Heather Jensen has been baking sourdough for over ten years. Long before lockdowns made it a national hobby, she was pulling boules out of a home oven in Rexburg and giving them away to neighbors. The standing joke at the Jensens’ house was that no one ever showed up empty-handed and no one ever left hungry.
Greg, her husband, had been telling her for years she should open a bakery. Heather, who is the actual baker in this family, kept saying she didn’t need to. The kitchen was working fine.
Then 2020 happened. The country discovered sourdough. Heather’s bread, which had always been good, started to feel like something other people needed too. The Jensens started quietly looking for retail space.
Rexburg is hard to find space in. The right place didn’t appear until late 2022, after the longtime owner of a College Avenue lunch spot called Soup For You? passed away. His name was Juston Wadsworth, and around here everyone just called him the Soup Man. He’d built a small, loyal following with from-scratch soups and the kind of warmth you can’t fake.
The Jensens talked with Juston’s widow, Nikki, about taking over the lease. Nikki wanted to see if someone would keep the soup tradition alive. The Jensens, who had wanted to add soup to Heather’s bread anyway, said yes.
They remodeled the space, kept some of Juston’s original soup recipes, added Heather’s bread, started baking cookies with sourdough discard, then croissants, then cinnamon rolls. The lights came on as Teton Sourdough Co. in late 2023.
The bread is naturally leavened with a starter Heather’s been keeping for years. It ferments for over a day before it goes in the oven. There’s nothing fast about it, and that’s the point. As Greg likes to say: “It’s the way bread was made before about a hundred years ago. It’s old-school bread.”
“It's the way bread was made before about a hundred years ago. It's old-school bread.”
— Greg Jensen
The soups still sell out by one in the afternoon most days. The bread goes fast too. We’re working on making more.
Come see us.