Central Point mom trades pilot wings for sourdough
By MORGAN ROTHBORNE Rogue Valley Times
Mar 16, 2023 Updated Mar 17, 2023
Miwa Aoki Russell went to great lengths to become a pilot in the U.S., but for now she’s content to hang up her wings and focus on raising her children in the Rogue Valley — and her sourdough bread.
Four months ago, Aoki Russell stopped flying to give her children and her bread business — Southern Oregon Sourdough — her full attention.
“At first I was like, ‘What am I doing? I’m not meant to be a baker. I’m a pilot.’ But then, it feels like this new chapter of my life is opening up,” she said while sitting on a stool next to her kitchen counter. Through the sliding-glass door, her garden and chicken coop were visible through the steadfast March rain. The house was warm, with the lingering fragrance of bread and the oven heating to 500 degrees.
Ovals of dough were rising in another room while her cast iron pots waited empty in the hot oven. On the kitchen counter in two Mason jars were two sourdough starters — Rain and Rainbow.
“They’re living things. After a while, you start to think of them almost like your baby. Like a pet. We named them. It helps you remember to feed them,” she said.
Sourdough starters are a fermented culture of flour and water. Sourdough bread needs no yeast to rise, only time and a little starter added to the dough.
Aoki Russell carefully shook out the little ovals onto her counter. She dusted each with rice flour, her own swap from the usual wheat flour. Rice flour takes more heat to burn, she said.
Bending over each oval with a special tool, she formed a slash through the top of the bread. As the bread bakes, she explained, the slash will spread out and become the partial opening common to sourdough bread — professionally known as the “ear.”
She carefully made designs of leaves on each lump of dough. Even when she’s baking 20 and sometimes 40 loaves of bread in a day, she still hand-designs each one.
“It’s meditative for me,” she said.
Her baking life has evolved with her passion for sourdough, but it didn’t start there. Originally, it was flaky french pastries that held her heart.
“When you travel the world, you get to taste all the different foods and find what you like,” she said.
First she baked the buttery delicacies for her family and herself.
When she started sharing with friends, demand grew into orders for birthdays and other special events.
She kept up the hobby business and didn’t change her focus until her husband made a request. Imprinted by the years they spent living in Seattle, he was craving fresh-baked sourdough, but he couldn’t find a bakery in the valley he liked.
Coming from labor-intensive French baking, she wasn’t expecting a challenge in sourdough.
“Sourdough is a whole other animal. I failed miserably for the first four to eight months,” she said.
But to be good at anything, you study, she said. Eventually, she realized the problem was her starter.
She had been working with a sourdough starter ordered online.
“I started looking at the climate, and I thought, ‘We’re having these 100-degree days — it can’t take it,” she said.
After she made Rain and Rainbow, everything changed.
Then during the pandemic, interest in sourdough rose to new heights, and she pivoted completely from pastries to sourdough.
To keep her business small and her focus on her children, she eschews expanding into a larger bricks-and-mortar bakery.
She sells her bread at the Jacksonville Farmers Market on Sundays from May to October, a few farm stands and from her own front door.
Aoki Russell didn’t think of herself as a people person before business picked up last year. As a pilot, she never really needed to be. “We pilots are so selfish. We talk to the customers a little bit, but we just shut the doors and let the flight attendants do the hard work. We fly the plane, which is so fun for us. It’s hardly even a job,” she said.
Customers come to her home to pick up their bread or find her at the market, and she realized they seemed to appreciate forming a relationship with her. Then she realized she was thriving on those relationships.
“Being a stay-at-home mom is the hardest job in the world. After I stopped flying last summer, spending all my time with two little kids — conversations with them don’t make any sense. Having adults to talk to, it keeps me sane,” she said.
Aoki Russell is quick to say she’s a self-taught baker, with no certificates or professional qualifications.
She offers classes to others with an emphasis on her hard-won baking skills.
“I’m so very human. I make so many mistakes. I think it helps people feel comfortable learning with me,” she said.
Even as she enjoys her new life in the kitchen, she looks at her pilot wings with pride. Only about 2% to 5% of pilots in the world are women, she said. Even fewer are Japanese women.
Growing up in Japan, she knew she wanted to be a pilot. But Japan is easy to traverse by high-speed rail, dampening the demand for pilots. The few who do earn their wings are almost exclusively men. At the aviation school in Japan, there wasn’t even a women’s bathroom. She credited her grandfather with pushing her to move to the United States.
“He told me, ‘If you really want to become a pilot, you should move to America. They have a lot of female pilots there,’ but I had never been to the U.S before. I didn’t speak English. I was like, ‘Heck, no,’” she said, laughing.
Aoki Russell moved to the U.S. and earned her wings. After marrying a fellow pilot, they fell in love with the Rogue Valley, bought a house, had two children, and they both kept flying until her husband started flying internationally.
Soon, she said it felt like they were switching shifts as babysitters more than raising a family.
First she gave up her job at Horizon and found clients with private jets at the Medford airport.
Last year, she decided it was time to devote herself to being a mother and a baker. By then, she had enough customers to expand her hobby business just a little.
She’s quick to dispel any ideas that she might expand her business into a formal bakery once her children are older.
She’s content with her newfound passion, but she knows she’ll return to the sky when it’s time.
To learn more about Aoki Russell’s business and her classes, visit southernoregonsourdough.store/
Reach reporter Morgan Rothborne