Meet Tania Salas and Danny Greenberg

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tania Salas and Danny Greenberg. Them and their team share their story with us below:

At the beginning of lockdown, in spring 2020, in their first year of marriage, Danny was let go from the company that relocated him and Tania to Nashville five years ago. In the first wave of the pandemic, with no employment opportunities, Danny taught himself to make Sourdough (as there was no yeast to be found) and delivered loaves to neighbors in lockdown. When the news of San Francisco style Sourdough spread through the community, the demand grew, so a 30+ years old commercial oven was acquired on eBay and Flour Your Dreams Bakery was born. Our garage was emptied of the car, sealed, painted, and converted into our bakery. Instead of a honeymoon (to at that point in 2020 a completely locked down Italy) we baked European-style bread.

We introduced French Bâtards next and subsequently launched a Bread Club. For a once a month fee, you would receive four loaves (one a week) delivered contact-free to your doorstep.

A couple of weeks later, we became vendors at Hip Donelson Farmer’s market, our neighborhood supported us (rain or shine) in a way we couldn’t have imagined. It became apparent that there was a void in the community, a need for a (bread-centric) bakery. In our part of the country, this pandemic brought customers and local makers closer, we feel their joy of knowing their baker: because who makes your food and what the ingredients are matter.

Now a year later, we’re out of the garage, renting a commercial kitchen in Donelson, our products are in two local grocery stores, Hendersonville Produce and GreenDoor Gourmet, for the summer season we’re at two Farmer’s markets, Hip Donelson and Amqui Station, we are vendors on Market Wagon, an online farmers market that delivers to several counties around Nashville. We supply breakfast pastries each morning to the guests of the hotel where our kitchen is situated, and we wholesale to local coffee shops, including Pumphrey and Beard in Dickson. Our goal for the following year is to have our own Brick and Mortar: Flour Your Dreams Bakery and Café.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
The first struggle, probably the simplest to solve, but definitely the first leap of faith into this new venture was purchasing our commercial oven. After only being able to do two loaves at a time in our domestic oven, we ran the numbers knew we had to purchase a commercial oven to be able to make enough bread a day to pay our mortgage. We found a used Vulcan for about a thousand dollars, as a reminder the breadwinner of the household, Danny, was recently laid off, but we figured we’re either doing this or not, and not isn’t an option. We shipped it from Ohio, bread bribed one neighbor to lend a truck and the other a trailer, and with some more neighbors to lift, we got it into our recently converted garage and set up shop. The biggest struggle is time. Bakeries are not a one person job, Danny was working long hours every day as I, Tania was still employed (thankfully from home) but could only assist him before 7 AM, after 4 PM, and lunchtime. I gave myself the role of Chief Marketing Officer and took care of product photography and growing our social media, work that could be done at night once the baking was done for the day, but that still left baking 100% to one person.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
We specialize in handcrafted bread. Our Sourdough takes days to make, the only ingredients are Flour, Water, and Salt; our French loaves also have a preferment, an added step that increases the flavor, and the only other ingredient in those is yeast, because contrary to bread produced loaves for large grocery stores, French loaves don’t need other ingredients, and our customers with diabetes were thrilled to know there was no added sugar in either of these options. Customers compliment these, comparing them with loaves they’ve enjoyed in Europe, I attribute this to the added preferment step, time is an ingredient in baking, overlooked when mass producing loaves.

We are also known for our scones, these took on a cult following of their own. What was a breakfast pastry we imagined might do well at the markets are now an item we bake the most, some days we make almost 200 before noon.

What matters most to you? Why?
Ingredients are vital to us and our customers. We only use non gmo, unbromated, unbleached flour in all our products; and our chocolate, whether for cookies or Tortes, is of the highest quality. We do not use preservatives, artificial flavoring and colorings, there are bakeries that produce eye-catching colorful sweet confections, and on the other end of the spectrum there’s vegan and gluten-free bakeries, our particular niche in our community is that We Are The Bread People: European inspired and traditionally bread focused. There’s no other bread-centric bakery in Donelson, our part of Nashville.

Contact Info:

• Email: flouryourdreams@gmail.com
• Website: https://www.flouryourdreamsbakery.com/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/flour_your_dreams_bakery?utm_medium=copy_link
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/flouryourdreamsbakery

Image Credits
All photos except for the Wedding one are by: Rebecca Denton Photography Wedding shot (on film) by Chelsea Rochelle Photography