116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Bread and Buttered brings new sourdough specialty bakery for loaves, sweet treats to Cedar Rapids
Get sourdough loaves, sourdough cinnamon rolls and more at NewBo City Market
Aug. 20, 2025 7:00 am, Updated: Aug. 20, 2025 7:23 am
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CEDAR RAPIDS — A new type of specialty bakery is rising quickly in Cedar Rapids.
Bread and Buttered Bakery, a new option for carbs in NewBo City Market, has the usual treats you’ll find at other bakeries — cinnamon rolls, focaccia bread, cookies and cakes. But here, almost all of them are made with sourdough.
“The difference between sourdough and yeast is a leaven,” said Nikki Lynn, who owns the new startup with her wife, Amber. “You would think it tastes like sourdough, but it really doesn’t. It’s giving you the benefits of it.”
The couple’s new business, opened at NewBo City Market July 16, quickly filled the vacancy left by Anh’s Bread Therapy.
If you go:
Address: 1100 Third Ave. SE, Cedar Rapids
Website: Find Bread and Buttered Bakery on Facebook
Phone: (319) 334-8898
Details: Find multiple varieties of sourdough bread, focaccia, cinnamon rolls, cookies, cakes and a line of custom granolas all made from scratch.
How it started
Those health benefits are exactly how they started making sweet treats from sourdough.
Though the couple has baked on and off their whole lives, it wasn’t until they started a weight loss journey early last year that they really got a knack for it. In addition to other healthy diet and exercise practices, they started cutting preservatives out of their diet by making everything from scratch — daily sourdough loaves, homemade granola, yogurt and more.
“We did all these types of things, and in that, our friends and family were like ‘this is so good, you should sell this,’” Nikki said.
Anticipating potential volatility with Amber’s full-time job for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, they started the business as a backup income in case of the worst. They started slowly with several farmers markets, where they still vend today.
But before long, they were guest vendors at NewBo City Market. As NewBo’s other bakery left earlier this year, the path for their growth was quickly cemented.
Now, Nikki has left her corporate career for Wells Fargo, where she worked 15 years, to knead a new business.
“We gained a following really fast,” she said. “Bread sells really well here.”
Starting sourdough
Sourdough can be a challenge for bakers. The labor of love at Bread and Buttered requires two days to fully make a loaf.
There’s a lot of nuance to sourdough starter, too.
“It’s a living thing — it’s alive — and she’s a moody girl,” Nikki said. “It’s like learning people. We refer to it as ‘her’ because she definitely is a living thing.”
Their first starter, which they eventually baked, was named Penelope. Penelope’s successor was Peneloplump.
Since then, the starter has taken on a life of its own with other characters like “Hoochie Mama,” named for the acidic liquid slough that develops as a starter matures.
“It almost smells like a rubbing alcohol,” Nikki said.
Therein lies the reason many bakeries don’t specialize in sourdough products, besides one or two variations of bread. Sourdough starter can be high maintenance, especially in larger volumes.
“I’ve never seen just a sourdough place (here.) And half the time, they’re not even real sourdough,” she said. “They have yeast in them, and then they add citric acid to give it that sour taste.”
Other treats besides bread use their “discard,” an inactive form of sourdough starter with the same properties, minus the ability to leaven bread.
Sweet and sour
There’s a sweet and savory treat for every taste at Bread and Buttered.
Sourdough bread at this bakery is softer and fluffier than the standard recipe, served here without the hard crust that deters some. Loaves are served in five daily varieties: plain, jalapeno cheddar, three cheese, roasted garlic and Parmesan, and roasted garlic and rosemary.
Focaccia bread, served daily, also varies with its toppings and dough mix-ins based on seasonal availability of ingredients. Ditto for cinnamon rolls, which can be found in flavors like caramel apple.
The couple makes a full line of granolas from scratch in varieties like strawberry cheesecake, blueberry lemon, vanilla almond and maple pecan, among several others.
Cookies come in popular flavors like chocolate chip pistachio and brown butter chocolate chip. Sticky date cakes and banofee cake layered with bananas and dulce de leche deliver some extra sugar, while the trendy Dubai brownies and strawberry cups give new application to pistachio.
Comments: Features reporter Elijah Decious can be reached at (319) 398-8340 or elijah.decious@thegazette.com.
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