If you’ve noticed queues forming outside what used to be the World’s End Comics book shop on Broadway in Kingston on Sundays, you may have wondered what all the fuss was about. Pastries. The fuss is, deservedly, about pastries.
The 200-square-foot spot at 588 Broadway is the new storefront for the Little Rye Bakehouse, where self-taught baker Catarina Cowden sells her still-hot sweet and savory danishes, morning buns, biscuits (served with seasonal jam), cookies, scones, and pies to a hungry public.
The project itself stretches back to the spring of 2021. After a decade in the service industry, Cowden got tired of working for other people and decided to strike out on her own. “I like being creative in the kitchen, coming up with my own stuff,” she says. “I knew I either had to figure out how to make that happen somewhere or else do it on my own.” When her friends, the owners of Tubby’s bar, finally opened back up post-lockdown, they decided to do so without an in-house food program (so long totchos!). Cowden needed a kitchen and they needed food for the revelers, and thus a kitchen share arrangement was born.
“We figured out a deal where I would provide food for Tubby’s while I rented the kitchen and started my own project,” she says. The project started under the name Rosie’s Bakehouse, after Cowden’s grandmother, who was the first to introduce her to the magic of pastry. In that first year, Cowden participated in Ellenville’s nascent Market on Market event. “From there, I started accumulating wholesale clients, plus doing more pop-ups, farmers’ markets, and events,” she says. It just continued to very slowly and organically grow. The first year I was totally by myself, working crazy hours. I started with a tiny amount of savings and just worked my ass off.”
This past season, Cowden was a fixture at the Kingston Waterfront Farmers’ Market and an occasional drop-in at the Uptown market. (This winter, she’s at the biweekly indoor market Uptown.) And she continues to bake out of Tubby’s kitchen. The Broadway storefront was a “careful-what-you-wish-for” moment. “I said, ‘If the comic book shop ever moves, I’ll move into the spot next to Tubby’s—then six months later they moved,” Cowden says. “So I hopped on that. All the landlord had to do was put a doorway in to connect the space with Tubby’s kitchen.”
With her partner, Dan Mazza, a Pakt veteran, Cowden designed the space and painted it, opening under the rebranded identity the first week of January. “It’s a really nice Sunday thing,” Cowden says. “People are making it part of their weekly routine. With the farmers’ market and my wholesale clients, it’s a perfect balance. I can still be in the kitchen being creative and doing my thing and be a part of my community as well.”
Those who have ordered the thick grandma-style Bakehouse pizza slices at Tubby’s know the menu is vegan and vegetarian, with options like seitan pepperoni and vegan cheese. For her pastries at the storefront and area markets, there are some vegan options, but it is after all a bakery. “I use a lot of butter,” Cowden says. “There are vegan options, but for my laminated pastries…impossible.
For rotating weekly hand pies, there is always a sweet and a savory option with a classic butter and plant butter variation of each. Like all her pastries, the hand pies are seasonal and locally sourced as much as possible. This past week’s special was koginut squash, baby kale, and caramelized onions, while the nine-inch quiche featured local golden oyster mushrooms, kale, and cheddar cheese (whole quiche $28, only available by pre-order). Cowden sources local veggies, fruit, mushrooms, and cheese through the Farms2Tables app and at area farms like Samascott Orchards. “In the season, I love to shop in Accord and Stone Ridge at the local farm stands,” she says. “It’s always more fun when you can pick up in person. You get more inspired.”
Cowden learned a love of baking from her Italian-American grandma, Rosie, who always had a lemon cake or wine biscuit lying around to eat. When she moved Upstate, she worked at Ella’s Bellas vegan bakery in Beacon, and later as the manager of the Mud Club in Woodstock, transitioning over time from front-of-house roles to back-of-house.
“The Mud Club is where I really taught myself a lot of the pastry work, because they had the tools necessary for me to learn,” Cowden says. “But it was still a lot of cookbooks and a lot of YouTube videos. Pie has always been a real passion of mine. My crust comes from many, many, many years of practice.”
Speaking of that famous pie, Little Rye Bakehouse’s signature flavor is the salted maple, a custard pie made with local syrup from Maple Leaf Sugaring and topped with flaky sea salt. Other recent specials have included a cara cara orange buttermilk custard flavor, a grapefruit cream pie, and a coffee chess pie made with Autonomous cold brew custard. Throughout the year, custard crumbles with seasonal fruit rotate through the menu.
Beyond being a cute name, the Little Rye Bakehouse’s new moniker is a nod to Cowden’s commitment to milling her own rye and wheat flour in-house using local grains, currently from Farmer Ground. “There is a little rye—or wheat—in all of our recipes,” Cowden says. “Whole grains make everything taste better, especially when they are fresh.”
Without the fancy equipment she learned on, Cowden is doing everything by hand. Current wholesalers include Accord Market, Darlings, Tivoli General, The Ridge Tea & Spice Shop, and Blackbird coffee shop. “I am doing the amount I can do in that kitchen—I have one oven and a very minimal amount of refrigeration, so I’m just kind of making it work,” Cowden says. “We’re growing and that is what is really amazing about it. ll I need to do is make enough to pay my bills. I know what food service is like and I wanted to create a more balanced way of living within it.”
If you want to stay in the loop/guarantee your goodies, sign up for the Pie Club to receive a once-weekly newsletter with upcoming pie specials that you can pre-order online.
As far as increasing hours, Cowden might consider adding Saturdays to the Bakehouse’s schedule in the future, but for now she is content to mix it up with markets and pop-ups. “I want people to be able to eat our food fresh,” Cowden says. “Baking the morning of means that whatever you made for the day needs to be sold, or there’s going to be waste or old product—neither of which I want. I’m trying to find a way to get our product to more people while keeping a small, open model. That way I can stay creative and inspired in the kitchen and put all my love and passion into the actual baking part, as I hope it comes through in our products.”
