Thanks to new Cottage Food Act, home bakers and jammers can sell legally.

A few weeks ago, a tourist in Monterey was in search of a good, crusty bread. She browsed online, found a Facebook page advertising authentic sourdough and called the number to ask, “Is this a bakery?”

The guy who picked up the phone – and who made the round, seductive loaves – isn’t a professional baker. Glen Cockrell is a general contractor, except when he bakes a couple dozen loaves of bread ($5/each) in his kitchen instead.

“When she called, it wasn’t a bakery,” he says. “It wasn’t Friday.”

His Carmel Valley Country Bread operates out of one of a growing number of home-turned-commercial kitchens. Most of them work like this: Sales are based on Facebook and word of mouth, cooks and bakers prep food only to order, and they’re not making much money.

California’s Cottage Food Act, as AB 1616 is known, took effect Jan. 1, 2013. Since then, small-time food-makers have been getting registered with county health departments.

There are 45 registered cottage food producers in Monterey County, about half of them bakeries in Salinas and South County like Daddy’s Panaderia, Batter Up and Da-Liz-ious Cake Creations.

There’s also an inventory of local honey, cake pops, and vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free energy balls made with flax.

Even the people at the Monterey County Health Department are happy, because California’s Cottage Food Act permits only a short list of items that are pretty much foolproof when it comes to food safety: nuts, dried fruit, baked goods without custard fillings, vinegar, mustard, popcorn, coffee, tea and spices. “It’s foods that don’t need refrigeration,” says supervising environmental health specialist Susan Rimando. “That’s what home-style kitchens can accommodate.”

She’s inspected about a dozen of the larger producers, who are permitted to do wholesale business; the others registered just by filling out forms and can sell only directly to customers.

Yaya Porto-Bainbridge stopped working as a DLI instructor to stay home with her new daughter, and started baking variations on Brazilian family recipes. She uses creamed passionfruit in her shortbread cookies ($20/dozen) and firm, fudgy caramel balls called brigadeiros ($18/dozen). They take three days to make, since she starts by making her own condensed milk. “If you buy it, it will be too sweet and crystallize too fast,” she explains.

For now, she’s barely covering the cost of ingredients, but Porto-Bainbridge hopes to transform her home bakery into a viable business. Same for Cockrell, who’s experimenting with baking as a career move. “It started as a hobby,” he says. “It’s not construction, but I’m still making something. If I can remodel a kitchen, I should be able to make a loaf of bread.”

He can – but he can only make about 20 a day, which is just enough to cover the cost of his ingredients. (Cottage Food producers can sell only up to $45,000 worth of homemade goods, but the producers I spoke with aren’t even close.)

According to the California Department of Public Health’s guidelines, once the operation exceeds the gross sales volume established in the law, they must move to a commercial processing facility and register with the CDPH.

The law is supposed to help small entrepreneurial foodmakers get into the business without the high upfront costs of commercial kitchens. But while a few of these fringey businesses aim to grow, some are hoping to stay tiny and operate exclusively out of their homes.

Anita Joshi started selling focaccias for $9 out of the tiny kitchen in her Monterey studio apartment when she was unemployed. Then she got a full-time job in nonprofit development. She keeps Foc Yeah! going on the weekends – and now has orders from Florida and Canada, thanks to people scouting her out online.

She tracks her expenses meticulously in a spreadsheet, which shows she’s sold 47 focaccias covered in a wonderfully aromatic rosemary-garlic-olive oil spread and miscellaneous veggies plucked from the community garden at her alma mater, the Monterey Institute of International Studies. She’s made a net profit of $51 – not counting dozens of hours of labor.

“It’s definitely not profitable,” Joshi says. “I’m doing it because I believe in supporting local, independent baked goods. As a society, we’ve become used to feeding ourselves mass-produced foods.”

She’s long made focaccias for potlucks and parties, but having a customer base appear at her doorstep makes her feel like a food revolutionary on some level.

“I get to have this face-to-face interaction with my customers, most of whom are my friends, or become friends,” she says. “It brings in the human element.”

There’s a similar vibe at Hidden Fortress Micro Farm in Royal Oaks, where Amelia Loftus and her husband are trying to make a living off their 3-acre farm. Loftus stays home and guards their 40 chickens from wily bobcats and other predators, roasts coffee ($10/12 ounces) and makes jam.

“This year is make or break. I have to either make money or get a job,” Loftus says. “It’s about food independence, and keeping the money more local.”

Good, lofty ideas – if there’s enough to be made for foodies to live on.