Meet “The Bread Lady” Serving D.C. Sourdough Treats
Capitol Hill resident Jill Nguyen’s bread has become one of the district’s top culinary delights
When Jill Nguyen walks to the park, kids shout about her arrival. “It’s the bread lady!” they yell.
Anyone who appreciates sourdough bread that is crusty on the outside, yet tender on the inside would share their enthusiasm. Nguyen is the woman behind Capitol Jill Baking. Each week she bakes roughly 55 loaves of sourdough bread plus other treats — bombolini, cinnamon rolls and cardamom buns, to name a few — in her home kitchen and sells them to grateful neighbors. She donates the proceeds to D.C.-based charities, including Access Youth, Dreaming Out Loud, ONE DC and Voices for a Second Chance.
Her baked goods have become so popular, that they sell out just minutes after Nguyen sends out the weekly order form to her 1,800-person email list. The popular Twitter account @eat_DC compared scoring pastries from Capitol Jill to getting Kennedy Center Hamilton tickets in 2019.
“I had a moment of ‘Oh my gosh. This is blowing up,’ last summer,” Nguyen said. “It’s been a year now and it’s still wild.”
As the city was starting to shut down in March of 2020, Nguyen’s spouse suggested she consider baking bread to fill the time during quarantine. She’d always been a big cook — her mom started teaching her when she was 12, growing up in Vietnam — but bread was something new.
In April 2020, she made her second sourdough starter, named “Scarlett Doughansson,” after “killing” her first with cross-contamination. Seven months later, overwhelmed with the amount of bread she had, Nguyen posted in a Columbia Heights Facebook group offering her neighbors bread. The response was overwhelming; people could not get enough of her bread.
The following year, when she moved to Capitol Hill, she repeated the process and quickly became a beloved member of the community. Her fans report obsessively checking their email on Wednesday afternoons when the order form go out, hoping to catch it at the magic moment.
“We got our first loaf [last week] and it lived up to the hype,” said Hill East resident Sarah Cannon.
D.C.’s Cottage Food Law, which allows home cooks like Nguyen to sell their non-perishable wares at farmers markets, was passed in 2013. The Council then expanded the law in early 2020, lifting the limit on how much home chefs could earn and letting them sell from their homes instead of only at farmers markets. That summer, the law was amended again to allow for online orders. Multiple states have relaxed regulations to make it easier for home cooks to sell their treats since the start of 2021 in response to a pandemic surge in baking and jam making, according to Modern Farmer.
Nguyen wasn’t the only District resident to spread joy during the pandemic through sourdough. An anonymous Twitter user, @FermentDC, began delivering free, fresh sourdough by bike to neighbors.
On Sundays, D.C. residents from across the city line up at Nguyen’s Capitol Hill row home, often with their dogs and kids, to pick up their carby delights. Both people and their furry friends leave her house with a treat.
“The Hill actively fosters community and within that, you have the homiest and community-ist of all foods, bread. Jill really hopped herself in there,” Maria Helena Carey, a 16-year resident of Capitol Hill and writer for the neighborhood blog The Hill is Home.
Recently, Nguyen left her job in political technology to bake full time. One way her previous career prepared her to be a home baker: she’s a whiz with spreadsheets. She has spreadsheets to keep track of how many breads she needs to bake, who’s picking up what, when and to calculate the ingredients she needs each week.
This summer, she’s offering a four-week bread membership, the Carbs Collective. (Full disclosure: a friend and I are sharing a membership for July.) Between the Tuesday Carbs Collective pickup and the regular Sunday pickup, Nguyen spends six days a week preparing treats.
The process for a Tuesday pickup begins on Sunday when she calculates how many loaves she’s making and makes the proper amount of sourdough starter. Monday, she prepares the dough, using her two stand mixers and then stores it in an upright refrigerator in her basement. Finally, Tuesday is baking day. Nguyen can fit four loaves in her oven at a time and can bake six loaves in an hour — she excitedly notes she’s experimenting with a method to bake nine loaves simultaneously.
Experimentation is big for Nguyen, who is always seeking to develop new recipes. She scrolls Instagram for inspiration and wanders the grocery store for inspiration. There aren’t many bakers who make sweet sourdough offerings, so Nguyen often tweaks existing recipes.
“I have a notebook filled with notes on recipes,” she said. “Sometimes it takes three trials sometimes take one.”
It’s not just the recipe she’s researching. It’s the packaging. For special Mother’s Day bombolini, Nguyen tried three or four boxes before finding the right one.
Nguyen has thought about expanding her operations and moving into a commercial kitchen but, said, “There’s no real urgency. I like being at home, I like the flexibility and not having to pay rent.”
Whether she stays at home or expands, Nguyen’s customers are just looking forward to seeing what tasty concoctions she comes up with next.
“Jill is bread obsessed. When she’s not thinking about bread, she’s talking about bread and talking about recipes,” Carey said.
