CALLICOON, NY — Esteban Eliza will be the first to tell you—he didn’t even really like baking.

Before 2020, bread wasn’t his thing. He did however love food, as he grew up around his grandfather’s Puerto Rican cooking, and traveled across the U.S. eating the delicious cuisine our country has to offer. But baking? Not particularly. He was a software engineer who spent a lot of his career working on video games, and had way more interest in pastry than sourdough.

Then the pandemic happened. Like a lot of us, he started a sourdough project. Unlike most of us, he didn’t quit when the world opened back up.

“I didn’t have a knack for it,” he said, “I failed a lot.”

He kept tinkering anyway. Worked on pizza dough. Made bread that wasn’t quite right and made it again.

The turning point came when friends at Good Find Farm in Damascus wanted baked goods for their farm stand. Suddenly the hobby had a reason to get serious. He dialed in the starter, the temperature and the recipe and made something he was actually proud of.

That farm stand led to wholesale bread for the Callicoon Pantry, all while he was still working in software full-time.

Then the nonprofit he worked for went bankrupt and laid everyone off. He looked for another engineering role but nothing felt right.

“I didn’t have the passion anymore,” he said. “I was much more motivated to look up sourdough cultures than software algorithms.”

So he made the leap and rented commercial kitchen space, scaled up for wholesale, got invited to join one of our local farmers’ markets and that, he said, is where everything really took off. Soon he took over the space where Grizzly Bagels had been in Callicoon; that was Labor Day weekend in 2024, and he had great success there.

Roger That Bakery now has its own storefront at 26 Upper Main St. in Callicoon, right next to the Callicoon Theater.

The name matters to him. He started the business with a partner, and “Roger” came from one of her late relatives —someone remembered for sparking creativity. For Eliza, who spent years in interactive storytelling and game development, “roger that” means dialogue. It means someone heard you, an affirmation.

The shop is now growing into more than bread; he now carries tinned fish, olive oils, local flour from Wild Hive Farm, bread knives and proofing baskets. He’s building out an espresso program with Driftaway Coffee out of Brooklyn and has his eye on house-made butters, jams and fresh-milled grains. He mills small batches now on a countertop stone mill and hopes to go bigger eventually.

Eliza says it’s the hardest job he’s ever had. Also the most rewarding.

“It’s really cool to become part of the community,” he said. “I feel so grateful and connected.”

That feels right. Because that’s what Roger That actually is: bread made with patience and humility, by someone who stumbled into a calling and had the guts to follow it.