By Amanda Estes
Staff Writer
Sitting on the bright red bench outside of Scratch Baking Company in South Portland’s Willard Square, Allison Reid said she has lived in the neighborhood for nearly 10 years, but didn’t know any of her neighbors for three of those years.
In charge of breads at Scratch, Reid said the bakery has opened up the community for her and for others who love good, simple food. 
“I had no clue who lived in the neighborhood and I always just felt like I wanted to be doing something more in the community that I lived in,” she said.
Reid, who was a chef at Street & Company for 10 years, said she was caught in a routine that wasn’t conducive to meeting her neighbors.
“Since we did this whole thing [Scratch], it’s just been amazing how many people we’ve gotten to know and how many people are here,” she said.  
Reid, co-owned One Fifty Ate, a café just a few blocks away from Scratch, until about a year ago.  She and a business partner opened the café six years ago, serving bagels, muffins, scones and sandwiches.
When an old friend, Sonja Swanberg, came to South Portland for a visit, she fell in love with Reid’s café.
“We were like why don’t you come up and bake with us?” Reid recalled. Swanberg and her husband Bob Johnson paid another visit to South Portland and discovered the building at 416 Preble Street was for sale.
At the same time, Reid said her business partner at One Fifty Ate wanted to take the café in another direction and add dinner to the menu. Reid, however, didn’t share his vision.
“I was really interested in the whole baking aspect,” Reid said. “Baking bread was always one of those things where I was like ‘Ahh, I wish I could be doing that,’” she said. “It never feels to me like cooking where there’s sort of that competition to create the next greatest invention of food. It’s more like just keeping a craft alive.”
Swanberg and Johnson purchased the building and Reid moved the café’s baking operation over to the new building, where they operated under the One Fifty Ate name until a year ago when Reid and her One Fifty Ate business partner went their separate ways. Since then, Reid said Swanberg has “expanded what we started ten fold.”
Reid said the name Scratch is a reflection of the bakery’s philosophy.
“We want everything to come from its true source,” she said.
Reid said she sees within the community an appreciation for local, good food. She has seen an “awakening” in that people want to get back to growing their own food or if they can’t, they want to know where their food comes from.
Listening to Reid talk about baking bread, it’s hard to believe that she doesn’t think of it as her specialty. She prefers to characterize it as her passion, one in which she said she still has a lot to learn.
When Lou, one of the bakery’s four star bakers, came by to say goodbye at the end of his shift, Reid credited him with teaching her “tons” since he started working there.
“We all share what little we know around here,” he joked.
She said baking bread is a relatively simple process, but one that is always changing. Scratch doesn’t have a lot of technical machinery, she said, which makes consistency a challenge. Last Thursday’s oppressive humidity, for example, tested Reid’s skills. 
“When the humidity is up…we might use a little less water in the dough because the flour [has] absorbed the humidity [and] it’s hot so things are going to move quicker, so you kind of have to account for that,” she said. “There [are] really not a lot of things you need to think about. It’s flour, water, salt, yeast, temperature…and yet it’s the momentous occasion of having everything work just right in order to get that thing the way you want it when you pull it out of the oven.”
For Reid, it doesn’t get any better than pulling a perfect loaf out of the oven and then giving that bread to someone else. She said she has come to understand why her grandmother was always so happy to see someone sit down and enjoy the food she had prepared.
“It’s like part of you that you’re giving to them,” she said.
In a time where people often don’t have time to sit down to dinner with family or friends, Reid is happy to carry on a sense of tradition.
“It feels sort of like that village place where people come everyday to get their bread for the night, which is what I always wanted to be a part of…was sort of a community and feel like I was giving back,” she said.
Reid said she enjoys the slower, more intimate setting of the bakery. While she might wake up in the middle of the night worrying about whether or not she remembered to shut the oven off, when she was in the restaurant business there were a lot more worries – would you have a dishwasher that night, would the fish you ordered come in and so on. While some people love dealing with those challenges, Reid said it was “crazy making” for her.
She is much more at home with those simple ingredients in front of her, transforming them into something for others to enjoy.       
“[It’s] carrying this living thing through its stages to get to the end result which is this beautiful baked loaf of bread that you pull out of the oven and it smells real caramely and the crust is just crackling,” she said. “It’s kind of like if you’ve done every little stage right and you get this really awesome finished product and if you haven’t then you can tell it’s not quite there and that’s kind of like that carrot that keeps dangling in front of you to come back and do that same thing the next day.”