Martha Durrett might never have started Cauldron Bagels if she'd liked working in tech.
Durrett's baking experience began in the Boston area, where she moved after graduating from Carleton College in Minnesota. She started a job in the tech field and didn’t love it, so she quit, thinking she’d take a month or two off before finding another job. That was February of 2020.
As her unemployment stretched on during the pandemic, Durrett got a job at Nashoba Brook Bakery in Concord, Massachusetts, a big wholesale operation where all of the breads were shaped by hand. She had to get to the bakery at 4 a.m.; the shifts were long and demanding. “The work was so physically intense. Like, my first day, I came home and I couldn’t move my arms,” Durrett says. “I kind of liked it.”
After a few months of toiling in that largescale production bakery, she took a job at Bagelsaurus in Cambridge (MA, not MN), a popular bagel shop that specializes in handmade sourdough bagels. “It just clicked in my head … I was kind of a natural at it,” Durrett says. “I learned everything that I know about bagels from Bagelsaurus.” Eventually, she’d become their head baker.
But while she loved the bagel shop, she and her husband both knew they wanted to move back to Minnesota. They did so in January of 2024, and while the move to Minneapolis’s East Harriet neighborhood was mostly great, one thing was missing.
“Minneapolis is not known for its bagel scene,” she says gently, though she does endorse small-scale handmade bagel operations like Mogi Bagel. “Immediately, I was like, ‘I miss the Bagelsaurus bagels.’”
After years of eating fresh bagels nearly every day, Durrett’s longing for a good one was acute. It didn’t take many weeks of yearning until she was working on a recipe of her own—sourdough, like Bagelsaurus’s—tweaking the ratios to perfect what would become the Cauldron Bagel recipe.
Minnesota doesn’t have a lot of great bagels, but it does have the cottage food law, which allows small-scale producers to make and sell certain homemade foods from their own kitchens. By March of 2024, Durrett was taking orders, first from friends and family, then friends of friends and family, and eventually anyone who happened upon her Instagram account with the link to order bagels by Google form.
“I’m honestly surprised by the number of people who are just willing to order bagels from a random Google sheet,” Durrett laughs.
But I totally get it, because I was one of those people after I saw a calendar that listed Cauldron Bagel classes while picking up pastries at Honey & Rye earlier this month. Dropping your personal info into a Google form is the least you can do to get your hands on a decent bagel in a not-so-bagel-rich region (and it helps that Durrett doesn’t ask for payment until you pick them up).
Now, by happenstance, I’ve been to Bagelsaurus many times; I lived in the Boston area for a long while and worked at a magazine that covered Cambridge specifically. So I had high hopes when I picked up a bag of Cauldron Bagels this weekend, still warm from the oven, and peeked inside to observe their crackly, shiny surface.
Durrett offers a number of classic flavors including plain, sea salt, poppy, sesame, and everything, plus some originals like cacio e pepe and a cardamom orange that’s inspired by a Swedish cardamom bun. I’d ordered two each of the everything, sea salt, and cacio e pepe varieties, and tore into the last of those first—a hell of an introduction to Cauldron Bagels’ offerings.
The bagel was entirely encrusted in cheese, and the tangy sourdough flavor worked wonderfully with its salty richness. That tangy-salty combo makes all of Cauldron’s savory flavors sing, and the sourdough is also to thank for the chewy texture; these bagels are noticeably airier and more bubbly than most Minnesota bagels. Durrett doesn’t bill her bagels as “New York style” or anything, but they’re not dissimilar and might help scratch that itch if you’re craving one.
And speaking of bubbles, there’s the Cauldron logo, a little witchy bagel riding on a broomstick. Durrett drew it up not long after settling on the name, which comes from Macbeth: “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake.” She’s always loved Shakespeare, and boiling and baking… that’s what you do with a bagel! (As far as we can tell there are no fenny snake fillets involved.)
Durrett says she would love to eventually start selling her bagels as a vendor through Honey & Rye, or maybe at local farmers markets, but right now she’s loving the flexibility that comes with her schedule of making bagels, teaching classes, and working at the bakery. It’s important to her to maintain Cauldron’s high quality, and all of the bagels are made by hand, which is somewhat limiting in terms of what she can produce. Someday, maybe in the not too distant future, she’d be interested in looking for a commissary kitchen space.
“But for right now, it all happens in my kitchen,” Durrett smiles.
You can place your order for a half dozen ($12) or baker’s dozen ($24) through the Cauldron Bagels website for pickup on Saturdays and Sundays. Find updates and additional info on Instagram at @cauldronbagels.
