Main Street has a new addition: nestled between Raygun and Cooks’ Emporium you can find a store unlike any other in Ames. With fresh sourdough peering out the window and a glass case filled with everything from traditional Prague cake to cheese boats, Piece & Freedom Bakery truly does bring a piece of Ukraine to Ames.
“In Ukraine, if we have gatherings with friends or with family, we always have bread in the middle of the table. So this is our way to show our culture from this side,” said Hanna Petrova, one of the store’s co-owners. The store is co-owned by Hanna Petrova and Shalika Khinduraugala, as well as Khinduraugala’s mother, Iryna Khindurangala. The Khinduraugalas began selling pastries at the Ames Farmers’ Market in 2022. They met Hanna Petrova and her mother, Yana Petrova, two years later at an event celebrating the Independence Day of Ukraine. Realizing that the Petrovas had embarked on a similar baking venture before moving to Ames, the four chose to team up. At the Farmers’ Market, they found themselves selling out every weekend, which encouraged them to purchase a space on Main Street.
“I found Hanna and Hanna’s mom, and we started talking and we realized that this could be something really beautiful, and the community would really like it,” said Shalika Khinduraugala.
For Khinduraugala and Petrova, both of whom were born and raised in Ukraine, the bakery is a celebration of their values and heritage. The name Piece & Freedom Bakery is symbolic itself. The “piece” in the beginning can mean both “peace” and “piece” as in a “piece of cake.”
“What every person needs in life is freedom- freedom to choose who they want to choose, to love who they want to love, freedom to live where they want to live, financial freedom, whatever freedoms they are interested in,” Khinduraugala said.
Khinduraugala hopes that the bakery will invite others to better understand Ukrainian culture. “This is our way to tell people more about Ukraine, about our culture and cuisine- about all the things. I think food is a gateway to understanding other people,” Khinduraugala said. “There’s a big issue here in the United States currently with understanding others who are not similar to you.”
Although many of the bakery’s products are steeped in tradition and several come straight from Yana Petrova’s recipes, the Bakery loves to play when developing new baked goods. “We love to experiment,” Petrova said. Alongside Ukrainian staples such as Kyiv cake and Prague cake, you can also find spinach and raspberry cake in the glass case, which combines popular Ukrainian produce.
The bakery has recently solidified its hours of business and is open from 4:30 to 8:30 pm on Fridays, and from 9:30 am to 3:30 pm on Saturdays and Sundays. Both Petrova and Khinduraugala, as well as their parents, have separate full-time jobs and operate the bakery as well. On average Petrova and Khinduraugala spend 80 hours a week solely baking, on top of other logistical tasks related to the bakery. Business picked up rapidly as soon as they first opened their doors. Through both cold and warm Iowa weather, the bakery has seen lines out the door each day they are open. On some days the bakery has seen nearly 200 customers walk through its doors.
“We thought that we were going to open a chill bakery. It has not been chill,” Khinduraugala said. “We thought we would have maybe 10 customers at a time- not that we wanted few customers, but we were like, ‘It’s going to be so chill.’ It has been anything but chill.”
For Khinduraugala and Petrova, it has been a pleasant surprise that they still find themselves adjusting to. “We have people come in and say, ‘Why don’t you have 20 more sourdoughs?’ or ‘We need more cakes.’ We’ve been baking in the middle of the night [to keep up with demand],” Khinduraugala said.
As seen through the extraordinary demand for their products, the bakery has already become a haven for the Ames community, which has found an insatiable appetite for the comfort that only homemade baked goods can bring. Khinduraugala knows that comfort is one of the bakery’s biggest selling points. “Sometimes, when everything is really bad, you just need a piece of cake,” Khinduraugala said.
