My bread journey… anyone can learn to bake bread!
You may have read one of my previous posts about my personal history with bread, but today I wanted to share a few more details. I grew up in western Kansas surrounded by "amber waves of grain". My own family, as well as all of my extended family, farmed for a living, mostly commodity crops. I think I had only one relative, one of my uncles, that didn't farm (he worked for the government in a capacity I was always puzzled by). I honestly didn't know there were other ways that people actually made livings outside of farming or serving the farm community. While my mother liked to bake, she didn't make bread beyond her cinnamon rolls and her crescent rolls. It was my older cousin that actually taught me (at around the age 10) to make bread. I'll never forget the experience.
While I didn't make it often, and for quite a few years not at all, but when I was dating my future husband I tried to impress him with the fact that I knew how to bake bread. I never demonstrated that ability to him, so after we were married he challenged me to actually prove that I could do it. I found a recipe that seemed achievable ("Sixty minute rolls" - are you kidding?? can you really make bread worth eating in 60 minutes? - the food industry seems to think so). Obviously those rolls didn't impress him much and he challenged me to learn to make bread like they have in Europe. As I began to research how I was going to make some bread worth eating, I encountered the bread gurus of the early 90's--Daniel Leader, Nancy Silverton, etc.--and I read every book I could get my hands on. These were the years prior to the vast network of knowledge one can attain in an instant via the internet. I finally got enough courage to make my own sourdough starter in the year 1993 . That makes "Gerard" 29 years old!! I followed every step in Nancy Silverton's book, LaBrea Breads, and taught myself how to make good sourdough bread. After spending some time in Europe, it became my dream to own a little bread bakery. I attended the San Francisco Baking Institute and learned some techniques of professional bakers. I had never worked in a bakery and my only exposure to the food service industry was as a waitress through my college years. We were young with big dreams and no fears when we opened the Artisan Bread Shop in Las Vegas.
After we moved to Texas (Rich had to get a “real” job to pay the REAL bills), I always said that when the girls grew up and we didn’t have to depend on it for a living I wanted to own a bread shop again. Next time I was going to do it differently – I wanted to live next door to it and I didn’t really want to deal with employees.
Fast forward almost 25 years, through all those years of baking bread for my family, teaching many people to bake bread, toting “Gerard” across the country in a cooler with a bag of flour for feeding him on every move we made, I was still making bread the Nancy Silverton way—which is NOT the easy way. It involves an entirely different sourdough hydration and a lot more physical activity in making the dough. I didn’t catch onto the “stretch and fold, gently handling” approach until just recently. I was pretty skeptical when both of my daughters didn’t adopt the techniques I had used all those years. I didn’t believe it was possible to develop the gluten in the dough which gives it the structure we want without a lot more effort. I finally picked up a book at the library, Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish, read it cover to cover, and tried out his approach. OH MY GOODNESS—this bread is amazing. ANYONE can make this bread!!
So now here we are—I live next door to my bake house at Gathering Grains Farm, and I don’t have any employees (yet). I’m selling bread and getting ready to teach classes. While I really love baking bread, it is my greater desire to equip others to bake their own bread! And while this bread is life-sustaining (for our physical bodies), I desire that you will consider that the Bread of Life Is Life Giving!
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