Tooth Butter is a small cottage bakery in Champaign-Urbana, rooted in the use of local and regional ingredients. We draw inspiration from the changing seasons and the community we live in.

‘tooth butter’ means having enough butter on your bread that you leave teeth marks.

It’s a danish thing. I learned about it right around the time I was falling in love with baking sourdough. It felt like the perfect phrase to capture my affection for butter, a lifestyle of butter eating, a celebration of all things butter. It was one of the first names that came to mind when dreaming up this thing I’m doing.

Hannah Fink Baker Tooth Butter Food Systems Advocate Champaign Urbana

Bakery Using Locally Sourced Ingredients Champaign Urbana

Organic Focused Bakery Using Locally Sourced Ingredients Champaign Urbana

Hi, I’m Hannah

Baker, Owner of Tooth Butter & Local Food Systems Advocate

I have been a baker for nearly ten years, and a local food systems advocate for just as long. As a young college student in Nashville, TN, I discovered that food is my medicine—and that my own hands could create the care my body and mind needed. This revelation guided me into community with local mentors, growers, and producers focused on regenerative agriculture and nourishing their neighbors with the gift of health and hospitality. My world lit up with a passion for food and a desire to know, truly know, the hands that grow it. When I returned home to the Midwest in 2019, that passion became a mission.

my mission

to reimagine the region’s agricultural and natural abundance—not just as sustenance, but as a powerful expression of care, culture, and belonging.

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Lessons in love, loaves and local food

My journey with food has certain timestamps that I feel are important for me to relish in. I am reminded of the mentors and deeply gracious love felt from being part of a food-connected community. I learned generous hospitality through years of working in catering and events—how food and service can be an offering. I learned that seasonal fruits and vegetables are a wellspring of creative inspiration while spending every weekend at my local farmers market. I learned to ferment for health and pleasure from my dear friend Leah. And I learned just how much I love naturally leavened bread during a stretch as an early-morning bakery delivery driver.

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The year I met my flour

Then came 2020. Holed up in my apartment, I dove into a self-taught crash course in pastries and bread. While grocery store shelves were stripped of traditional white flour, I was building the romantic relationship of early morning, country road drives an hour north to Janie’s Mill in Ashkum, IL—an organic wheat farm—to pick up flour and say hello to the farmers and millers behind it. Nothing has propelled me into the creation of Tooth Butter quite like that: building a real relationship with the people and land who grow my flour.

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Buttermilk Sourdough Loaf Using Midwest Grains Champaign Urbana

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A Web of Interconnection

I want people to consider each component of a baked good as they take a bite, relishing in the balance of flavors but also, knowing that their resources have gone back into the community to support local laborers, myself included, trying to fulfill their passions. Community Supported Baking, there’s a term for it.

Here’s how I see a meal on my table: braised beef from the farmer I chat with every week at the market—conversations that drift from government corruption to natural fibers. Spring greens and carrots from an organic farm down the street, one devoted to fighting food insecurity. Toasted bread made with my own hands, using grains with identity. A thick slice of good butter, finished with sea salt and local honey. A pint glass of kombucha brewed by dear friends to wash it all down.

Meals like this make me feel nourished and abundant. They reflect the web of interconnection we share as food eaters and food makers. I hope to play my part in strengthening that web—encouraging deeper ties within our local food systems and, ideally, getting more people on board with butter thick enough to leave teeth marks.

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local partners who’ve helped me flourish

Cloud Mountain Kombucha

This amazing crew has been my host for pop-ups and bread subscription pick-ups from the very beginning. The most gracious hosts and their space has been invaluable for building the Tooth Butter community. My first bake ever as a business was literally apple pies because Kyle gave me the abundance of apples from his trees.
Delight Flower Farm

The gals at this flower farm provide me with most of the florals I use for cakes, they host me for the Spring Plant Sale, and soon we will be collaborating on a floral decorating cake workshop. They are dreamers and fans of creative collaboration just like me.
Common Group Co-Operative

Sarah Buckman welcomed me in as a teacher at the Co-Op starting in spring of 2024 and has helped me build a solid foundation as a baking educator in the community. With Sarah’s support I have been able to teach everything from cookies and pie dough to sourdough bread workshops.