It’s a story as outdated as Covid-19. When Corrie Strandjord and her husband, Eric Anderson, discovered themselves caught of their Central District residence throughout lockdown, they spent it making sourdough, identical to you.
“I had been a schoolteacher for 10 years,” Strandjord says, “after which I began a private chef enterprise within the fall of 2019, already with a love for sourdough bread—and pizza as an extension of that.” She had been making pizzas privately for a shopper earlier than the pandemic, and Anderson, who was working in operations for a neighborhood ice creamery on the time, had some robust opinions about them.
“He thought we should always promote this frozen pizza product. He tried it and was like, ‘That is so good! We may scale it.’ And I used to be like, ‘Nicely, that’s a pleasant dream for another time. However I can’t get my head round that proper now.’”
However then Anderson was laid off on the prime of the pandemic, and their pizza goals drifted again into view.
The couple opened up as Good Luck Bread in November 2020, initially working out of the kitchen at Dino’s Tomato Pie on Capitol Hill, with Strandjord because the pizza chef and Anderson on operations. On the time, Dino’s wasn’t open for dine-in, and its takeout program closed round 8pm, so proprietor Brandon Pettit invited the pair to make use of the kitchen at evening to make pizzas. “We’re buddies with Brandon,” Strandjord says, “and he’s sort of incubated quite a lot of companies this fashion. He’s only a very beneficiant particular person.”
They used Dino’s as a protected area to slowly experiment with several types of sourdough pies earlier than flash-freezing them. This fortunate begin, mixed with some notes from Mt. Bagel proprietor Roan Hartzog, propelled Good Luck Bread into a fast stride, using a subscription mannequin just like Mt. Bagel’s. A loyal base of supply clients adopted.
At present, Good Luck Bread operates with a small employees out of a commissary kitchen in SoDo. Initially strictly supply, the group now opens up its area on Saturdays for pickups, when Strandjord bakes contemporary bread for purchasers. Cookies, beer, and wine are additionally on provide. She provides that they’re looking out for his or her subsequent kitchen, as soon as their lease is up, and so they hope to do extra in-person retail with the brand new area, like serving scorching pizza alongside the frozen type.
“Really, this summer season, we’re doing a little scorching pizza popups round city,” Strandjord says. She refers to a current popup at Darkalino’s in Pioneer Sq., the place the featured flavors included a traditional pepperoni “after which what we’re calling Grownup Cheese, which has a spicy sauce created from Calabrian chile. We use Grande mozzarella, from Wisconsin, which we pile up, and it will get the very nice crispy cheese curtains, the frico.”
Different featured flavors have included a pepperoni-and-mushroom pie, in addition to Millennial Pink, with contemporary ricotta and fried shallots on a vodka sauce base. “After which one other one we’re calling Tiny Meatball that has little meatballs,” Strandjord says with fun. “We’ve a cat named Tiny Meatball, so it’s our homage to our little meatball.”
With regards to how she and Anderson selected their enterprise title, Strandjord says, “You recognize, it is sort of an outdated title We’ve all the time been schemers, and years in the past we had a foolish concept for a bar that we known as Good Luck, the place we have been pondering it could have a merchandising machine the place it’s all home beer however then there’s some, like, very nice beer, and it’s all a greenback. So you may get fortunate.”
They grabbed the title for his or her pizza biz from that concept, she says, to not seek advice from the marvelous ease with which the pizza enterprise got here to them. “Possibly we’re charmed, although, now that I give it some thought.”
