bakery, so she called her mom.
“That was the moment, standing in front of the Notre Dame in Paris, and I was like, ‘I think I’m going to do it,’” Nisly says. “That conversation was me asking her, ‘Do you think I’m capable of doing this?’”
Her mom, Doris, told Nisly to go for it and that encouragement was all she needed.
“My mom was the one who made me think it was possible,” Nisly says. “On my own, I was doubtful and not sure I could do it, but she really breathed life into it.”
Baking brings Nisly joy and has since she was a teenager when baking was her hobby. She honed her baking skills at a young age, learning how to prepare sourdough from start to finish from her mother who handed down her sourdough starter to her.
With a nudge from mom, Nisly’s business, Sweet & Sourdough, launched in August 2024.
From nervous
beginnings to sold-out success
Fast-forward to a cold winter morning in Nisly’s home. The smell of freshly baked sourdough bread wafts through the air. Standing in her kitchen, a space large enough for two ovens and cooling racks, she picks up each finished loaf, tapping them on the bottom. She is listening for a hollow sound, indicating the sourdough is perfect.
She moves from task to task, a routine she’s perfected to produce bread for eager customers who have placed online orders. During May through October, Nisly’s customers can find her at the Reno County Farmers Market where she is known to sell out of her product.
Thinking back to her first market experience, she remembers feeling nervous as she set up her table with packaged sourdough, harvest rolls and scones.
“I was so nervous thinking, ‘I don’t know if anyone’s even going to buy anything’, but I was completely sold out within an hour or an hour and a half.”
Nisly moves easily between tasks in her home-based business, which complies with state guidelines that allows for baked goods like her sourdough bread, rolls and scones to be sold directly to consumers because they don’t require temperature control or specialized processing for safe consumption.
A labor of loaves balancing tradition and efficiency
Sweet & Sourdough is a one-woman operation. From fulfilling bread orders to preparing packaged baked goods for pick up from a Hutchinson location, Nisly prefers to work solo.
“I thought about a variety of bakery items I could make,” Nisly says. “I even considered something more along the lines of cookies or snacks, but this just seemed like the most straightforward approach. It’s a bit of a unique product. I don’t know many people who bake and sell sourdough.”
At the onset, she baked bread using Dutch ovens, adding a few at a time to a traditional range oven. After purchasing the Belgium-designed Rack Master RM24 oven, made for sourdough baking, production became more efficient. Still, the process is a time commitment.
On Sundays, she builds up the dough’s starter; on Tuesdays, she mixes loaves of bread, stretches and pulls the dough and shapes them into loaves to rise in plastic-covered baskets. On Wednesdays, she bakes six loaves at a time, typically baking up to two dozen loaves, a dozen harvest rolls and a batch of scones.
Fans of sourdough bread prefer it for several reasons and often seek it out because sourdough starter breaks down gluten, making it easier to digest. Supportive of shopping local, she sources Hudson Cream flour from Glen’s Bulk Food in Pleasantview for her recipes.
Loyal customers go the extra mile for Nisly’s sourdough
Nisly’s customers are so happy with the sourdough bread that one customer who purchased his first loaf at the Reno County Farmers Market drives from Oklahoma to buy it from her directly. Customers who don’t shop the market from May to October can purchase it from her online and then pick it up on Wednesdays from a designated Hutchinson location.
One Reno County Farmers Market customer from Ellsworth craved her sourdough so much that during the holidays, he ordered several loaves online.
“His support and his willingness to drive so far, and he bought quite a bit of bread as well, and knowing he had my bread before…that was definitely a really good moment,” Nisly says.
Another customer who drove from Oklahoma to purchase sourdough messaged Nisly after her boyfriend bought a loaf at the Shop Kansas Farms Market of Farms event in Caldwell so she could make even more purchases.
“She’s buying a bunch so she can just freeze it,” Nisly says.
Kneading a niche
Much like investing in new equipment for her business, Nisly knows she must continue to invest in herself. She wants to keep challenging herself and continue to give her customers the best product she can.
As an industry, bakers often rely on instinct to know when the bread is complete at each stage of the baking process, and she admits that while baking sourdough is a time commitment, she appreciates how her intuition has grown with experience.
Patience and a willingness to learn more and improve are the mental pushes she needs to avoid complacency. In fact, she gave a presentation about the process of making sourdough at an event hosted by Kansas Farm Bureau, which she admits gave her a taste for teaching it to others.
For now, Nisly wants to keep her business as a home bakery. While she isn’t opposed to new opportunities to grow her business in the future, she loves her status as a micro bakery.
“There is a part of me that thinks it might be fun to have a brick-and-mortar bakery, but at the end of the day, if I were to say what I want, it’s to stay as a micro bakery,” Nisly says. “I love working from home.”
Whether she grows her business capacity or not, she’s focused on continuing to provide her customers with high-quality sourdough from Sweet & Sourdough.
Customers can order her products online, including her most requested bread, Garlic Rosemary Sourdough. Menu offerings are updated weekly via her Facebook page.
https://kansaslivingmagazine.com/articles/2025/02/06/kansas-baker-alisha-nisly-turns-a-dream-into-a-thriving-micro-bakery
