7 Kings Market and the Story of a Home-Based Microbakery
After trying the expertly crafted sourdough bread and baked goods Po Tim King makes and sells with her family through their microbakery, 7 Kings Market, it’s hard to believe that baking is a relatively new skill for her.
Po Tim grew up in Hong Kong, where her family’s home did not have an oven, and the go-to cooking techniques were steaming, stir-frying and boiling. “When I first got married and was living in America with my husband, I used our oven as a place to store pots and pans,” said Po Tim, who initially moved to the United States at age 18 to attend college.
But things have certainly changed. These days, the oven in the kitchen of the Barrington home she shares with her husband, Brenden King, a photographer, and their five children is continuously cranking.
With help from her family, each week Po Tim bakes several kinds of naturally leavened sourdough breads, bagels, focaccia and doughnuts, along with Japanese milk bread and, often, seasonal additions like pumpkin-cream cheese muffins. Her signature sourdough boules, available in plain, garlic-rosemary and sun-dried tomato-olive varieties, are light and airy, with satisfying chew and tanginess. Light and fluffy Japanese milk bread, which Po Tim fondly remembers eating as a kid in Hong Kong, is another popular item.
She typically makes 50 sourdough boules, 14 Japanese milk breads, 70 doughnuts and 72 bagels each week. “Making all of that has basically become a full-time job for me, and I want it to be perfect,” she said.
Po Tim and her family start the process with prep work on Tuesday evening and bake Wednesday through Friday to prepare to sell at the Mount Hope Farm Farmers Market in Bristol on Saturdays. Items that have been pre-ordered through the bakery’s web-site are also available to pick up on the front porch of the family’s home on Maple Avenue in Barrington.
Among the secrets to her success, Po Tim said, are high-quality ingredients, including flour from King Arthur; a wonderful sourdough bread recipe from the website ThePerfectLoaf.com; and a 400-year-old starter from Germany that she diligently feeds.
She is able to sell food made from her home kitchen thanks to Rhode Island’s approximately two-year-old cottage food manufacturing law. The law allows for the sale of baked goods from a home kitchen that do not require refrigeration or time/temperature control for safety.
While Po Tim says she is grateful to have the opportunity to run a business while simultaneously staying home with her children, who are home-schooled according to a self-driven, informal model called unschooling, there are limits. For example, she’d love to make cheesy bread, but is unable to due to the specifications of the law.
Visit her at the farmers market, and you’ll likely meet her children, who range in age from 3 to 14 and learn about business and math by completing tasks like measuring ingredients, moving supplies and helping with sales.
Even the sourdough starter provides a lesson: The family looked at it under a microscope and marveled over how much it bubbled. “It was really cool to see—it’s living bacteria that we’re eating,” said Po Tim, who enjoys sharing with customers the benefits of fermented breads.
In 2023, the family started the business as the kids’ lemonade stand. “We’d go over to the bike path and sell lemonade and other stuff so that they could learn,” Po Tim said.
Around the same time, Po Tim started experimenting with making breakfast foods for the family as a way to save money. She quickly mastered Japanese milk bread before trying her hand at sourdough and, after a lot of trial and error, realized she was onto something.
“I’m a very determined person, so I didn’t give up, and then one day, my husband said, ‘Wow, this is the best bread I’ve ever had,” she recalled. “I was surprised, because it’s not something I ate growing up, so I wasn’t sure how good it was.”
Eventually, the lemonade stand grew into the microbakery it is today. Its name, 7 Kings Market, represents the seven members of the family. “It was definitely not planned,” Po Tim said.
The couple is expecting their sixth child early this winter. “We may need to change it to the 8 Kings now,” she added.
Jenna Pelletier is a Rhode Island–based features journalist who has worked on staff as a writer and editor at Boston magazine, The Providence Journal and Rhode Island Monthly. Her food writing has also been published in Food & Wine and The Boston Globe.
For more information, visit 7KingsMarket.com.
