We recently connected with Joseph Magnelli and have shared our conversation below.
Joseph , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you come up with the idea for your business?
In the winter of 2022 I was given an opportunity to run my first kitchen. My roommate’s boss purchased a local pizza joint that was attached to his current business. He needed someone to run the old pizza place while it was being phased out, and create the menu for the new restaurant and run the new kitchen once it was open. My roommate knew I loved to cook and loved my cooking, he also knew my dream was to one day run a restaurant. He suggested I meet with his boss. Unfortunately, other than being a dishwasher in my teenage years, I had never actually worked in a restaurant. However, my dad was cook and chef at various restaurants and I had spent a lot of my childhood in those restaurants learning the ways of the kitchen. In my high school years, most of my friends worked in the restaurant industry so I always spent time with cooks, servers, bartenders, chefs, etc. During my time the Army, I learned leadership skills, how to work long hours without issue, and how to get along with people from all sorts of backgrounds. Did this experience mean I was suited to run a kitchen? Probably not. But sometimes you gotta take chances and the owner liked my lack of of experience. We were set to get to work in December of 2022 and the new restaurant was expected to open in February 2023.
In hindsight, taking this job was both the worst, and best decision I had ever made. I was asked to start a month earlier than anticipated and met my new staff in early November. To make a long story short, issues with construction and city permits made the quick turn around we had hoped for an impossible task. I was expected to phase out the old restaurant in two or three months but ended up running it for seven months. In those seven months I rarely had a day off. I worked 10-16 hours a day, six or seven days a week. Running a restaurant is no easy task but running a restaurant knowing that any day we could get our closing date was even more difficult. During my time in the old kitchen we must have had 15 different closing dates. We also had floods, power outages, staff issues, construction issues, complaints from the community, and every other problem you could possibly think of. It was one of the most difficult working environments I had ever experienced. It was definitely a trial by fire and when the doors finally closed in the summer of 2023, I knew I was ready and able to run my own kitchen.
When construction finally started, I was able to deep dive into R&D for the new menu. My sous chef and I used my home kitchen to come up with a new menu. When I wasn’t doing R&D, I was helping out in the owners store that was attached to the restaurant. This went on for a month or two before the menu was finalized. Construction was still taking forever so the owner decided to have me work full time in his store until the kitchen was finished. I understood the decision, but I wasn’t happy with it. I was hired to run a kitchen and pursue my passion, instead I was stocking shelves and cleaning a liquor store. During this time I could feel a tension between myself and the owner. I was visibly unhappy in my current situation and his plans for the kitchen and menu were constantly changing. He was going in a direction that no longer excited me and we didn’t seem to agree on much anymore. In January 2024 we finally had the discussion that I would be temporarily laid off until construction was done so I could be back in the kitchen. He suggested I get a part time job to hold me over for that time and I did. That was the last conversation I would have with him. Two weeks later I saw he was looking for a new head chef on indeed.
It was this situation that led me to say no more bosses. It was time to take all that I had learned and pursue my passion of making pizza. I wanted to do it in my own way, I wanted something I could be proud of, something with real ingredients and made the right way. I wanted to bring something new and exciting to town, something that it had never seen before. Most of all, I wanted to take a chance on myself. It was at this time that Defiant Baking Company was born.
Joseph , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My name is Joseph Magnelli. Im 37 years old and I make sourdough focaccia and Pizza al Taglio in Lodi, Ca. I’m happily married to my amazing wife. I love punk rock, skateboarding, traveling, cooking, running, hiking and playing with our three dogs. I dislike rude people, arrogance, pretentiousness, any sort of authority figure, and glitter.
My early life was an absolute shit show. I was mostly a latchkey kid and knew at an early age that life was hard and unforgiving. I was raised around addicts, criminals, outlaws, and everyone else that society likes to throw away. I was around violence a lot in my youth. I have been chased by street gangs, beaten and robbed as a child, jumped on many occasions, and even witnessed/been a victim of domestic violence. Ive been homeless, lived in an illegal trailer park on a pig farm, lived in tent through winter in central Oregon, and lived in a crack house. This was all before I was 18. During these years I found many different ways to mentally escape my surroundings but the ones that stuck with me were music, art, skateboarding, and most important of all cooking. Both of my parents were great cooks. When my dad was cooking, it was different. He would always cook east coast Italian recipes passed down from his mother. From an early age he taught me how to cook many of those dishes and laid the building blocks for my obsession with food. Years later I made him a dinner and he pulled me aside and said ” Joe, I know how to cook a few things really well. But you know how to work with foods Ive never even heard of and this was one of the best meals I’ve ever ate”. Im not sure if he ever knew it but he was the reason I fell in love with food and the reason I knew that one day I would have my own restaurant.
I don’t say any of this to look for sympathy. I say this to let you know where I come from and what those experiences did for me. My childhood taught me to be strong and to never give up. It gave me the strength and wherewithal to accomplish things that are normally not in the cards for someone with my upbringing. I am now a college graduate and a veteran of the US Army. I’m happily married to my best friend and own my own business doing something that I love. Early life was definitely hard, but it shaped me into a person that embraces every challenge as a learning experience. It gave me a defiant attitude that challenges authority and the status quo. But most of all it gave me the understanding that it doesn’t take much to be happy in this life and that you should always appreciate the good things around you, no matter how small they seem to be.
Being a small business owner these days is not easy. But as you can see, there hasn’t been many things in my life that are easy. I feel the skillsets I’ve acquired through my childhood are perfect for running a business. Im able to set a goal and have the tenacity to do whatever it takes to reach that goal. In January 2024 I started Defiant Baking Company and set two goals to reach before 2025. Goal one was to be able to quit my part time job and have Defiant Baking be my main source of income. I didn’t have the funds for the equipment to be making pizza from the start. So, my second goal was to make and sell sourdough focaccia to get my name out there and build a following until I could get my funding together to start selling pizza. By September I was able to quit my part time job and three months after that I had my first pizza pop up. It took a lot of work to reach those goals but because of my past experiences, I knew I had what I needed to make it all happen.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
When I was a kid I spent a lot of time at my grandmas house. Her house was sort of an escape from the rest of my life so I enjoyed going to her house as often as possible. My grandma was a bit of a hoarder and her house was always full of stuff. It was kinda fun to dig through everything and find so many random things to play with. I think I was around nine or ten when I came across a beautiful old Spanish guitar that once belonged to my great-grandmother. I was just getting into music and started to play around with the guitar. Every time I would go to her house I would play it and my grandma would tell me stories about her mom playing the guitar for her as a little girl. When I turned 18 she gave me the guitar, but when I joined the Army a few years later, I left the guitar with my dad to take care of. Eventually the guitar found its way back to me when my dad passed away. After years of neglect it needed a little work so I took it to a friend of mine who was extremely knowledgable about guitars. He had never seen the guitar or heard of the brand so he did some research. Turned out to be very rare and valuable guitar from the 1920’s. It was considered one of the greatest classical guitars ever built.
The timing of this discovery couldn’t have been crazier. I had just been “laid off” from the pizza restaurant and was figuring out ways to get enough money together to start my company. My friend who made the discovery connected me with a guitar buyer and the guitar was worth exactly how much I estimated I needed to start Defiant Baking Company. At first I was questioning wether or not I should sell this family heirloom. It meant a lot to my family and it meant a lot to me. After much consulting, I made the decision to sell. Everyone said the same thing “if your grandma was here she would tell you to sell it to fund your dream” and they were right. So the decision was set. I made the sale and started Defiant Baking Company.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
I started baking during the pandemic just like so many others did. It was a great skillset to have and it was a productive way to pass time. I started with sourdough loaves but I didn’t like how tedious the process was. So I started to play around with other breads until I came across focaccia. I LOVED baking focaccia right from the beginning. The dough was more fun to mix and it was more forgiving. The flavor options were unlimited and I could play around with different thicknesses and still get a solid product. I was hooked on sourdough focaccia.
Once the pandemic was over, I stopped baking all but an occasional loaf here and there. When I started working at the pizza restaurant I thought it would be cool to serve up home made focaccia as a free table bread. Everyone liked the idea so I got to work and figured out a decent focaccia recipe for the restaurant with ingredients we already had on deck. I also played with the idea of making some of our pizzas on a thinner focaccia for my own version of pizza al Taglio. Pizza al Taglio is a roman style pizza that is made in large sheets of a focaccia like crust and sold by the square. I became obsessed wit this style of pizza but when I brought it up to the owner the idea was shot down. I was bummed but started working on a recipe anyways just for fun. Once I was “laid off” and decided to start my own business, I knew I wanted to be the first in Lodi to make this style of pizza. So I got to work on creating a new menu full of interesting and creative pizzas to sell at pizza pop ups here in the central valley.
Everything I make is made from scratch, wether its focaccia or pizza. The dough is made from organic flour sourced from Utah and is naturally leavened with a sourdough starter. My sauce is made with locally sourced olive oil and organic tomatoes from here in northern California. The cheese I use is made 45 minutes away. My belief is that if you keep things simple, master your tools and use quality ingredients your product will be amazing.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.hotplate.com/defiantbakingco
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/defiant_baking/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Defiant-Baking-Co/61565892380860/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Image Credits
Photos of bread, pizza, and guitar are shot by myself. images at pizza pop up and bread baking were photographed by Lindsay Ortez Photography.