Anna Jansen just wants to make bread, and she hopes people will buy it.

A classically trained chef and baker, Jansen graduated first in her class from the Culinary Institute of America in 2001. She has been cooking and baking bread professionally for over 15 years.

Jansen said she began making and selling her handcrafted artisan breads from her home in Alna, where she lives with her husband, Frans.

She sells her breads, all sourdough, to local stores and farmers markets through her business, Head Tide Oven.

Soon the bread baker will be located on a more traveled road — at 456 Main Street in Damariscotta. The small cape-style building that Frans is in the process of restoring has been sitting empty and for sale for several years.

“Nobody noticed it,” she said. “People keep asking when we moved it here. We didn't. We just put a driveway in.”

The building is being transformed into a bread shop. Another building, the same size and shape, with a walkway connecting the two, will house her workshop, where she'll fashion and bake her artisan breads.

Jansen has had a few varied lives. She was in the wine business in New York City and moved to Chile to start a “fledgling wine import” business. In Chile he met and married Frans, a fishing guide and champion caster from Holland. The couple has a fishing lodge in Chile where they spend winters.

The bread maker has also worked alongside chef and two-time James Beard Foundation Award winner Melissa Kelly at Primo in Rockland.

Jansen and her husband moved to this area so he could striper fish and “we could live in a beautiful place.”

“But I've always wanted to do another business,” she said. “And I'm really good at baking bread.”

Jansen said she's not sure how the bread baking business will pan out.

“But I know I need to make bread, and I'm hoping this will be a place where people will stop on their way to or from Hannaford. This should be a part of their shopping outing.”

Jansen wants to be clear about being just a bread shop. She's not going to sell cupcakes, or flaky pastries.

“It's a bread shop, a boulangerie — a place where bread is made and sold.

“This is going to be good bread. This is all it's about — bread. It's going to be a cute little shop, and I'm going to bake the bread in the building out back, and I'm hoping people will stop by and buy a loaf of bread. The worst that could happen is having a great product and people not buying it.”

Sourdough bread leavening comes from a natural yeast as opposed to yeast out of a packet. Jansen's breads are all sourdough, and she said that people who are gluten intolerant can eat her bread.

“If they eat sourdough bread they should be fine. Not people who are allergic to gluten, but if they just have trouble digesting breads, this is the bread for you. It can be digested more easily than other breads.”

A quote on Jansen's Head Tide Oven website states: “Making artisan breads is not so much difficult as it is time consuming. The outcome is dictated by time, temperature and touch ... you really have to love the challenge of making good dough to take up the process of baking great bread.”

Jansen is hoping to open Head Tide Oven in two to three weeks.

“This was a tiny little place nobody even noticed,” she said. “Now it will be a place to buy good, fresh baked bread. As soon as you see a sign out there that says 'bread' come on in.

“I just want people to buy my bread.”