Broadway couple bakes bagels in Kila

Bagels and Broadway are cultural staples of New York City. They're not quite what you'd expect to find in Kila, Montana.

Nonetheless, a small bakery called Big Sky Bagels opened west of Kalispell last summer.

Lizzie Webb and Scoob Decker are Montana natives and the masterminds behind the unorthodox business.

Decker hails from Kalispell and graduated from Flathead High School. Webb grew up in Cut Bank.

Their careers as performers took the married couple from the Big Sky to the Big Apple. Decker has been a professional actor for about eight years, and Webb worked as a musician, director, conductor and pianist for a decade and a half.

They traveled the world on national and international tours of shows such as "The Wizard of Oz," performing as far away as China, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

But the COVID-19 pandemic forced the pair off the stage and into their Kila home.

Webb said she was one week away from starting a national tour when Broadway canceled all of its shows, and rehearsals are only just starting to get off the ground again.

The creative couple endeavored to find a way to keep themselves busy — and pay the bills — during their theater hiatus.

They casually experimented with a few different options in their kitchen, like brewing their own kombucha and learning to cook dishes from different Asian countries.

When they landed on sourdough starter, they found a winning recipe.

Sourdough bread quickly took over their kitchen and expanded beyond it. Webb said the couple ended up with so much sourdough, "it was literally exploding in our bathtub."

"It was starting to get a little bit overwhelming," she recalled.

Instead of bread, which took a lot of time and space to bake, they decided to use the sourdough to bake bagels. In the time it took to bake a loaf of sourdough bread, they found they could make three dozen sourdough bagels.

And the sky was the limit when it came to bagel flavors.

Big Sky Bagels offer 120 different bagel varieties in avant-garde flavors such as lemon lavender honey, cookies and cream, and Flathead cherry. Their everything bagel is their best-seller, but their pretzel bagels and even their plain bagels are popular, too.

"We have some really wild flavors," Webb said.

These days, she's churning out 20 to 25 dozen bagels per day, but she said her record is 50 dozen in 24 hours.

That's a little more than Webb and Decker can eat by themselves.

They secured a cottage license, which allows Big Sky Bagels to sell products from their home kitchen without needing a commercial space.

They sell their baked goods at the Whitefish Farmers Market and the Clark Fork Market in Missoula. Big Sky Bagels also offers home delivery in the Flathead and Missoula.

However, they don't offer a pickup location, and there aren't any plans right now to expand beyond their log cabin in Kila.

"We are just a home-based business that kind of took off," Webb said.

Webb and Decker personally carry out every step in the bagel-baking process, from feeding the sourdough, to sprinkling the seasoning, to delivering the bagels.

Webb said they enjoy working together, so they don't want to build the business any bigger than it is right now.

Plus, as theater productions get underway once more, both Webb and Decker plan to return to the stage. They hope to perform in the winter and return home to Big Sky Bagels in the summer.

"We'll continue doing bagels for as long as we can," Webb said.

Delivery orders can be placed at bigskybagels.net.

Reporter Bret Anne Serbin may be reached at 406-758-4459 or bserbin@dailyinterlake.com.