Green Gal's Bakery
Thank you for all of your support, Reno! Green Gal’s Bakery is currently taking a break.
I recommend visiting the Riverside Farmers Market website for updates about other local organic sourdough bakers!
100% Organic • Vegan • Handcrafted • Wild Fermented
Green Gal’s Bakery offers organic, handcrafted sourdough bread and other baked goods to the Reno community. Green Gal’s overarching mission is to support initiatives connecting people to place, nature, community, and self. Our bakery serves this mission by supporting a local, regenerative, accessible, and resilient food economy.
Our signature offering is “Reno Sourdough,” an organic, vegan, hand-shaped sourdough loaf. We often mix in herbs, spices, and seasonal ingredients like tomatoes, but the essential ingredients are simple: flour, water, salt, and olive oil, with a little bit of cornmeal along the bottom crust.
The magic ingredient that makes it true sourdough, of course, is the wild yeast that bring the flour and water to life.
Green Gal’s Bakery is a cottage food operation based out of our home kitchen in Reno, Nevada.
Green Gal’s Bakery is taking a break, but we encourage you to visit the Riverside Farmers Market to support local farmers, bakers, artisans, and other vendors!
Learn more on the Riverside Farmers Market website and Facebook page.
All of our ingredients are organic and consciously sourced, with a goal of using the most local and regenerative ingredients available. We purchase our ingredients through the Great Basin Foods Coop, a consumer-owned cooperative based in Reno. We are continually seeking more information about the ingredients we use, and as we discover more, we will update this list:
Flour
Giusto’s Organic Ultimate Performer Unbleached Flour
Giusto’s Organic Baker’s Choice Unbleached Flour
Giusto’s is based in South San Francisco, CA (270 miles from Reno). At this time, we do not have information about where they source their wheat from, but we will try to find out!
Water
We use tap water that flows into our kitchen thanks to the Truckee Meadows Water Authority. Their website explains, “Most of our drinking water comes from the Truckee River, which originates at Lake Tahoe and is fed by snow melt and rain throughout the Tahoe and Truckee River basins in the Sierra Nevada. The remainder comes from more than 90 wells drilled in deep-water aquifers located within TMWA’s service area. TMWA also has a small number of satellite water systems that are fed exclusively by ground water.”
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Organic Roots Arbequina Certified Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Organic Roots is small family-owned and operated farm that was established in 1983 in Colusa and Glenn County in the Sacramento Valley of California. They grow, harvest, and mill their own olives into extra virgin olive oil. They’re about 165 miles from Reno, but this is way more local than most organic olive oil you can find in stores, which is often from Europe.
Salt
This salt is mined from an ancient dead sea in Redmond, Utah (545 miles from Reno). Their operations are almost entirely solar-powered, too. Learn more on the Real Salt website.
Herbs
Frontier Co-Op Organic Sweet Basil Leaf
Frontier Co-Op Organic Rosemary Leaf
Frontier Co-Op is based in Norway, Iowa (1700 miles from Reno). This is the herb company that the Great Basin Foods Co-op sources from, and they are also a member-owned cooperative. At this time, we do not have information about where they source their herbs from (likely even farther away), but we will try to find out!
We hope to also start growing our own herbs and/or sourcing from local growers to really bring our herbs sourcing closer to home. If you have recommendations of farms in the Reno area who sell herbs (fresh or dried), please email us.
Cornmeal
Giusto’s Organic Gourmet Cornmeal Polenta
Giusto’s is based in South San Francisco, CA (270 miles from Reno). At this time, we do not have information about where they source their corn from, but we will try to find out!
Tomatoes
The tomatoes we use in our tomato basil sourdough loaf come from Prema Farm, located 20 minutes north of downtown Reno.
In addition to offering our baked goods, we also share food for thought. We strive to not only participate in a regenerative economy, but inspire conversations about how a local food economy can benefit all people in a community.
We are inspired by 10 principles of “Next Economy” enterprises that have been identified and shared by LIFT Economy. We hold these principles as goals to work toward, and we hope to share and invite conversation about them at the farmers market and online.
1. Need-oriented, basic goods and services
2. Diverse and Inclusive ownership
3. Equitable/democratic culture
4. Support of local economy ecosystem
5. Education embedded into the good or service
6. Open source
7. Transparent
8. Zero waste and climate beneficial (regenerative)
9. Scale by regional replication
10. Supports personal growth and development
We are also experimenting with strategies to make our offerings more financially accessible, recognizing that real, organic, and fairly produced food is often more expensive. We hope to implement these experiments at the market soon.
Why is sustainable and equitably produced food more expensive?
Producers of cheap food hide true costs by taking shortcuts that allow them to charge less because they are in some way exploiting people and/or the environment. These shortcuts include unfair wages and labor practices for employees; growing food big and fast with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that harm humans and ecosystems; benefiting from government subsidies for GMO, monocrop, conventionally grown crops like corn and wheat, etc.
By sourcing consciously and from our local region as much as possible, our products more accurately reflect the true cost of good food: living wages for farmworkers and employees, farming practices that regenerate soil health and keep seeds unpatented and regionally resilient, and supporting a local food economy that is regionally resilient.
There’s a lot to unpack with this issue, which we refer to as the Price Parity Paradox (PPP). Thanks again to LIFT Economy for introducing us to this term.
Low Waste and Mostly Plastic Free
We strive to be zero waste by purchasing in bulk, using compostable packaging for our products, composting when needed, never throwing away excess sourdough starter, and continually learning.
We also minimize contact with plastic materials. Some of our ingredients come in plastic containers, although we are seeking alternatives. Most of our ingredients come in paper bags or glass bottles. Our baked goods packaging is biodegradable paper, and we mix and ferment all of our dough in glass containers.
Proud to Support Local Businesses and Cooperatives
- Member-Owners, Great Basin Foods Coop
(Membership is $20/year and there’s many benefits that you can read about here.) - Members, Greater Nevada Credit Union
(Did you know credit unions are member-owned cooperative banks?)