Amena Chaudhry produces her sourdough bread the traditional way, using a sourdough starter that goes back five generations.

Hannoun Sourdough produces more than traditional sourdough bread. Among Amena Chaudhry’s creations are scones, English muffins and cookies, all very low in gluten thanks to her starter.

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

Amena Chaudhry hadn’t been able to eat bread for decades. Then she discovered sourdough.
“Bread made with sourdough starter is entirely different from what’s commercially available,” the Moorhead baker explains. “The product you find in stores doesn’t use it; vinegar or something similar is just added to give it that distinctive sour taste. Real sourdough is made the traditional way, with only flour, water and, instead of packaged yeast, a starter.”
That starter is the secret that has made the Moorhead woman’s bread, scones, English muffins and even cookies a sensation, especially among those whose health conditions make it imperative to avoid gluten and starch. Concocted of only flour and water, plus wild yeast and lactose bacteria from its environment, the living mixture is labor-intensive, requiring regular feedings of flour and water to keep it fresh.
Added to the other ingredients in one of Amena’s recipes, it’s left to ferment for 24 to 48 hours before it goes into the oven. The result: Delicious bread with that special sourdough tang, but minus almost all of the gluten. As a bonus, the fermentation process also creates foods with low glycemic content – a huge boon to diabetics.
For Amena herself, who has several health conditions, the discovery was revolutionary. “I must avoid foods that cause my blood sugar to spike. Baked goods were at the top of the list. But now I can eat a slice without seeing any change.” And her home-based bakery, Hannoun Sourdough, is offering the same benefits to a growing list of customers.
Amena’s journey into the sourdough business was prompted by a series of serious challenges to her health. She and her husband, a Concordia religion professor, have lived in Moorhead for 18 years. In 2020, she was hospitalized with a near-fatal condition that originally stumped her doctors. Then she was seriously injured in a car accident. It left her with a severe concussion that led to several autonomic neurological conditions. The combination of life-changing crises forced her to leave her job in human resources at Concordia College and look for alternate ways to make a living.
“I went from being very active to not active at all,” she reflects. “I still have trouble standing for extended periods of time.” She was trying to establish a counseling business in her field when, she says, her son’s random request for sourdough bread piqued her curiosity. That eventually opened the door to a new opportunity.
“I read everything I could find about sourdough. What I learned seemed almost impossible – breads made the traditional way that were actually good for you,” she says now. “This is how our ancestors did it. They baked, and ate, tons of bread, and they were healthy.”
But that was long before the introduction of active yeast 150 years ago and its rapid-rise variant, which goes only back to 1975. Today, people with gluten sensitivities like celiac disease or who must control their consumption of starch, like diabetics, must sharply limit or avoid those white, yeasty slices. “Commercial yeast sped up the baking process, which is great for efficiency,” she explains. “But conventional breads eliminate the sourdough starter and long fermentation process that made it so healthful for our ancestors.”
Growing up in Toronto, Canada, Amena says, she didn’t have grandmothers or aunts steeped in the old traditions who could pass on the way of sourdough to her in their own kitchens. Instead, she devoured information on the internet. “I joined 50 Facebook groups. I watched thousands of hours of YouTube and TikTok videos on sourdough. I learned that speed is not good for either health or mental well-being.”
Her first sourdough starter was a gift from “a friend of a friend” who’d inherited her own supply from her great-grandmother. Then Amena baked her our first loaves. “By my third or fourth try, I thought, ‘This is pretty good,’” she reports. “And it was wild! I’d spent two decades not eating bread. Now I was enjoying delicious white slices that didn’t spike my blood sugar. At the age of nearly 50, I was learning why our ancestors could eat tons of bread and not get sick.”
That was at the end of 2023. She continued to perfect her technique – nurturing her starter, fermenting the raw loaves for more than a day before they went into the oven – and shared the bounty of her small kitchen with friends. By early last year, she said “yes” to one fan’s suggestion that she try selling it, and went public under the banner of Hannoun Sourdough. (The name is the Palestinian word for “poppy,” a symbol of resilience and strength.)
Meanwhile, her menu was growing. “If this works so well for bread, I thought, why not scones?” she remembers. Then English muffins. Then cookies. Her weekly menu, which she posts on Hannoun Sourdough’s Facebook page early each week, began to grow. This week, it included two sourdough loaves (garlic confit and rosemary, and jalapeno and cheddar); English muffins; two kinds of sourdough cookies (brown butter chocolate and Mexican hot chocolate); and three flavors of sourdough scones (candied orange peel and chocolate, candied ginger and blueberry, and almond cranberry).
Customers place their orders by direct messaging. She begins baking on Thursday; they pick up their fresh-out-of-the-oven orders at her home on Saturday morning.
The success of Hannoun Sourdough has created its own kind of problem. Licensed as a microbakery under Minnesota’s cottage foods law, Amena has been working out of her small home kitchen. That, plus the decidedly slow processes involved in sourdough, places dramatic limits her production. To prepare and bake the volume her customers are ordering, she plans to upgrade to commercial appliances – a brick-lined oven with three racks, for example, in which 40 loaves can be baked at a time, and refrigeration units large enough to accommodate big batches undergoing the lengthy cold fermentation process.
Toward that end, Amena recently launched a Gofundme campaign with a goal of $25,000 to buy the commercial appliances and specialized pans her bread requires. As of Monday morning, she says, the campaign had reached 60% of its goal. “Most of the donors have been part of my virtual community online,” she says. “I’m hoping that my real community here in Fargo-Moorhead can get me over the finish line.”
Along the way, she has become an expert on the history, tradition and value of the foods she bakes. “Commercial sourdough breads are no such thing,” she warns of the conventional sourdough loaves found in supermarkets’ bread aisles. “It’s basically conventional bread with something like vinegar added to duplicate the tangy taste.” Packaged yeast, too, defies the tradition. “It speeds up the process, which is great for efficiency but not so good for our health.” Even the flour differs from tradition, ground from wheat that’s been hybridized and modified to increase production. If she could afford it, she says, she’d bake exclusively with flour made from einkorn, nature’s original wheat, but its cost is prohibitive.
Amena’s deep dive into sourdough has convinced her, she says, that bread still can and should be the healthy staple food that nourished families over countless generations. “Understanding that has been liberating.
“It’s not the bread that’s the problem. It’s the wheat and the process,” she says. “Returning to ancestral ways may not be good for commerce, but it is good for our health and the planet. Fast is not always best.”
For more information on Amena’s menus and a link to her GoFundMe, check out Hannoun Sourdough on Facebook.