“I think my love language is cooking and baking for people”, says Megan Katya Lowe who has enjoyed making food for others since she was a child. Growing up in a large family in Luxembourg, she often took it upon herself to make sure that no one went without. “Any time someone was hungry or they didn’t have dinner, I just went over there and cooked”, she says. Now twenty-three years old, she has found a way to make her passion a profession.
Six months ago, Lowe and her boyfriend made the bold decision to uproot themselves from Luxembourg and settle on the outskirts of Tuam. At home, she dreamed of setting up her own bakery but found it difficult to compete with the existing corporate bakeries. As a result, she desired to move somewhere more accommodating to small business owners. “We moved here because I wanted to get into bread-making, into sourdough, into trying to open a business here. There’s no chance of doing that in Luxembourg – it’s not for the little person”, she says.
After months of groundwork, Lowe’s dream has become a reality with the launch of her business “May’s Place of Sourdough”. Working out of her home in a fully-equipped kitchen, she is taking orders from local cafés, restaurants and bars and delivering the bread herself. She chose to base herself in Tuam because she found it difficult to promote herself in the city. She says “in Galway city, it’s very hard to get the word out and find people. The established bakeries have got a huge head start”.
Conversely, the people of Tuam were immediately enthusiastic and encouraging towards her. “I posted it on our local Tuam Facebook page and the amount of people that commented and asked for some bread, shared my post; there was so much support just for someone trying to sell something that they love”, she says.
Already, she is enjoying high-demand and she attributes this partially to the scarcity of sourdough bakers. Upon arriving in Galway, she took a job in a bakery in the city and this helped her to get the word out about her sourdough baking. She says “when I was looking for a job, I said ‘I’m a baker and I make my own sourdough’ and they were immediately asking me, ‘do you produce your own sourdough’, ‘can you make big amounts’, ‘can we buy it from you’”. Immediately, she realised that she was tapping into a niche yet very lucrative market.
Lowe calls sourdough bread the “mother of yeast” due to its notoriously difficult nature. Unlike other types of bread, it is very much dependent on temperature, humidity, the cooling process and the type of flour used. “It’s not like a bread recipe where you can just go on the internet and find a recipe and follow it”, she says. However, this has never deterred Lowe who has always strived to “do the hardest thing” when it comes to baking.
As soon as she learned about sourdough’s baking process, she was determined to master it and “be the best at it”. Of course, her journey to becoming an expert sourdough-baker was not without its challenges. As she honed her skills, “there were a lot of failures and a lot of breakdowns” but this only served to drive her on. “It motivated me and I hated that I kept on failing”, she says.
As the orders come rolling in, Lowe is focused on the future but concerns about electricity costs cause her to question the long-term sustainability of working from home. “It’s all very electricity based”, she says of the baking process, “because sourdough bread needs such a long fermentation time. I need the ovens on for a long time to create such a high amount of heat”. However, she is conscious of keeping costs low and this is one of the reasons she is adamant about staying at home for now. She says that she is “planning to stay around Tuam so I don’t waste money on fuel”.
Business aside, Lowe bakes because of the joy it brings and the easing effect is has on worldly anxieties. “I had really bad mental health issues in Luxembourg and I didn’t plan baking to help me with it but it’s just so time-consuming and distracting so it’s helpful”, she says. Whether it continues to be her living or not, Lowe acknowledges how beneficial baking has been to her sense of worth and how it will continue to fuel her. She says that prior to her baking journey, she “had lots of insecurities about lots of things and its brought my confidence up to a whole new level. I think that’s why I’m so much passionate about it – it’s not just there to make money or to feed you, it’s really good for mental health”.
