Serenity Farm Bread's headquarters at 423 Main St. in Leslie
One of the premier food publications in the United States, Food & Wine Magazine, recently recognized Serenity Farm Bread in the small Searcy County town of Leslie for producing the best bread in Arkansas. It took only 30 years.
Perhaps that’s not surprising. After all, authentic sourdough bread, the kind baked by Serenity Farm, also takes time. And a wood-fired brick oven. And leaven that is — at least in Serenity Farm’s case — reportedly 200 to 300 years old and from Belgium.
The bakery was founded in 1992 by Dr. Morris Keller, a Dallas podiatrist with an interest in natural health.
David Lower bought the bakery from Keller in 1993, selling it to Adrienne Freeman and Jordan Archotie in 2018. Archotie left the business and Daniel Burlison bought into it in July, becoming co-owner with Freeman.
Freeman, a native of the Leslie area, had worked at Serenity Farm. “The entire name and integrity of the business was kind of him,” Freeman said of Lower, eager to give credit where it’s due.
Lower’s wife babysat for Freeman when she was a child and she would visit the bakery, getting “focaccias and Blue Sky soda, so I grew up with the bakery.” Freeman began working there at 18, but quit in 2006 to work in marketing and administration. She returned to the bakery part time in 2017, purchasing it the next year.
Burlison also is a longtime resident of the area and former employee of Serenity Farm.
What makes the bread special is the technique, Freeman said. When the bakery was started it was believed to be one of only three in the United States making bread in the same way.
That technique involves two main elements: how the bread is baked and its components.
Serenity Farm bakes its bread in a 30-year-old wood-fired brick oven using the oven’s retained heat. “We have no way to add heat to the oven during a bake,” Freeman said. “We have to fire the oven and keep a bake temperature in the oven at all times whether we’re baking or not.”
The bricks are brushed after a bake and the bread and other items are baked atop them. Focaccias, which require a hotter temperature, are baked first and then the products requiring less heat and so on, with cookies baked last. “We bake around a cooling oven all day,” she said. “It takes a lot of skill. You’re not setting dials.”
The second element of Serenity Farm Bread’s technique? “We do a true sourdough,” Freeman said. That means using a leaven — the ingredient that causes the bread to rise — a culture of bacteria kept alive and fed. “It does not contain any baker’s yeast,” she said.
“The leaven that we have actually came from Belgium about 200 or 300 years ago,” Freeman said. “And we’ve been feeding it and keeping it alive ever since then.” Serenity Farm’s rye leaven is from Slovakia.
“Sourdough is just flour, salt and water. That’s it,” she said. “If you’ve got any sweeteners or added yeast or oils, it’s not a true sourdough.”
Serenity Farm Bread’s most popular product is its country French bread, but it also sells whole wheat, walnut raisin, European-style rye, cranberry pecan, multigrain and spelt breads, along with focaccia and sourdough cookies and sweet breads.
The bakery is at 423 Main St., and a pastry shop is a quarter of a mile away at 805 U.S. Highway 65 South. In central Arkansas, Serenity Farm products can be found at Me & McGee Market in North Little Rock, and it sells to other specialty stores, including Ozark Natural Foods in Fayetteville, along with a few restaurants.
But Freeman said about half of the bakery’s revenue comes from shipping its goods throughout the lower 48 states. Serenity Farm has average annual revenue of about $500,000 and employs eight, she said.
Freeman said it’s too early to determine whether the Food & Wine mention has meant an increase in sales. What means something to Freeman, though, is the appreciation her customers have for what the bakery creates.
“A lot of our customer base is European,” she said. “We have a ton of people from Germany and Russia, Ukraine, those areas. They find us and they get teary-eyed: ‘I haven’t had bread like this since I left home.’”
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