By Christine Hill
Heirloom Bakery & Hearth began with an age-old love of baking and a desire to create a cozy neighborhood bakery with great locally sourced food and drink. After renovating an East Brookside gas station, owners Scott and Kate Meinke opened Heirloom in May. The bakery features a wide variety of items ranging from handmade breads, build-your-own-biscuit breakfast sandwiches, the highly popular homemade pop tarts, pastries and pies, soups and salads and much more.
“We want it to be a neighborhood hangout spot, somewhere where people can come together with really good food, conversation, coffee and everything we have to offer,” said Scott about their vision for Heirloom.
“We want people to feel at home,” said Kate.
The husband and wife baking duo succeeded in bringing that vision to life with Heirloom’s comfortable, rustic ambiance with indoor and outdoor seating and local home grown taste. The Meinke’s had the former gas station completely revamped with repurposed oak wood, and they created an edible garden with the help of Cultivate Kansas City.
“We’ve done a lot of planting outside to show edible landscape,” said Scott. “We have an herb garden, blackberries, raspberries. We use the kale and herbs a lot; we also harvest fennel, mint and rosemary. In that sense, we repurposed the land instead of just having all sod or all bushes, we have a lot that we actually use here.”
For their ingredients, the Meinke’s believe in sourcing locally as much as possible, and proudly display their list of local sources in shop and online. Gibbs Road Farm, Prairie Birthday Farm, Heartland Mill and Green Dirt Farm are a few of the many local farms where Heirloom Bakery sources ingredients.
“We’re in America’s heartland, there’s no reason why we wouldn’t use wheat from Kansas, and use eggs from farmers that are less than 100 miles away,” said Scott.
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