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The Shed, your scratch kitchen for brunch and dinner daily at 21 Main St. in West Sayville.
The Bread Shed is proving to be no half-baked idea.
Since opening March 1, the weekends-only bakery has become a West Sayville sensation, with crowds lining up outside the small Main Street shop for a shot at Meggin Hall’s homemade sourdough creations — which are sold from 11 a.m. until everything is gone.
During The Bread Shed’s first two weeks, that took 90 minutes. This past weekend, the Saturday supply of 126 loaves, including Irish soda bread, sold out in all of 40 minutes.
“The line was down the block and I looked at my husband and I went, ‘Can you believe this is happening right now?’” said Hall, a second-grade teacher during the other days of the week. “We were hysterical laughing, ‘Can you believe this is happening, what did we do?’”
A self-taught baker and mother of two, Hall said she began experimenting with baking sourdough bread in 2022 “just by watching videos and going on YouTube and whatever.”
How it happened
Hall, 48, said she was drawn to sourdough not by the pandemic-era baking craze — “Everyone was doing this during 2020, but I really had no idea” — but by health reasons.
The mother of two explained that she learned about sourdough while reading author Dan Buettner’s books about “blue zones” around the world where people live extraordinarily long lives.
Among the revelations: that sourdough bread from Ikaria, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, has health benefits. Yes, bread.
“I was reading about how good it is for you and how good it is for your microbiome and your gut,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Wow, I want to start to make it.’”
After Hall’s first attempt at making a starter “completely failed” in 2022, she said she tried again a few months later and hit on a winner.
She began baking for her family, her mother and friends at the school where she works. Neighbors began lining up for loaves.
“My friend at work, I’d make her sourdough bread and she’d make me meatballs,” Hall recalled. “She said, ‘This bread is so good, you should sell it.’
“And I thought, ‘That’s crazy, who would buy my bread?’”
A family affair
Now, she doesn’t have to wonder anymore.
In January, Hall and her husband, John, discovered a vacant 650-square-foot storefront in West Sayville and later signed a one-year lease for South Shore Sourdough’s space at 106 Main St.
The sourdough breads, chocolate-chip cookies and muffins are baked inside the couple’s Oakdale home, where a bread oven was installed last month. Then, all the baked goods are packaged and driven to the nearby storefront.
“We got people lining up at 10:40,” she said. “We open at 11.”
John Hall, 48, is involved in shopping for supplies and serving, his wife said, as “the lifter of the flour.”
“He runs the register and the Facebook,” she said. “I do the Instagram.”
Their 17-year-old son, a high school senior, worked at the shop this past weekend, while their 20-year-old daughter is in college.
Ever the teacher, Hall, 48, said the family’s new business is providing lessons for the kids.
“It’s a great thing to show them that you can follow your dreams, whether you intended them to be your dreams or not,” she said. “Just take a risk and do something different.”
Hall conceded that the one-time side hustle has become a lot more than that, but said she does not allow it to enter her mind while she’s at school. That changes almost as soon as school ends.
“I get home, I turn the bread oven on,” she said Monday, on St. Patrick’s Day. “I was mixing dough last night, I was rolling dough this morning before work. Now I’m going to go bake the bread while I’m making the corned-beef dinner.”
Hall said she has “zero intention” of leaving teaching behind, though she and her husband, who is a middle-school teacher, are considering opening the store on Fridays during the summer, given the early demand.
“No, no, no, not in my wildest dreams did I think this would ever happen,” she said. “We’re bringing bread to people and it makes them happy.
“And I love making people happy with food.”
The Bread Shed, at 106 Main Street in West Sayville, is open Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. until supplies are sold out. All photos come courtesy of Bread Shed ownership.
