From a side gig to a brick-and-mortar, BlueRabbit Bakehouse draws fans with its breads and spreads

It’s Saturday morning and a line stretches out the door of a storefront in a well-worn Jefferson Highway strip mall. BlueRabbit Bakehouse’s homemade sourdough, rumored to be some of the best in town, is the draw.

Many in the queue hope to secure a Mary Kate, the cottage bakery’s top-selling rustic whole wheat bread. Others want The Grainwright’s Table, a loaf made from heritage red fife wheat flour. There are English muffins, sandwich breads and loaves studded with varying combinations of nuts, seeds, cheeses, cured meats and chocolate. A rotating selection of pimento cheese spreads, hummus and almond butters is on offer, too, perfect for slathering on sturdy, toothsome slices.

All the breads are sourdough, and most are made with flour that founder and sole baker Matt Bolton mills himself.

Bolton is part of a growing wave of regional cottage bakers selling small-batch breads to enthusiastic local fans. The pandemic inspired many of them to catapult hobbies into side hustles, but for Bolton, the motivation to start a bread business came from a life-changing event.

In 2022, he experienced three back-to-back heart attacks in a matter of hours, resulting in open heart surgery and a lengthy recovery. The event forced an epiphany. Bolton had spent decades in the stress-inducing world of running his own industrial construction company and quickly concluded it was time to walk away.

“I said, ‘That’s it. I’ve had enough,’” he recalls.

But at 59, Bolton still needed something challenging in his life. He turned to sourdough making, something he’d dabbled in for several years but hadn’t yet mastered. Bolton dove in, attempting to outmaneuver the bread’s finicky requirements by baking practice loaf after practice loaf.

His drive stemmed from a lifelong interest in food.

“Like most south Louisiana guys, I’ve cooked all my life,” he says. “All my siblings, my parents and grandparents were fantastic cooks.”

Growing up in Old Goodwood, suppertime saw the family of seven around the table sharing stories about the day. The phone was taken off the hook and the door locked, Bolton says. A couple of times a week, his father would bring home a fresh, warm French or Italian loaf from now-closed Baum’s Bakery on Florida Boulevard to serve with dinner. The bakery stopped selling hot loaves when Bolton was in his teens, he says.

“I’ve been mad about it ever since,” he says, pointing out a profusion of doughnuts and cookies that seem to dominate local bakery counters today.

Lamenting the lack of fresh bread inspired him to play around with baking it as an adult. He was already baking when the pandemic hit, but the nationwide yeast shortage brought by the shutdown sparked Bolton’s foray into sourdough.

“Sourdough is such a challenge because everything affects it—ambient temperature, flour temperature, time of the year, humidity,” he says. “You don’t realize how it’s going to turn out until you open the oven door for the big reveal.”

After retiring, Bolton baked routinely, keeping meticulous notes and dabbling with flours. Practice made perfect. His friends—who acted as guinea pigs—convinced him it was time to sell his breads. He converted his boat garage into a commercial kitchen outfitted with mixers, a bread oven, a large worktable and open shelves for ingredients and equipment, including a grain mill to process small batches of ancient grains ordered from farmers in the Midwest.

By January 2023, BlueRabbit Bakehouse was officially born. Bolton began selling bread at The Artists Loft Market on Antioch Road and V. Watts Trade Mart in Livingston Parish, both of which helped build a loyal following.

In February, he opened his own 500-square-foot space on Jefferson Highway and brought in fellow small business owners Next Chapter Coffee Company and Crumb and Get It.

Regulars come from around the region for BlueRabbit’s artisan breads, some of which have earned the Ochsner Eat Fit label for their nutritional heft. Bolton currently sells about 200 loaves every Saturday and plans to increase his capacity and menu with a forthcoming second bread oven and a larger mill.

The popularity of the bakery turned a former side gig into a full-time, one-man show that has Bolton milling, baking, bagging, labeling and selling the finished product.

“I love doing it,” he says. “For the first time, really, in 40 years, I’m doing something that I enjoy.”

BlueRabbit Bakehouse is open on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 17301 Jefferson Hwy.