Sarah’s Bread: Katalina’s Owner Kathleen Day Honors the Late Master Baker Sarah Black

Editor's note: Renowned baker Sarah Black died on Feb. 15 after battling cancer the last few years. A Marion native, Black moved back to Ohio in 2015 after becoming well-known in the upper echelons of baking and cooking circles in New York City. Over nearly three decades there, she worked in a variety of restaurants and later established Tom Cat Bakery and Companio Breads to supply them with bread, earning acclaim from The New York Times for “bringing ciabatta to the U.S.” 

Back in Ohio, Black helped open Flowers & Bread, a bakery and floral studio in Clintonville that has since closed. After she moved on from that project, she created Sarah’s Breads, selling bread-making kits, working with local farmers to source heirloom grains and teaching classes at Columbus State Community College. She also published her cookbook, “One Dough, Ten Breads: Making Great Bread By Hand.” The consummate baker, Sarah truly revered bread, imploring new bakers to respect the “living” dough, as she often referred to it.

Kathleen Day, owner of Katalina’s Cafés, pays tribute to her friend, as well as the life Sarah lived. 

I first became aware of Sarah Black when we were featured together in an article on women food founders in Columbus. I was impressed with her baking chops and wanted to reach out, but as a harried, newish business owner, I didn’t do anything about it. Flash forward a few years when she asked me to put my spin on one of her bread kits. I didn’t do it justice—again, my busy life!—but she was gracious and thankful, and we struck up an Instagram correspondence. 

She invited me to her baking presentations, and we soon bonded over our shared love of local, organic food, and especially heritage grains. Though I only made it to a few events, they taught me more than the Michael Pollan books I often quoted. 

Soon, her messages began getting more personal. She asked about a post I made about a long-term illness I had called sarcoidosis. I was curious because not many people know what to ask—or say—when they know you’ve had—or have—a debilitating illness. But soon, I gleaned that she had an illness of her own, one much more dire. Sarah had cancer. 

Oh, the irony of two women obsessed with organic and whole food each coming down with a life-threatening illness. Lucky for me, mine was finally in remission. As for Sarah, she was soon periodically texting me from the James, a place revered for its cancer treatment. Of course, she mentioned how remarkably good the food was, and we both decided that in our next lives we would tackle the problem of horrific hospital food. As was our nature, I think we truly believed this would happen. 

Though optimistic when it comes to “making the world better one little bite at a time” (a Katalina’s mission), we both had experienced too many health issues to be really optimistic about much but food, and Sarah was soon calmly telling me that she would be starting hospice. Not realizing how serious her illness had become until then, I finally took time out of my busy days to really, truly engage with her. For the new irony was that, as someone with so little time left, Sarah had all the time in the world when it came to connecting with people. I saw that she had been patiently pursuing a true connection with me for almost a decade. And so I vowed to make more time with my friend. 

Some of our last communication surrounded my plans to interview and write this article about her. She brushed me off, but I pressed on, even giving her a proposed angle of writing about her legacy contributing to the Columbus food community. She mostly demurred but agreed that she at least liked the word “legacy." 

The next day, she reached out and remarked how much fun we would have and said how happy she was that I was her friend. She wrote in a different tone, confessing she was on really strong painkillers. I still choose to keep her specific words that day between the two of us, but they didn’t feel drug-induced. They felt “otherworldly.” I now see that she knew something I did not, and, for once, she seemed to be the one with too little time. 

When I first heard the news of her passing, I looked back through our messages. In retrospect, she had known for a while that the end was near, and resolutely spared me that knowledge. 

There’s a saying among cooks and bakers that you’re either one or the other. Cooks are creative, chaotic and inspired; bakers are precise, purposeful, deliberate. I am a cook. Sarah was the ultimate baker. Her laserlike focus, both in life and in baking, is the power behind her legacy. I’ll think of her every time I smell freshly baked bread as it wafts soulfully and subtly over a room—like Sarah did in my life. I think she’d like that. May we all be so lucky to have a legacy baker in our lives. 

This story is from the April 2024 issue of Columbus Monthly.