Elizabeth Quezada — the owner of Matteli’s Handcrafted Sourdough — spends Fridays prepping her sourdough starter and Saturdays mixing dough with organic, Illinois-grown flour. She then wakes early on Sunday mornings to bake bread before selling it fresh at the Oswego Country Market. To Quezada, this baking routine is a labor of love.
“I’m trying to support our farmers and, in turn, feed our community healthy bread,” says Quezada, who grew up in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood.
Quezada has run Matteli’s Handcrafted Sourdough in Joliet, IL since 2022. As a registered cottage baker, she converted the first floor of her home into an at-home micro bakery. She sells a variety of breads and baked goods online and at pop-up markets each week, with locations updated regularly on Facebook. Her products are also regularly available at two shops in Channahon, IL: Local Wildflowers and Mac’s Country Market.
Operating her own small business is a journey that began two years ago when she was deciding how to spend her days as a full-time grandma in Joliet, IL. She’d always loved baking but wanted a healthy option due to her diabetes. She found sourdough’s organic grains, and the fermentation process didn’t spike her blood sugar like other breads. She now strives to make products accessible to a wide range of diets.
“What I enjoy the most is seeing the people come back again and again,” Quezada says. “And hearing stories from people that ‘I couldn’t eat bread, but I can eat your bread’ or ‘I have celiac disease, but I can eat your bread’ or ‘my son can’t have processed flour, but he can eat your bread.'”
Local ingredients and partnerships are central to her business model. She sources garlic from one nearby farm and herbs from another. She recently partnered with the Conservation Foundation’s Green Earth Harvest program in Naperville, IL, to sell bread to their farm shareholders.
She’d love to open her own coffee and sandwich shop in the future “to be able to expand and serve more people,” she says.
Cover Photo: Dill & Havarti Sourdough, courtesy: Matteli’s Creations (Facebook)
Zella Milfred is a fourth-year undergraduate student studying journalism and environmental policy at Northwestern University. Previously she has served as an editorial intern at Madison Magazine in Madison, WI. Twitter: @ZMilfred
Publisher’s Notes: This story, among others, was produced by undergraduate students in the bilingual reporting class at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media & Integrated Marketing Communications. Led by Prof. Mei-Ling Hopgood, the class aims to help journalism students practice sensitive and ethical engagement and reporting with multicultural communities in Spanish and English. Students visited the Illinois Chamber of Commerce Business Expo at Navy Pier this fall and interviewed local business owners.