Croton has a new bakery, The Hudson Oven. The name may be familiar because for the past seven years, baker Chase Harnett has been making sourdough loaves and distributing them in a distinctive and memorable fashion. His sourdough scavenger hunt invited would-be customers to nab one of 60 loaves from a cupboard that Chase placed in different locations every Sunday morning. He didn’t even plan where he’d put the bread, just selected a spot in the lower Hudson Valley, preferably with a good view and posted it on Instagram and in his newsletter. On a national television spot, the camera caught a happy bicyclist clutching a coveted loaf. This was the first time he had found the self-service “shop” when it was still stocked.
Now Harnett’s fans know exactly where to get bread: 385 S. Riverside Avenue in Croton, Saturdays and Sundays, 9am to 4pm. However, even with the mystery taken out of it, securing a loaf remains tricky. Opening day for the Hudson Oven’s brick and mortar was October 15, and they sold out of bread long before customers stopped coming. The salads, soups, and stews, made by Madison, Harnett’s life and business partner, are very popular too.
“We wanted to make a place that had what we wanted,” Harnett says, somewhere with good bread, coffee, and prepared food you could take home for a relaxing weekend. The couple are high school sweethearts from the area, and recently married. Neither of them has formal culinary training, but both developed a deep affection for food during their college years.
Madison studied psychology at Manhattan College, and Chase started out studying business at Pace in lower Manhattan. During a semester in France, he fell in love with food, and when he returned home, he tried to recreate the bread he missed. When his father saw his efforts falling flat, he found a baker in Nyack, New York to help guide him.
Harnett’s mentor Tom Daly was baking bread in his garage with Farmer Ground Flour, which is stoneground and freshly milled from organic grains grown in Ithaca. He used natural leavening and baked his country loaves in a portable woodfired oven.
When Tom decided to return to his career in tech, he offered to sell Harnett his oven. This became the tool that fueled him to continue to improving his bread. He gave away learning loaves to friends and family, and once his bread was good enough to sell, he set up a table in his front yard, inviting folks to pay what they wanted. Pretty soon, the drive-by bakery transformed into the scavenger hunt.
All the while, Harnett was still in college and diving deeper into food. He switched majors and campuses because environmental studies are stronger at Pace Westchester. A summer internship at Stone Barns had him studying trees and plants in a seven-acre forest. “We threw a hula hoop and wherever that landed is where we would identify the species of ground cover,” he said. The point was to get an understanding of a Northeast forest pre-grazing and to be able to track the impacts of grazing animals on the plants. He also volunteered three days a week in the gardens, and eventually got a job working in the greenhouses, which are intensively farmed, providing produce for Blue Hill.
The itinerant bread cupboard didn’t suit the realities of the pandemic, so instead, Harnett and some friends started a business building raised-bed gardens in people’s yards and got them growing their own vegetables, an enterprise he really enjoyed and wishes he could continue.
However, there’s only so many hours in the day. With the new storefront, he and Madison spend theirs prepping food: making packaged dough mixes; soups, stews and salads, and of course, the multi-day steps of bread. Hudson Oven's popular "flour bricks" are pre-packaged dough mixes for homemade sourdough bread, pizza, and cookies, ranging from $8 to $12, and available for purchase online and in-store. They are expanding refrigeration capacity—keeping the dough cool to slow down fermentation is a key part of the process—to be able to keep up with demand. And don't worry, the famous cupboard? It graces the front porch of the new bakery.
That first day, two shoppers with strong links to baking showed up. Father and son Carl and Thor Oechsner were excited to meet the couple; Thor grew up in Croton and started Farmer Ground Flour, the flour mill that The Hudson Oven exclusively uses. Hi father, Carl, still lives in Croton and grew up in Ossining, where his German immigrant father ran Ascherman's Bakery. The fact that this bakery is taking root here, using flour made by a Croton native, and echoing the family’s baking heritage, moved all four people—baker, soup maker, farmer, and father.
You’ll find this place special even without such ties. Call ahead to reserve a loaf or have one delivered to a handful of participating partner bakeries in Westchester.
