Chicago Home Bakers Turn Sourdough Passion Into Thriving Cottage Businesses

When Daniel Koester was laid off from his head baker job, he did what a certain strain of Chicagoan apparently does: he fired up his starter and opened an Instagram account. First operating as Dan the Baker and later rebranding as Bad Butter, Koester spent three years selling preorder loaves out of a spare kitchen at the Emily Hotel, building a following on flavors that pushed well past the classic boule. His sourdough loaves ranged from blue masa corn and oat to benne seed and beer, with focaccia variations including black garlic and Parmesan and loaded baked potato. This month, Koester is fulfilling his dream of opening his own bakery when Bad Butter opens at 1655 W. Cortland St. in Bucktown, formerly Mable's Table, offering coffee drinks and eventually sandwiches on his homemade bread.

His trajectory from Instagram feed to brick-and-mortar is the clearest illustration yet of how Chicago's pandemic-era sourdough wave never really crested. The passage of Illinois' 2022 Home-to-Market Act allowed home bakers to register as cottage food operations, taking their creations out of home kitchens and directly to customers. That legal shift quietly unlocked a path for a generation of bakers who had been feeding their starters in relative obscurity.

One of those bakers was Mirela Hukic, for whom baking has always been a form of therapy. It began when her family came to the United States as refugees in the 1990s during the Balkans War. Hukic baked bread alongside her mother and even briefly ran a small bread-baking business as a tween. That was a distant memory when she became a mother and built a career in finance, until she was laid off a year and a half ago. That same day, she told her husband she was going to make sourdough, the family's favorite bread.

Divs Ray's path into professional baking cut through similarly unexpected terrain. Ray moved to Chicago in 2015 to pursue a graduate degree in Public Policy at the University of Chicago, and between stints in finance, gradually uncovered what truly brought her joy: cooking and baking. Her Instagram operation, Umami from Scratch, brings "flavors from the spice routes" spanning Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean to breads, pastries, and cakes. The business earned a Chicago Reader Best Popup award in 2025 and now operates out of Streeterville on a preorder model. Ray describes bread-making as her ideal form of meditation.

What these operations share is the Instagram infrastructure that made cottage food viable long before the legal framework caught up. While some people who got into sourdough during the pandemic have long abandoned their projects, others have continued to feed their starters, using sourdough as a vehicle for flavor experimentation and self-expression. Koester's Bucktown opening is the latest proof that for some of those bakers, the experiment was always going to outgrow the kitchen.