“Alexa, set the timer for roll recipe #2,” says Isabella Mastroianni, executive director of Sanctuary Baking, a non-denominational, faith-based nonprofit she runs out of her 1,000-square-foot cottage in Harpswell. She’s a whirlwind of flour and enthusiasm for serving the hungry as she moves among the stainless-steel workbench, proofing machine, and convection ovens in the commercial kitchen at Pathway Vineyard Church on Columbus Drive in Brunswick. She’s making 175 savory yeasted pumpkin rolls to be served at the church’s weekly Tuesday night community meal.
When Mastroianni moved to Maine in 2016, it was to build a program that provided free culinary training and job placement assistance to disadvantaged youth. Her pandemic pivot, with the help of a 100-pound bag of flour, was to bake bread and make meals for the food insecure in her community. Today, she does so with the help of a small group of volunteers. With ingredients supplied by the Mid Coast Hunger Prevention Program (MCHPP) and Maine Grains and purchased with monetary donations from supporters, Sanctuary Baking produces baked goods and meals for MCHPP’s clients, neighbors staying at Tedford Housing, and hundreds of shut-in elderly folks served by the Harpswell Aging at Home program.
“We also pack up brown bag lunches to give to the homeless people we see around town. And sometimes, through that exchange of food, we make connections with them as humans, because they know they’ve been seen, recognized,” says Mastroianni. Although she works in the travel industry to pay her mortgage, Mastroianni is an avid culinarian, schooled in viennoiserie by pastry chef Charles Niedermyer at the Pennsylvania College of Technology, in from-scratch cooking at Ireland’s Ballymaloe Cookery School, and in bread baking at the King Arthur Baking Company school in New Hampshire.
The breads, rolls, scones, pies, and cookies she and volunteers make vary by request (the Pathway Vineyard Church community meal organizers recently asked for cornbread, for example), by ingredient donations (there was a lot of pumpkin available the week she made the aforementioned rolls), or by occasion (the organization made thousands of cookies to distribute last Christmas). No matter what, though, they are always made with care and quality ingredients—even though the prices of eggs, butter, yeast, and flour have risen drastically in the last six months.
Sanctuary Baking has embarked on a fundraising campaign to build a multipurpose center for teaching basic nutrition and cooking skills to food-insecure kids and young adults. Once she’s raised the $60,000 required, she plans to give students two things: access to the high-quality ingredients Sanctuary Baking uses, and knowledge of how to prepare healthy, simple meals at home.
For more information, go to sanctuarybaking.org.
