Fork & Pie Bakery

NEWTOWN, OH
 

The best family recipes are charmingly inexact: a handful of this, a pinch of that. The recipe for Fork & Pie Bakery might read something like this: Stir together one heaping portion of gardening know-how, a scoop of professional baking experience and a pinch of Appalachian grandmother, then bake and finish with a sprinkling of friendliness.

Owner Stevie Rufener draws culinary influence from summers on her paternal grandparents’ farm and her maternal grandma’s “MacGyver” way of cobbling together whatever food she had in her rural kitchen. The Ohio native developed her professional skills working for several years at a bakery-pizzeria in Hawaii, turning out bread and pastries for retail and commercial customers.

Like many food entrepreneurs, Rufener started out in her home kitchen. “I was baking things for other people and for school events, and then did a wedding, and then suddenly I was like, ‘I’m going to do this NOW!’” she says. Just a few days later she started selling at the Mt. Washington farmers’ market, where her gluten-free items drew raves.

In 2018, Fork & Pie opened a shop in a cottage on the main drag in Newtown just east of Cincinnati proper. Still a farmers’ market fixture, Rufener also supplies coffee shops across the region. She encourages customers to “stop by, say hi and eat pie”—housefavorite tomato-basil pie, along with sweet and savory hand pies, giant cookies, breakfast sweets and breads.

Rufener sources gluten-free sorghum flour from a Kansas grower; she says it yields a pie crust that’s so flaky and flavorful that she no longer makes pie pastry with wheat flour. Seasonal ingredients come from Rufener’s backyard garden or the tangle of herb plants and tomato vines outside the bakery. “We try to grow as much as we can—if it’s not in our yard it’s at my dad’s family farm in Southeastern Ohio.”

Fork & Pie Bakery
6836 Main Street, Newtown, OH
513.914.5589
ForkAndPieBakery.com

FIND IT AT:

• Ft. Thomas, KY, and Madeira, OH, farmers’ markets
• Carabello Coffee
• Hyde Perk
• Mile 42 Coffee
• The Coffee Shop on Wooster