The Baker

The bakeries are the reason Carolina Ground exists. Driven by a desire for something more than the industrial commodity white flour that is readily available, less expensive, and easier to work with, these bakeries—often small to medium-size businesses—have passionately embraced our flour with a willingness to engage deeper with their ingredients, allowing the flour to inspire their recipes.

What you will see on the following pages are the old and the new: those of us who have been baking for ten- or twenty-plus years, and a new generation of bakers that has arisen perhaps because of the regional grains movement. I am especially intrigued by this new wave. They embrace regional grains, and the flours—from whole-grain to sifted—ground from them, and they know their grain varieties as if this is the way it has always been. Perhaps because it should have always been this way.

Natural Bridge Bakery

Walnut, North Carolina

It was a simple operation: a masonry oven and a pile of wood, a stone-burr gristmill, grain, and salt. This bakery was witness to my marriage, the birth of my child, my divorce, and my move from Tennessee to North Carolina. I would raise my daughter in tandem with the bakery, our house located just a stone’s throw from its massive brick oven. This was our world, tucked away in the mountains of Western North Carolina. It was its own universe of cultures and dough, kindling and coals, children’s books and beeswax crayons and an array of stuffed animals. It was a life composed by my much younger self, lured by the ancient craft of bread baking.

More than a decade has passed since this was my world, and more than twenty years since I began piecing together that dream. The sign for Natural Bridge Bakery still hangs from the wooden beam that supports the large metal roof, covering the outdoor wood-fired oven. It is a reminder of its beginnings. The bakehouse has since morphed into an incubator space producing three more bakeries—Dave Bauer’s Farm and Sparrow (see this page), Tara Jensen’s Smoke Signals (see this page), and Brennan Johnson’s Walnut Schoolhouse (see this page). Although our ingredients and techniques have been similar, the aromas that have defined this baking space have changed with each baker.

Farm and Sparrow

Mars Hill, North Carolina

Dave Bauer was one of the eight bakers who came to the many meetings that led to the launch of Carolina Ground. Eleven years my junior, Dave first launched his Farm and Sparrow out of my bakery space. He was the next-generation baker. What I had gleaned from Alan Scott—the concept of a microbakery, of natural leavening, wood-fired oven, and gristmill—Dave took to another level. When he eventually moved into his own space, the oven he had built for the bakery, although inspired by Alan Scott, was a wholly new design by Antoine Guerlain—a massive oven fitting sixty-three loaves at a clip with three doors, side by side, to minimize heat loss while loading. Focusing the lens even more on flavor, he sourced heritage varieties of grain for seed to be planted. And he planted seeds in his front yard with the intention of bulking up his supply to ultimately hand over to a farmer. Turkey Red was the first variety he had a farmer grow for him, in Old Fort, North Carolina. He purchased a mill with a sifter from Austria, so he could produce both whole-grain and sifted flours for his bakery. And he added laminated pastry—wood-fired croissants and puff pastry—to his offerings. He built up a team of bakers: milling, laminating pastry dough, mixing bread dough, and delivering products to the booming farmers’ markets of Asheville, as well as to restaurants and grocery stores. He and a chef-friend opened a wood-fired pizza restaurant, enabling him to pair his flavor-forward flours with seasonal local ingredients.

And then after thirteen years of baking, Dave paused and reflected deeply on what he had been working toward for over a decade, and he realized it all came back to the seed. In 2018, he closed his bakery. He got married and moved into a hundred-year-old church in Mars Hill, North Carolina, reopening Farm and Sparrow in its current iteration, which he describes as an “Appalachian-based seed project, grain collection, and mill.” For Dave, above and beyond his seed work, what inspired his breads and pastry and pasta, driving all if it, has always been flavor.

Tara Jensen

Pound, Virginia

My first introduction to Tara Jensen was as an artist. She was working for Dave Bauer of Farm and Sparrow, bagging granola and selling at farmers’ markets. I was looking for an art teacher for my daughter, and Dave suggested Tara, who had recently returned from Japan, where she’d put on two art shows of soft sculpture and taught workshops on sewing and papier-mâché. At the time, I figured baking was just a job for her and art was her real passion.

Growing up, Tara had always done art. She figured she would go to art school, but the art world felt too competitive to her, and she ended up choosing a small, more holistic liberal arts college in northern Maine. She majored in human ecology. This multidisciplinary degree is the study of people and their relationship to their environment, be it a man-made environment or a natural one. And what better environment for the study of human ecology than a bakery. Bakeries are common ground. They can alter the social landscape of a town, create place out of space. Tara got her first job in a bakery while in college. The bakery was owned by a husband-and-wife team; the wife was also a midwife, and many of the customers were pregnant women and babies. It was a social space, both for the employees and the community. Tara fell in love with the potential of what could happen within those walls.

After college, she moved to Vermont, got a job at Red Hen Baking Co., and began a crash course into the world of artisan bread. She would learn the discipline, repetition, and quiet beauty of production baking. She worked in the bakery by day and made art at night. These two worlds—art and baking—were separate. After six or seven years of production baking, she moved down to Asheville and naturally fell in with the city’s artist community. At the same time, she was selling baked goods for Dave at farmers’ markets and observing people’s reactions to food. “Watching people eat the food you made—it was such a gratifying experience,” she says. “It wasn’t a composed, intellectual response, it was the body’s response, which is what I ultimately became more interested in.”

Tara would become increasingly jaded by the art gallery world; to her, it felt uninspired and lacking substance. At a certain point, she declared “no more art,” and in a dramatic gesture, she burned all her paintbrushes. She began dating a fellow farmer vendor from the farmers’ market, eventually started farming with him, and then began her own little baking operation, which she named Smoke Signals. She baked out of a pizza shop in Marshall after hours and sold her breads and pastry at the farmers’ market. By this point, my relationship with Tara had evolved into a friendship. She’d launched Smoke Signals just a few months after we’d begun milling, and she used our flour exclusively. When the farmers’ market season started to wane, I was ready to hire an assistant to our miller and asked Tara if she wanted to join our team. She readily accepted the offer. The chance to deepen her knowledge of baking through a closer proximity to the source of her ingredients excited her. She worked in the mill room one day a week, and she farmed, and she baked. She also test-baked flours for the mill. And if we made a mistake in the mill room, she was the best candidate to run to her kitchen with some odd flour and inspire us with the incredible baked goods that resulted.

My bakery space had been sitting vacant for three years. It felt lifeless and sad. I showed Tara the space. She would transform this place, infusing it with new life and aromas and creativity that is uniquely Tara. She thought she had left the artist at the door, but one day, she started rolling out a large sheet of pie dough to cut into pie tops and bottoms. Then she just kept cutting and realized she could make various shapes and arrange them into layers. She loves surface design and texture and thought she could layer the shapes in interesting ways, which she documented on social media. At the time, nobody had ever seen a pie top like that, or at least it was yet not as prevalent in the social media landscape. It caught a lot of people’s attention—including, fortunately, that of the editors at Bon Appétit. This ability to make art with food—with pie dough—inspired her to use baking as her canvas. Initially, this was baking art with a focus on what it would look like, but eventually, it became the art of baking for flavor and taste.

Teaching came next. She began with pie because it was something she could fit within the window of time between farming and baking for market. For her first pie workshop, she chose the least intimidating thing she could do: apple pie. Maybe eight people showed up, mostly people from Marshall, and they all had a great time. She decided to do more of these workshops, bringing in various elements from her background in art, sculpture, and human ecology, which incorporated value systems, use of resources, and lifestyle. She found that being in the position of having to explain baking to others made her a better baker herself. Having to explain the value of growing practices and fresh flour made her more passionate about fresh flour and flavor and gave her the tools to tacitly affect the positive change she believes is essential for our planet. Her workshops evolved into multiday retreats, drawing participants from all over the United States. Now many years later, Tara is an author, mother, and wife and teaching workshops and weeklong retreats using her mobile wood-fired oven.

When I ask her about her path, she tells me, “This is my lifelong craft, something I will be working on and tinkering with and exploring every day until I’m done walking on the planet.” And then she adds, “When I first started working at Red Hen, we loaded everything with this huge wooden peel, and I still remember what that felt like as a young woman standing in the middle of this huge long crazy tool with all this bread on one end and this hot oven and the rhythm of moving the peel in and out, just this feeling that this is the position that I’m supposed to be in. I say this is my lifelong practice because I feel like I’m still understanding why I’m in this position or what I have of value to offer, as it is constantly changing. But that balance point, it was intoxicating finding myself in this great fit.”

Ashley Capps

Asheville, North Carolina

The first time I met pastry chef Ashley Capps, she was rolling out dough. This was when she worked at Farm and Sparrow Bakery. I was meeting with Dave, and I remember noticing how Ashley used her entire body as she rolled and folded large sheets of dough layered with butter. A few years later, shortly after I’d launched Carolina Ground, she reached out to me to ask for flour. She was working with Chef John Fleer at the time, as part of the opening team for Rhubarb, Fleer’s farm-to-table restaurant in downtown Asheville. Having worked for Dave, she knew the significance of good flour. Another few years later, images of iconic Southern desserts she’d crafted for Chef Elliott Moss’s Buxton Hall BBQ started appearing on my social media feed, with Carolina Ground tagged.

Since 2008, when the idea for Carolina Ground was first conceived, Asheville has evolved into a dining destination. Ashley has been an integral part of putting our small mountain city on the food map, and in doing so, she brought Carolina Ground into those kitchens. She insisted on using our flour—and other stone-ground regional flours—challenging the precept that flour is just there to carry eggs and butter and other additions.

When I ask Ashley what she loves most about baking, her first response is, “That’s like asking, what’s your favorite movie?” But after taking a moment, she tells me that what she loves most about baking right now is “the fact that I know that every day is the same and different. So every day is the same: you put on your favorite apron and you put your hair up and you put on your favorite playlist and you clean up your station, you weigh out your ingredients. So there are things that are the same and that ground you and anchor you, and there are things that are like, ‘Oh, it’s spring, now we have strawberries, now it’s fall and we have local pumpkins,’ so it’s like there’s this awesome dichotomy of everything is the same and everything is different.”

Walnut Schoolhouse

Walnut, North Carolina

Brennan Johnson is the fourth baker to occupy the space that was once Natural Bridge Bakery, and in his hands it has become part classroom, part community gathering place, and part bakery. Brennan grew up in an environment where baking bread was closely aligned with the concepts of community and spirituality. His father was a Methodist pastor who started baking bread as an outlet after years of pastoral work and built an oven in the backyard of Brennan’s childhood suburban Minnesota home.

For a summer job, his dad suggested Brennan use their backyard oven to bake bread to sell at farmers’ markets. With Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread to guide him, he launched his first bakery the summer of his junior year of high school.

Baking followed him to the small liberal arts college where he baked between classes. When his father received a grant to study community brick ovens in Western Europe, he brought Brennan with him. “An incredibly formative trip,” Brennan reflects, “To a young American boy, especially one that had grown up in the Midwest where culture always seems to take the longest to permeate, seeing that there’s this wisdom in older traditions, and seeing what that can do for community and regions, and also to see that there are all of these older cultures surrounding bread; I think in America, we are lacking in terms of the wisdom of long traditions. My favorite bakers and chefs and millers are taking older ideas and traditions and putting them into context in the modern day, bringing them to life again.”

I ask Brennan what he loves about baking, and in his answer, I see how intrinsic baking has been to his life: “It’s always for me been sort of a refuge, a sacred space, an opportunity to remove myself from the day-to-day stress or the everyday tasks—when I was growing up, it was my social anxiety; when I was in college, it was the stress of homework and being in college; and the real world has its own set of challenges. But baking has always been this place where I can just simply let that go and work with my hands and listen to the bread. I don’t have a mixer in this space, and I’m just using sourdough and I’m just sort of guiding the bread along and listening to it, in conversation with it, and it’s been a chance to sort of exit from the day-to-day world and just have a conversation with a different way of being or a different way of living, the aliveness and the activeness of the dough itself—it’s really beautiful. I don’t always get to grasp that when I’m trying to make a living off of it, too—that’s the irony of the whole thing. But that’s what I love most about it.”

Flat Rock Village Bakery

Flat Rock, North Carolina

In mid to late June, just after harvest, samples of new-crop bread wheat arrive in the mill room. If the grain looks promising, I send part of the sample to the lab and the rest I mill into whole-grain and high-extraction flour. I then drive forty minutes south to Flat Rock Village Bakery, where the majority of our baking tests are done. Depending on the year, this can be a few bakes or numerous bakes using various iterations and/or blends in order to find our way with the year’s harvest. Bakers Daniel Goodson and Jon Hartzler take the lead. Because this will be the flour they will be using for the next nine to twelve months, these bakers have a vested interest in the outcome.

Flat Rock Village Bakery co-owner Dave Workman is one of the bakers who came to Waynesville in 2008 for that first field day. He also came to the many meetings that followed to discuss the possibility of launching this mill. Eight of us bakers pulled our chairs into a circle and imagined what this could look like: the chance to lessen our food miles, to know our growers, to engage in the process. We considered the challenges, too—the few challenges we understood at the time—not the least of which was, what if the flour doesn’t perform in the bakery? Baking is hard work, and to add to the mix, the possibility that one’s key ingredient may not work is no small thing. But from the moment we began milling in 2012, Dave shifted all of their whole-grain flours to Carolina Ground and created a bread with our high-extraction 85 bread flour that would become their signature North Carolina Sourdough (see this page for the recipe). “In one sense, it was an easy decision,” he explains, “as for Flat Rock Village Bakery, it has always been about the ingredients.” Flat Rock was the first bakery to make such a bold commitment. I ask Dave why he stepped in with both feet—because at the time, this really was no-man’s-land—and he replies, “As nervous as I was, it seemed like a good thing to stand behind, in the sense that it seemed important to what we were doing as a small business.” Dave has a degree in economics, and so I'm curious what drew him to baking. He tells me he liked that “baking turned nothing into something, and it brought pleasure to people.” Dave spent the first eleven years working as a baker for others, until 2005 when he partnered with Scott Unfried, the founder of Flat Rock Village Bakery.

Scott opened the bakery in 2001. His degree was in accounting, though he realized, while working as an editor of math software in the San Francisco Bay Area, that he was not suited for a desk job; in his free time, he visited bakeries. He also sought out Alan Scott and worked with him building an oven at a residential location in Sonoma County, took baking classes at the California Culinary Academy, and staged at Wild Flour Breads, a wood-fired destination bakery and garden located in Freestone, California. Eventually, a move back east to be closer to family brought him to North Carolina.

Inspired by the concept of a destination bakery, Scott opened Flat Rock Village Bakery in the tiny historic village of Flat Rock, North Carolina, which is home to the Flat Rock Playhouse, North Carolina’s state theater, and to the Carl Sandburg Home, a National Historic Site. At the time, the village of Flat Rock had no center; Flat Rock Village Bakery became its nucleus. Herein lies the transformative nature of a bakery—it can change a place.

Initially the bakery just had a walk-up window where customers could come to buy three varieties of hand-kneaded, wood-fired-oven-baked bread. Indoor seating and then outdoor seating were eventually added. And the menu grew to include pastry and pizza and more varieties of bread. Scott's vision was a place for people to gather for coffee and a scone, to meet friends for a pizza, or to pick up their weekly bread.

Scott and Dave’s partnership enabled them to expand their concept into a restaurant in the adjacent town of Hendersonville, where there were very few options for quality food at the time. They eventually opened Fletcher Village Bakery in Fletcher, on the northeast end of the county, which had none of the charm of Flat Rock. It was to be their commissary bakery, enabling them to move pastry production out of the cramped Flat Rock space. But the bakery in Fletcher, like the original space, grew into more than that, with added seating and a full lunch menu, motivated by the same intentions of creating a place where very little existed—or, just as Dave had described baking, “turning nothing into something.”

Choosing to create new pathways, like opening a bakery on a less traveled road, and committing to flour grown and ground regionally, instead of taking the worn path of business as usual, is a transformative act; it is taking an active role in creating the place we wish to live in.

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There’s a little fairy-tale twist to this story. Scott and I were briefly the only two wood-fired-oven businesses in Western North Carolina. We maintained a mutual admiration and respect for each other over the years, though we rarely saw one another; we were both busy running our respective bakeries and being parents. But twelve years after meeting, we ran into each other at a cyclocross clinic. (Cyclocross is a form of bicycle racing, sort of like a steeplechase on bikes—there’s something about bakers and bikes.) Neither of us knew the other was a cyclist, let alone racing cyclocross (this was a very brief stint for me). A few weeks later, we ran into each other at his bakery. I showed up to get bread from Dave for a demonstration and talk I was giving, and Scott was working at the bench, shaping loaves, something he had not done in years, but they were down a baker and he was filling in. We decided to share a ride to Winston-Salem for the next cyclocross race. And then we began dating. And now he is my husband, which has been the biggest (and most wonderful) transformation in both our lives.

OWL Bakery

Asheville, North Carolina

Maia Surdam started baking while working on her PhD in US history. Her gravitation from the intellectual toward the tactile began with gardening and then developed into an interest in cooking, as she learned to cook the foods that grew in her garden. And from cooking came an interest in learning to bake. These activities helped her stay sane during the academic rigors of her graduate work, which focused on industrial agriculture and its effect on rural communities and on the people doing the work of farming. As she delved into the history of farming and farm workers, including that of the migrant families and women and children and older people who worked in the fields together, and explored how domestic responsibilities and manual labor intertwined in the fields, she herself experienced the visceral work of growing, cooking, eating, and sharing food. She had every intention of continuing on an academic track and becoming a professor, but as she was writing her dissertation in 2008, the economy crashed, derailing her well-laid plans.

A move to Asheville was prompted by her her partner, Dave (a historian who she’d met in her graduate program), who had friends in the area. After completing her dissertation, with a historian’s craving to understand the history of Appalachia—the region in which they had chosen to reside—Maia began reading the Foxfire books. Published in the 1970s, these books tell of mountain wisdom, community, and self sufficiency. Maia learned about the tradition of making an apple stack cake, which, she says, “really appealed to me because it’s such a story of people being resourceful. This is a simple cake of many layers that would be made for a celebration. Whoever was hosting the celebration would provide the filling, and the people that came to the celebration would bring the layers, so the whole community together made this cake. I thought it was such a beautiful tradition.”

Soon after, Maia picked up a copy of the Mountain Xpress, Western North Carolina’s weekly arts and entertainment newspaper; on the front cover was a picture of Susannah Gebhart, founder of OWL Bakery, holding an apple stack cake, with the headline “Preserving Appalachian Flavors.” The story’s focus was the Appalachian Food Storybank, which Susannah had started in 2011 as an initiative of Slow Food Asheville’s Heritage Foods Committee. Susannah had studied food anthropology in college, and while living and working in Sylva, North Carolina, she’d gotten to know the old timers at the farmers’ market. After moving to Asheville, she learned that many of them had passed away; regretting not having the opportunity to hear more of their stories and record them, she began the oral history project. Maia had learned to do oral histories during graduate school; seeing the article, she thought, “Here’s a baker who was interested in history and also doing oral history projects about food, which is where my interests had all come together at that point in my life.” Maia reached out to Susannah, and they hit it off.

At the time, Susannah’s OWL Bakery (OWL stands for Old World Levain) was just her, working out of a tiny rented kitchen, with weekly offerings and a rich and poetic newsletter. On Valentine’s Day, when Susannah had more orders than she could fulfill by herself, she hired Maia to assist. Valentine’s Day happens to be Maia’s birthday, so it was especially significant, and the two started working together regularly after that. Maia began helping out as Susannah’s business grew, and Susannah told Maia about her dream to turn OWL into a brick and mortar bakery. Maia became a partner in the business, and in the spring of 2016, they opened their newly expanded iteration of OWL.

For the first nine to twelve months the bakery was open, Maia spent most evenings mixing bread dough. She embraced the repetition of it, got to know bread, and found that she loved it, and although she learned how to make everything they offered, it was bread she ended up drawn to the most. As a historian, the act of baking bread brought in a whole new dimension for her: “It’s history that’s at the core of human civilization, and it’s visceral and has to do with bodies and myth and labor and all of these things that I’d studied in school, but so much more expansive than that. What I’ve learned about industrialization in terms of the vegetable industry in the Midwest and Texas helps me understand where we are with bread and milling and growing grains and what was lost. When farming was more localized, those activities brought different people together and so the farmers were not disconnected from the people that ran the mill or sold their product. There’s this social cohesion that really became part of making food in agricultural communities, and then as industrialization came, not only did it change how labor was structured and what the daily lives of workers looked like, but it also changed the social fabric. I think that’s one of the things that seems really rich and rewarding—that we can look back and understand more about how people used to do things and choose which methods could be sustainable for the world we’re living in today, and then think about how that can enrich our connection to each other in different areas. History is not just about getting stuck in the past; it can provide a map for us. for the present”

Asheville Bread Festival

The first Asheville Bread Festival took place in 2004. Husband and wife bakers Steve Bardwell and Gail Lunsford organized this one-day event, inviting bakers from throughout Western North Carolina. None of us bakers quite knew what this would be, but we brought bread, and customers came—an overwhelming number of hungry, very excited customers. It was clear that this was going to become something. Steve organized a dinner for all the bakers that evening, after the festival wrapped up. It was the first time many of us had ever met. The night began with polite exchanges; this was our competition. But as wineglasses were filled, conversations began to unfold. A common thread connected all of us—we were bakers, that unique slice of humans who would choose to rise before the sun and work long hours for a humble living. We shared a common respect for one another and became friends that evening. Fast-forward five years, and those same bakers would pull chairs into a circle and discuss the idea of working directly with grain growers here in the South. Three years after that, Carolina Ground was born.

Steve and Gail have since stepped down as the festival’s organizers and I’ve taken an active role in their stead, along with my cohorts Cathy Cleary, Rich Orris, and Joe Bowie. The event has grown considerably over the years, expanding to include a bread fair, workshops for home bakers, and a day-long master class for professional bakers. We are striving to bring diversity to this festival, hoping to cultivate a space that draws more people of color and women in the roles of instructor, vendor, and/or participant, as the demographic surrounding artisan bread has historically been as white as the flour. But this is no longer the case. Just as our breads have continued to evolve—incorporating regional flour and more whole grains—so too has the fabric of the artisan bakers’ community.

La Farm Bakery: Lionel Vatinet

Cary, North Carolina

Lionel Vatinet always tells his students, “Do not blame the ingredients.” This was something instilled in him during his seven years of apprenticeship in France as part of Les Compagnons du Devoir, the centuries-old French guild of artisans. From the age of seventeen, traveling throughout France, changing cities each year to learn from a different master baker, Lionel was used to having a mill supporting him as a baker within the city, town, or region where he was living and baking; there was always a relationship with the mill in the vicinity of the bakery. This was not what he found when he came to America in 1991.

Lionel would spend the next eight years traveling, teaching baking, and consulting for bakeries throughout America, a Frenchman bestowing his baking tradition on a country in need of assistance. At the time, very little had been published on artisan baking, and what was available was not in English. Lionel was a direct link to the Old World, of artisan guilds preserved through the tradition of passing knowledge from master to student. He helped open the San Francisco Baking Institute as part of its inaugural faculty in 1996, and coached Team USA in the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie (World Cup of Baking) in 1999, the same year the US took gold as a team for the first time. Through his consulting work, he met his wife, Missy, and they decided to plant roots in this country, opening La Farm Bakery in Cary, North Carolina, in 1999.

Those of us who had come together in early 2009 to discuss the possibility of launching this mill did so in the wake of a profound rise in the price of wheat; very real economic uncertainties motivated us to action. But when Lionel became part of the conversation, he was motivated by something different. Lionel saw the opportunity to re-create what he had experienced in France, and as a member of Les Compagnons du Devoir, he stood by his pledge to give back to his profession. I brought flour samples for him to test. He reflects, “The results were incredible! This is the beauty of knowing your farmer and your miller.”

Lionel had an intrinsic understanding of the value of what we set out to build between farmer, miller, and baker here in the South, grounded in his own tradition and experience in France. La Farm would play an instrumental role during our nascent stage, pushing us forward and validating our efforts. They shifted all their whole-grain flour—whole wheat and whole rye—to our flour, creating their Piedmont Loaf (this page), Rye Hand Pies (this page) and Rye Chocolate Chip Sablés (this page) to showcase these flours. Lionel and Missy insisted on meeting our grower, Billy Carter, and wheat breeder Dr. David Marshall, and they brought this story back to their customers, as education is part of the guild pledge that Lionel lives by. Lionel jumped at the opportunity to test flour for the mill and to test flour for Dr. Marshall, as we continue to explore the nuances of flavor between experimental varieties.

Having a relationship with millers and growers in the region has enabled him to continue to use his profession to impact his community. “As bakers, we deal with the weather every single day. The farmer does the same thing. And the flour may be from a crop during a dry season, or rainy season. We’re the alchemists who adapt to these changing ingredients and seasons. The dough is never going to be the same, but in a skilled bakers hands, it can be transformed. This is the challenge and the beauty of the bread baker, but our biggest challenge is to continue to educate the consumer.”

Boulted Bread

Raleigh, North Carolina

I ask Joshua Bellamy, co-owner of Boulted Bread, what he loves most about baking. There’s a long pause, and I realize he’s overwhelmed with emotion. He says, “I try really hard not to think about that question much at all in my life because—” (There’s another long pause, and co-owner Sam Kirkpatrick interjects, “This is one of those questions where you instantly have Joshua crying.”) Joshua continues: “ ‘Attracted’ is not the right word, but I’ll say it because I don’t know a better word. I’m attracted to the whole process of baking so intimately that if I evaluate it or try and study the whys too much, I’m afraid I’ll lose it. But there are a few things: building something and growing something on a daily basis is really attractive to me. My dad builds houses. As a child, watching him turn a wooden log into a home and then a family lives there was really cool, but that took six months, and I was less patient. This takes every twenty-four hours and the cycle repeats, so I’ve been getting to experience that magic and adjust it every twenty-four hours. It’s a distinct part of the process that I love.”

Sam is not a baker, but he is like the salt in bread, enabling all the other ingredients to perform well. Sam had planned to be a high school English teacher, to give back to his community in this way, but the 2008 economic crisis (and ensuing layoffs) altered the course of his life. Yet his core intentions have remained the same, just applied in a different way—to building community through this bakery. Joshua reflects, “Sam allows us to have a macro perspective on things, on Raleigh, on the way the shop feels, the way the customers see the shop, which has been invaluable.” When I ask Sam what his role is at Boulted, he says, “What comes naturally to me is helping people be their best selves, and it’s really fun when you can do that behind a product that’s screaming to be shown off, like ‘help free me,’ and I get to nudge it along to be free. I get a big kick out of that.”

Chicken Bridge Bakery

Pittsboro, North Carolina

Milo points to the loaf of naturally leavened 100 percent whole-wheat bread sitting on the stainless-steel table and emphatically states that this is his favorite bread. He tells me he eats a slice of this bread every day, toasted, with honey and butter. Milo is six years old.

Simon is fourteen and passes on the opportunity to have his picture taken alongside his dad and brother in front of their cottage bakery. He is very much a part of this place, though. He grew up helping out around the bakery, and this past summer he worked as his dad’s assistant, dividing and shaping dough, unloading bread from the oven, and packaging the loaves.

Mom (and pastry chef) is out on deliveries.

This is Chicken Bridge Bakery. Located in a residential neighborhood in Pittsboro, North Carolina, a small town on the outskirts of Raleigh-Durham, this home-based, wood-fired-brick-oven bakery owned and operated by husband-and-wife team Rob and Monica Segovia-Welsh is more than simply a profession—this bakery is their life. Rob admits there really is no clear divide between their home life with their two sons, Simon and Milo, and bakery life—“they’re absolutely entwined.” He says that in this way, they have more in common with their farmer friends than with other brick-and-mortar bakeries. The bakery’s relationship with farmers has been part of their story since day one, when they launched as a community-supported bread (CSB) program in 2007.

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I ask Rob what he love most about baking, and even after thirteen years of wood-fired-oven baking, he replies, "I still think that the most exciting thing to me continues to be that every day is different, that every flour is different, every grain is different, and just as you grow as a person, you grow as a baker. There are new yardsticks or new goals always, because it seems like when you start out as a baker, you just have this picture in a book, like this is what I'm aiming for, this is what I want it to be, but as you develop as a baker and get into techniques and the science of it all and the creativity of it all, you can find yourself developing your own idea of what you want to be striving toward and I feel like that’s the thing about baking that’s exciting. If I make one loaf that I’m super proud of, like this is it, I can pretty much guarantee that the next ten loaves are going to be like, ah, I could have done better, but rather than feeling demoralized by this, it is kind of an everyday way of learning you can do better."

Weaver Street Market Bakery: A Cooperative Model

Hillsboro, North Carolina

“What does it look like to be a baker at fifty-five if one doesn’t own the building or have some stake in a business that can provide beyond a salary or an hourly wage?”

I was asked this question by a baker in his early thirties at the end of his eight-hour shift, which had begun at 2 a.m. I think the question was rhetorical. He’d been a baker for close to a decade and is talented and committed, but three years earlier, he became a father, which changed the equation for him.

A few days before that conversation, I sat down with baker Jon McDonald of the Weaver Street Market Bakery, the bakery end of Weaver Street Market, a cooperatively owned grocery and bakery in Hillsboro, North Carolina. Jon shared with me Weaver Street’s mission, which seeks to address the full picture—to provide for both the community they serve as well as for those doing the serving and baking. For Jon, who is also in his early thirties, this has meant a viable and lasting livelihood as a baker.

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Weaver Street is differentiated from other co-ops by its particular form of cooperative structure. Most grocery store co-ops are owned only by their shoppers, but Weaver Street’s equity is split equally between worker-owners and consumer-owners. Jon reflects, “That makes it a really unique place to be a worker.” The workers have strong representation on the market’s board, and when there is a profit, the board decides what to do with it. If they declare a dividend, it is split equally between the worker-owners and the consumer-owners. The workers’ dividend is based on hours worked that year, and the money is held in an internal account at the co-op; when a worker-owner leaves, they receive all that money. Jon explains, “We have some people who have been working for twenty or thirty years who have $30,000 in the Weaver Street Bank. And so having that as a foundation, inside of the bakery, enables us to hire really good people and keep them. I feel it’s unique that we are able to do artisan bread at the scale that we do it and still attract bakers that are interested in pushing the craft. They’re not just grunt workers. They really care about the co-op mission, and they really care about the role the bakery plays in the co-op and take a lot of pride in what they do. And so that makes it a really fun place to work.”

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Our flour was a natural fit for Weaver Street, guided by their mission to support local “by the community, and for the community.” Jon recalls, “It seemed the simple, obvious choice was to switch our whole wheat and whole rye to stuff that’s grown right around the corner”—a goodly amount of our grain is grown less than an hour from Weaver Street Market Bakery—“that’s milled in the same state, and if we need to work through the process of making the breads a little different, we can handle that because we have skilled bakers. And it’s made it more exciting for the bakers and the customers because you can know you’re working with a product that’s unique and close to home. It’s totally in line with our co-op values, supporting farmers, supporting the local economy, and it has ended up being a very rewarding transition, resulting in new products, like our dark rye (this page). That bread came about because we had this Wrens Abruzzi rye. The bread literally arose out of the grain itself; there’s not that many breads that are developed in that way.”

Carolina Ground began with a vision similar to Weaver Street’s, which was about building something in order to create the kind of place we want to live in. Weaver Street’s buying power has had a real impact on our ability to succeed, helping us reshape the food landscape by enabling us to increase our acreage with Southern growers. They recently opened their fourth location, and for the opening ceremony, the mayor of Raleigh, along with Weaver Street’s founder and General Manager Ruffin Slater and other co-op owners, broke a six-foot-long baguette instead of doing a ribbon cutting. Jon reflects, “We want to be a sustainable marketplace—intentionally a marketplace—not just a market. We want to be a gathering place, sort of that third space for people to have good experiences with their families and have it all centered around food, and then we want the co-op to be the center of the community; and bread is such an emblem of that.”

Beach House

Bradenton Beach, Florida

I quickly scribble down the phrase amplification and modulation. This is something Ed Chiles says when we first meet at Beach House, his oceanfront restaurant. He is on fire, talking about oyster shell recycling and building new oyster habitat. He points to the restaurant’s amber-glassed deck lights, which ensure that turtle hatchlings, guided by moonlight and starlight, are not thrown off course by the artificial lighting, leading to their death. And then he mentions kitchen culture and team building, and I follow him back to the kitchen. He shows me the dish pit, where food scraps from dirty dishes are scraped. The 55-gallon barrel of food waste will go to Gamble Creek Farm (owned by Ed’s company, the Chiles Group) to be composted and the compost mixed back into the soil. The farm grows certified organic produce for Ed’s restaurants: Beach House, Mar Vista, and Sandbar. We drive over to Gamble Creek in Ed’s Tesla and he talks about Seminole pumpkins and serving acorn-finished wild boar, and about bottarga, salt-cured and sun-dried striped gray mullet roe, wild-caught and produced a few miles away.

Teddy Louloudes is his head baker at Beach House, and Teddy is the reason I am here. He sources our flour to use in his Ciabatta Sandwich Rolls (this page), his Hemp Crisp Breads (this page), and anywhere else he can integrate flavor-forward flour. Teddy is a native of Bradenton Beach and worked at Beach House as a teenager, returning to bake at the restaurant after college and culinary school. Ed allowed him to start the bread program for Beach House, and when they began a weekly farmers’ market at Gamble Creek Farm, it was Teddy’s breads that drew people. Amplification and modulation. It means to increase the strength of a signal while also enabling the signal to travel a longer distance.

Harry Peemoeller

Charlotte, North Carolina

Carolina Ground began with a small group—in Western North Carolina—that helped bring the idea to life. We had numerous meetings. We shared a vision. These bakeries replaced some or all of their Midwest-grown whole-grain flours with our North Carolina–grown stone-ground whole-grain flours; some created breads specifically inspired by this flour. But outside this core group, it was a slow climb with plenty of challenges to overcome, from infrastructural to cultural, both on the farms and in the bakeries. To convince another bakery that they should give up the flour they were using and use our flour instead was not that simple. To understand the value of what we were trying to do with this mill would take some time; this was a very different kind of conversation than bakers were used to having with their millers. But early on, there were a few people who helped push us forward, lending some validity to what we were doing. Harry Peemoeller was one of those people.

Harry understood this mill because he had lived the story I was trying to tell. As I was attempting to piece together the past—what this farmer-miller-baker relationship had once looked like—Harry was cheering us on, asserting the value of local grains. He was in the ideal position to do so, too, as senior pastry and bread instructor at Johnson & Wales University’s Charlotte campus. To educate the next generation of bakers on the value of whole grains and local flours was a fairly new concept in the culinary world, traditionally dominated by white flour, but Harry knew that this was the direction forward.

Harry first learned of our mill not long after competing in the 2012 Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie (World Cup of Baking), a prestigious, invitation-only competition that takes place every four years in Paris. He was part of the three-person Bread Bakers Guild Team USA, which placed second overall. During the competition, Harry’s teammate Michael Zakowski pushed the envelope with his use of whole-grain flours, and this reignited something in Harry, bringing up memories from his youth of his stepfather’s bakery in northern Germany, where the flour mill was located next door and all the breads were made from freshly stone-ground whole-grain flour. Harry tells me, “I thought, ‘What am I doing over here! I need to go back to my roots.’ ”

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Harry grew up in a small town outside of Hamburg, Germany, on a farm with a thatched roof home and an outhouse. His father farmed during the Green Revolution, which meant new seed varieties, heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer, and an urge to get as much yield as possible. This was a farming system that sought to end famine in India, but its impact on Harry’s village in Germany was less promising, he recalls, “When it came to spring, the whole town was smelling like these chemicals.”

Harry’s mother grew up in a farming family and would tell him how when she was a little girl, they had had a horse and a wagon, and her parents had harvested their grains—wheat and rye—by hand, forming shocks in the field that they would then thresh. She remembered she had to wear gloves because of the thistles bundled in with the wheat. And Harry vividly remembers a conversation she had with his father: “She said to him, ‘What happened to the thistles? I don’t see any of these weeds, and thistles especially, anymore. What happened to the balance between what we want and what nature has, because they’re not bad, they’re contributing something to the ground.’ ” She convinced his father to stop using the chemicals, and instead, he employed rich crop rotations, growing rye and wheat and potatoes and beans; they also raised animals. When the crops were ready, Harry’s family would harvest what they needed; afterward, the townspeople would come into the family’s fields and take home the rest of the harvest, offering what they could in compensation. He reflects, “It was the best upbringing I could have had.”

When Harry was ten, his parents got a divorce. Eventually, his mother remarried a baker. Harry explains that his mother, having grown up during wartime, felt that another war was to be expected, so she told Harry and his four brothers, “When the next war comes, you don’t want to be a tax accountant, you need to do something with your hands—a farmer, a baker, or a butcher—because these were people that had something to eat.” And so he and his brothers all became bakers. When he was a teenager, he began apprenticing in his stepfather’s bakery, with the stone mill next door. He recalls, “We’d get freshly milled flour, and I remember when I opened a bag, the smell, I was transported back to my father’s tractor. When he harvested rye, that’s how it smelled. It was always amazing. And then we made the bread. We made hundreds of volkorn and michebrot; there was not so much white bread. Our bread was something that sustains, that keeps you full. All the farms had lots of kids over there, and they needed bread that would feed you.”

Eventually Harry was drafted into the German Navy and traveled around the world for two years as a radio operator on a destroyer. When he returned, his stepfather was ready to give up the bakery, and he encouraged Harry to get his master’s certification in bread baking, a level of study one must achieve in Germany in order to have apprentices. He became a German Master Baker, but he had traveled and seen the world; with his master certification, he wanted to do something different with the bakery, but his stepfather was married to tradition. Harry felt he needed to leave Germany for a time to try this on his own. It was 1989, and he was offered a one-year position in a place he’d never heard of—Orlando, Florida. He recalls, “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. America! It was like [in an affected American accent], ‘We don’t care, if it ain’t broken, break it and put it together new, and if people like it, you’ve got something!’ It was really crazy—I was like, what a country!”

In Orlando, Harry worked in a bakery that supplied the Walt Disney Company, but eventually he grew dissatisfied because, as he recalls, “The mouse was in charge; everything for the mouse.” Harry had fled the rigidity of centuries-old tradition in baking only to find himself creatively stunted by Mickey Mouse. He did meet his wife in Orlando, though, and they left for a job opportunity in Miami, where he became lead baker at Biga Bakery, the first artisan bread bakery in Miami, creating high-quality European-style breads. When the bakery was sold to a consortium, Harry stayed on and was sent to Mexico City to learn about the breads of Mexico so the bakery could market to Miami’s ever-growing Latin American community. Harry loved the work, loved to travel and learn and bake, but he was now also a father, and he was not able to strike a healthy balance between his roles as a baker, husband, and father. There was a job opening at Johnson & Wales University’s campus in Norfolk, Virginia, and his wife encouraged him to apply. He got the job, and in 2002, the family moved to Norfolk. It was not an easy move for him, but he says, “Looking back, I see that it was the next step. I could now have more time with my family, I could enjoy baking again.” And it closed a loop—when Harry was in the German Navy twenty-two years earlier, the first harbor his ship landed in in America was Norfolk.

In 2004, Johnson & Wales closed its Norfolk campus, consolidating with their Charlotte campus, which brought Harry to North Carolina. Although Harry says that when he first began teaching, he was not very good, I find that hard to believe. I have witnessed Harry in action, and he is an inspiring teacher, which is why Carolina Ground was so fortunate that he reached out to us for flour in 2012, the first year we were milling.

With such a rich and long baking history, I wonder if Harry still loves baking, but when I ask what he loves most about it, he smiles and tells me, “What I love is that it never gets old. I like the magic of fermentation. It’s like a religion. When they tell you, if you’re a good boy you’re going to go to heaven, and if you’re a good baker, you follow the rules, you are going to bread heaven. So you’ve got to trust the process. When I bake at home, sometimes I just want to go back in time a little bit and create something that wakes up memories, this aroma that smells like what I remember of my grandma’s home and definitely remember from the bakery that I worked in, and the memories it evokes from my childhood.”

Jackie Vitale

Captiva Island, Florida

Scrolling through Instagram, I come to a photo of a naturally leavened whole-grain bread sliced open to expose the crumb, posted by Jackie Vitale (@SunshineandMicrobes). In the caption, Jackie opines, “Crumb shots on Instagram stress me out the way that a photo of an Instagram influencer lounging on a beach in a bikini might stress other people out. Just as I have no interest in scrolling through carefully staged photos of homogeneously pretty ladies, I have mostly scrubbed my feed of impossibly open-crumb white bread. What I’d love to see more of is the type of bread that I make and enjoy eating. Humble, flavorful loaves made with stone-ground whole-grain flours.”

Jackie is formerly one of the owners of Ground Floor Farm, an urban farm, food establishment, and community space in Stuart, Florida (now under new ownership at Colab Farms), where she used our flour in all of their baking. She then brought our flour with her to her new position as resident chef at the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island. She is co-creator of the Florida Fermentation Fest and co-author of the food blog, Sunshine + Microbes.

I ask Jackie what she loves most about baking, but also what she loves about fermentation, because this is the larger theme for her, both literally and figuratively. “It feels like a good reminder that I can do my best and I can create the right circumstances, but at the end of the day, I’m not in charge. These invisible creatures are in charge,” she says, referring to microorganisms, “and they might decide to do a different thing. I can try and create the right boundaries for getting the result that I want, but there is a kind of allowing the world to take charge and to remember that I’m a small part in all of this and I can do my best but can’t control everything. I grew up very anxious, and I think working with food, and lots of therapy, have helped me let go of a lot of that. And to know that there is joy in the mistakes.”

Anisette

Raleigh, North Carolina

Unlike most of the bakeries we work with, which are bread-driven, Anisette is driven by something less tangible. Stepping into their tiny neighborhood bakeshop in Raleigh, I am met with lovely sweet buns glistening with sugar, piles of small biscotti-like cookies called cantucci (see this page), slices of cream-filled cakes, pie, the smell of coffee, and something else that I cannot quite put my finger on until I sit down with Nicole and Jason Evans Groth, the wife-and-husband team that conceived of this enchanting bakeshop, and ask what this is all about.

Nicole sought out our flavor-forward flour to play a prominent role in her clearly delineated approach to baking. “I'm always thinking about how to best make the recipe fit the flour.” She expounds, “What I think of as ‘classic’ recipes/flavors are often traditional Italian recipes—much of the inspiration for Anisette is from a few trips to Northern Italy and Istanbul—or totally nostalgic/traditional American recipes, like something adapted from Joy of Cooking. I like the idea of making something that’s totally familiar to people but that often tastes like a bland sugar bomb, and giving them a version that’s been made with really beautiful/delicious/healthful ingredients and actually tastes like those ingredients!”

I ask Nicole what she loves most about baking. She has to think about it, like she’s sorting it out, and then she says, “Oh man, there’s so many layers.” Jason chimes in, “She mentions her Aunt Della a lot, how she was her touchstone for flavors and how flavors and memory are so wrapped together, and so a lot of the flavors and the foods that she shares with others evoke memories that are pleasant for her, and she wants to share that experience with others. When I’m working the counter and people say, ‘this reminds me of X,’ I feel like we’ve accomplished this goal. It’s like when people connect through the music we play (Nicole and Jason are also musicians) and they tell you so, it’s not because you’re a star, but because you shared this thing that you can’t really speak out loud and people have understood it. The same thing happens when people experience food that way.” Jason turns to Nicole and says, “You talk about evoking memories or making nostalgia not just a thing that makes us feel good in the moment but actually helps us to understand the present. I think Nicole is really good at expressing feeling through her food, and it’s often read by new customers as nostalgia at first, but then moves into more of a relationship, a common ground between the baker and the customer.”

And then Nicole adds, “Yes, it feels like sharing feelings with people.”

Joe Bowie

Columbia, South Carolina

My initial introduction to Joe Bowie was via his Instagram moniker, @brooklynbreadnerd. He started buying flour from us through our online retail store, then tagging us in pictures of what appeared to be professionally executed breads and pastries baked in his tiny Brooklyn apartment. Instagram had launched just a year and a half before we began milling, and it became this vehicle that pushed us forward by way of the bakers, providing a platform for us and any talented bakers using our flour. I’d imagined @brooklynbreadnerd was a really serious, super-devoted, avid home baker. When he posted an image of some incredible-looking salted chocolate rye brownies, I wanted the recipe (see this page), so I sent him a message, asking him to be the first guest blogger on a recipe blog I was trying to maintain.

My second introduction to Joe Bowie was as one of our wholesale customers, buying flour for his Cola Bread Club in Columbia, South Carolina. Joe had moved down from Brooklyn to join his husband, who had accepted a position as a professor at the University of South Carolina. I wasn’t too surprised to learn that Joe was, in fact, a professionally trained baker, having studied artisan bread baking at the French Culinary Institute (now the International Culinary Center) in 2011.

Baking was Joe’s second career. He’d been a professional dancer for twenty-five years, and his shift into professional baking happened by way of a grant from an organization called Career Transitions for Dancers. Joe would spend the next six years baking in various kitchens in New York. He worked at Le Pain Quotidien fresh out of school, then went on to work for world-renowned chef Daniel Boulud, Dean & DeLuca, the Brooklyn-based bakery Ovenly, and bagel maven Melissa Weller. And he began engaging with different flours from regional mills.

As a child, Joe had a lot of food allergies. “I couldn’t eat bread as a kid. So watching how one’s diet can change how one responded to things was really important to me. I didn’t feel the draw to just bake cool things, it wasn’t just about that for me. I wanted to bake things that helped people and made people feel like they were putting something good in their bodies.”

About this transition from New York to launching his bread club in Columbia, South Carolina, Joe explains, “You have to find a balance between your audience and your baking. I know that when I first came down here I was thinking, well, I would like for people to eat more whole grains—of course I cannot decide what they eat, but I wanted to keep it as local as possible because in addition to the nutritional thing, it was a flavor thing. And it’s always easy to stick whole grains into pastries, especially things that people are used to, like chocolate chip cookies, just finding really good combinations. I realized that with most of my subscribers, it’s not until they taste something made with beautiful whole grains or beautiful flour that’s local, that they realize it can taste like that.”

I ask Joe what he loves most about baking. “I love that I can take four or five ingredients that look nothing like what it’s going to turn out to be. I put them in a bowl, I mix them up, and it’s science of course, but also it’s like alchemy. I love that I can take flour, water, salt, and culture, mix it together, let it sit, with some stretch and folds, and then the next day I can bake a beautiful loaf of bread that looks nothing like those ingredients. And there is that moment—every time—you’ve watched it ferment, and then you shape it and you stick it in the fridge overnight, and score it, stick it in the combo cooker, and that moment when you take off the top [of the combo cooker] to let the crust form—every time, it never gets old, I’m like, ‘Oh my! How beautiful.’ And sometimes there’s a little more or a little less oven spring but every time, it amazes me.”

Joe’s tone shifts as he speaks in more technical terms: “Everyone says the bread directs things, but there are variables we can control. I like that scientific aspect of it, too, that we’re controlling these variables to try and create consistency. When I would teach I would tell my students, ‘Here’s why you weigh things: because you’ll have a better chance of having consistency, even if you’re just baking cookies.’ And I tell people when they’re baking bread, really keep track, because the bread doesn’t rule; there are ways you can control it—you can put things in the fridge. You can control fermentation, and you can control your day. I tell my students, take the time, let it be a different thing, let the bread baking be a different thing. The only way to get good at it is through practice.”

[NOTE: Joe has since relocated to Chicago, where he and his husband have taken positions at Northwestern University (Joe is teaching dance), though he is still baking up a storm.]

Albemarle Baking Company

Charlottesville, Virginia

Sitting in the retail side of Albemarle Baking Company, one can see into the pastry prep kitchen through windows that divide the retail space from the production. Beyond pastry prep, another set of windows provide a clear view of their massive multideck bread oven and, just above the oven, spanning 7 feet of the 10-foot width of the oven, is a steel sign with a message stamped out of the steel: This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender. The sign was installed on the one-year anniversary of “Unite the Right,” the Charlottesville white supremacist rally that resulted in the death of Heather Heyer. The street where she was run over, a short walk from the bakery, has been renamed Heather Heyer Street. The bakery was open during that weekend, as it had cake orders to fill: weddings on Friday and Sunday, and a fortieth wedding anniversary that Saturday night. This is a role that bakeries play in civil society: baking cakes for significant life events. Bread is the centerpiece for gatherings of friends and family. The concept of breaking bread is intrinsic to a balanced and healthy society, and one could not break bread without the baker.

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Gerry Newman began his baking career in 1981, as an apprentice for a Swiss Master Baker. “He took me in, he had a very suspect look, like, ‘Here’s another American that is not going to work hard,’ and truth be told, about six months in I was ready to quit. He was unrelenting in what his demands were and he wasn’t always kind about it. But when I told him this just wasn’t working, he asked me in this really broken English, ‘Gerry, how long it take to make a baby?’ And when I said nine months, certain that my answer wasn’t correct, he said, ‘That’s right. You’re not going to learn how to bake in six months. Just relax and pay attention.’ He believed in me and I relaxed and it started coming to me. I stayed for four years.”

When asked what he loves most about baking, after this many years, Gerry replies, “It’s very rewarding. And the difference between the bread side and pastry is that the pastry is pretty scientific: you’ve got to cook these ingredients at this temperature for this period of time; everything has to be done with these steps to follow; and with some variances they’re not usually affected by any other thing. But there’s nothing about bread that’s the same every day or throughout the day, and you can’t approach it like that, and so that part is nice, the attentiveness that you have to have to what you are doing, the stewardship that you have to have. And then this many years into it as well, to be with a lot of people who believe the same thing, that work with us, and especially the younger people that come in and work with us with that same passion, it’s really nice.”

Betsy Gonzalez: Osono Bread

Atlanta, Georgia

“In Latina culture, food is very much connected to family and community; you come together at the table,” explains Betsy Gonzalez, Latina and first-generation American. Betsy grew up in Canton, Georgia, and was raised by a single mother. At an early age, ten or eleven, Betsy took an interest in baking. “We would go to la panadería every week and get tons of different baked goods—that is one of the first memories I have associated with bread.” These trips ignited something within her: “I wanted to participate,” she recalls. Her mother, who had always encouraged her to find a creative outlet, bought Betsy baking tools and books and gave her free rein to bake whatever she wanted.

Betsy baked throughout middle school and into high school, where she took all of the culinary programs available. She wanted to go to culinary school but they simply could not afford it, so she moved to Atlanta to attend Georgia State University and study journalism, though she had no clear ambitions or goals in the field. One day, she saw that there was a job opening for a front-of-house person at the Little Tart Bakeshop. She recalls, “The first time I walked into Little Tart, I was very much in awe of it, like, ‘Oh wow, there’s a real bakery in the city.’ ” Betsy applied for the job, and when she met the owner, Sarah O’Brien, she mentioned that she’d love to bake. The front-of-house position got her in the door, and eventually she made her way into the kitchen, reawakening her love of baking. Betsy worked at Little Tart for a couple of years and enjoyed the work, but a desire to learn the craft of bread baking tugged at her. She was specifically interested in working with sourdough or natural leavening and engaging with regional flours, but there were no bakeries in Atlanta at the time doing that kind of baking.

Through social media she gained access to the greater baking community, and Betsy contacted six bakers in six different countries: “The way I went about choosing the certain bakeries overseas was: Are they doing sourdough? Is bread their main thing? Are they using local flour or trying to incorporate it into their programs? That’s the checklist I had.”

Betsy would spend four months traveling and baking overseas, working twelve- to sixteen-hour days and learning her craft. She was exposed to rye breads for the first time at Riot Rye Bakehouse & Bread School in Cloughjordan, Ireland; she engaged with stone-ground British flours at Bread by Bike in London; and Spanish grains at Yellow Bakery in Barcelona. In Otzberg, Germany, she spent a week with Paul Lebeau at the headquarters of Mockmill, producers of countertop stone mills (see Resources, this page). Paul gave Betsy the opportunity to engage with a variety of grains. “Paul was all about using freshly milled [flour] and using local grains, which got me excited as well,” she says. “He introduced me to grains I did not even know existed.” She spent a few days shadowing Maxime Bussy at Le Bricheton in Paris, a tiny operation inspired by the peasant baker movement in France, which started in the 2000s with the aim of reviving old seed varieties and baking methods. She traveled to Norway and spent a week at Ille Brød with Martin Ivar Hveem Fjeld, who uses only stone-ground organic Norwegian grain flours and mixes high-hydration doughs. “Spending time with him molded the idea for me that flour is as much of an ingredient as an apple for an apple pie. Flour is more than something that sits on a grocery store shelf, flour is more than a dry good.” Her final stage was at Egt Brood in Genk, Belgium, where she worked alongside two women bakers: Tina, the owner, and Ceria. The bakery was just a short drive to the farmer and the miller who produced their flours. They baked with 100 percent rye and 100 percent spelt flours, which was a whole new experience for Betsy. She was thrown right into mixing dough, “three women just cracking it out. By the end I was not only mixing and shaping but also baking. So much more interesting than culinary school. My time with Tina really influenced what I do now because she also emphasized the need for local grain and that it’s really up to us as local bakers to start that conversation. She definitely shaped a lot of my philosophies, she and Martin, because they were both 100 percent local. And then I had to go back home.”

When she returned to the United States from her four months overseas, she was at a loss. “I’d been surrounded by these cultural norms of real bread, the concept of it, and local grain and local flour and things being fresh. I wanted to start a dialog with people here,” she says. “Because at that time, I didn’t even have any intentions of starting a business, I just wanted to bake and start a dialog with my family and my friends, that bread is more than just white flour. There’s just so much more out there, and I wanted to share what I had learned overseas. But I was baking way more than I could eat, and more than my family and friends could eat, so then it was friends of friends, and delivering bread door-to-door throughout Atlanta.”

She created her community supported bread (CSB) program without really knowing what it could mean: “I didn’t really realize the emphasis of community behind it at the time, but I do now.” She reached out to local business owners to see if they could act as drop-off locations and she found willing businesses at opposite ends of the city so both communities could have access to her bread. Word spread, and an urban farm reached out about adding her bread subscription to their existing CSA, with a pickup at their weekly urban farm stand located in a different section of Atlanta from her two CBS drop-off points. And she also started selling breads directly at the farm stand, engaging with customers who were buying their produce right where it was being grown. “All the vegetables are grown right there, and customers get to walk around this land, which furthers the idea of the importance of knowing where one’s ingredients come from and knowing the people that are behind it all, and also honoring all the work that goes into it.”

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Betsy’s mother was born in Guatemala and her father in Mexico. She is a product of three countries, and Osono Bread is an amalgamation of her upbringing, her global baking community, her Atlanta community, and her relationships with farmers and millers. When I ask her what she loves most about baking, she closes the loop: “I like that baking not only provides a creative expression, but also the opportunity to be selfless in it and give to people. Being able to just provide, make a memory, whatever that may be.”

Michael Matson

Nashville, Tennessee

This mill would not exist without the bakers. But baker Michael Matson sees it the other way around: “Without Carolina Ground, I don’t know what I would do, because this bakery would not be what I want it to be, it would not reflect the Southeast in grain. You allow me, aside from at certain times when things on the growing end get rough, to be a regional bakery. I get to work through all of the obstacles and experiments that come along with using flour from the region, while also getting incredible flavors and the ability to contribute to the regional economy. I get to be a part of the farmer-miller-baker chain in a way that many bakers around the country working with larger mills do not.”

This was from an email Michael sent me in 2016, a few months after launching his micro-bakery in Nashville. His email continued with reflections on the current baking culture: “More and more bakers are beginning to mill in-house”—he, too, was vacillating over whether to go in that direction—“I love the process of milling. I like the work, I like the idea of working directly with growers, but based on my current experience trying to source local grain to mill myself, I’d be in the position of simply buying grain from the Midwest and Interior West to mill just for the sake of milling.”He asked how I feel about the bakers who have chosen to mill in-house: “Are you thankful that more bakers are beginning to care more about this aspect of the process, or are these folks you see as potential customers that would help Carolina Ground continue to grow and thrive?”

Michael’s email hits at the core of what and why we do what we do at Carolina Ground. He chose to allow us to be his miller, and his bakery to be part of the change we are trying to effect here in the South. Carolina Ground is proof that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And yet my answer to his question is that I think any approach to fresh flour is good. I think it further strengthens the ground beneath all of us working to rebuild regional grain economies because it’s changing the conversation, transforming this once homogenous ingredient into a dynamic agricultural product. And yes, ideally one would hope that milling in-house would go hand in hand with an increased demand for regional grains, but none of this is simple, and it will not happen overnight. A mill like ours brings bakeries together, enabling them to become a formidable voice, creating a dependable market for our regional growers, but fortifying that market is diversity, so a farmer who is able to work directly with a baker milling in-house is a good thing, as it enables that farmer to fetch the highest price for his or her grain, with no middleman (or middlewoman). That single bakery, though, will likely not use as much grain as the farmer can grow, so having more than one market is ideal. To truly reshape the food landscape is going to take all of us—from small to medium bakeries milling in-house to regional mills like ours, specialty mills like Farm and Sparrow, and larger mills like Lindley Mills here in North Carolina, who include a local flour in their offerings.

Michael and I have continued to correspond over the years via text and email as he has transitioned from his own microbakery with a mobile wood-fired oven selling at farmers’ markets to teaming up with Rolf and Daughters, a seasonally inspired farm-to-table Nashville restaurant that would eventually open Folk, the wood-fired pizza restaurant where Michael led the bread program, to his current iteration as Ornette Bread, located in a studio of an art gallery.

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I ask Michael what he loves most about baking and what drives him to bake. “I just love the act of baking most days, the tools, the honesty and physicality of it all, the tradition and history in it,” he says. “It’s not going anywhere, you know, and that’s no small thing. And frankly, it’s the only thing I’ve ever felt ‘good’ at, the intuition, the bodily memory is there. I just know it now. I know how to do it. That’s not to say there isn’t room to learn, it’s just that I feel comfortable doing the work every day. I’ve learned what this labor means, and so the motivation comes in some sense, too, from the fact that I’m not certain there’s anything else I can hold in that way. To me, that’s special, I suppose, or at least a reason to forge ahead, regardless of the form.” He tells me this through text. And then he says he needs to go put his son to bed. I tell him to enjoy these moments with his son, as children grow up faster than one can imagine, and to this he replies, “Ha, that’s the only other thing I know, how fast it goes.”

Christina Balzebre: Levee Baking Co.

New Orleans, Louisiana

As soon as Christina Balzebre graduated from Loyola University in New Orleans, she got a job at Satsuma Café, a small farm-to-table restaurant. She had decided she would get a full-time job working in a kitchen, and if she liked it, she’d keep doing it, and if she didn’t like it, she’d go to graduate school. Her first position was as a juicer, and from there she progressed to line cook, and then a position for a baker opened up. She’d always loved baking and was given creative freedom. “We would get fresh stuff in and I could make whatever I wanted that was seasonal,” she says. Three years later, she left the intimacy and seasonality of this little café and stepped into the corporate restaurant world in pursuit of a mentor to teach her the art of bread baking. “I went to stage (an unpaid internship) at a restaurant group in New Orleans,” she recalls. “They had a commissary kitchen for all of their restaurants, and they were doing all of the bread and all of the pastry from scratch there, which is not that common for big restaurants to do.” She found the mentor she was seeking and her stage turned into full-time employment, but they weren’t making the kind of breads she wanted to be making, so she would go home at night after work and make the kind of bread that she wanted to be baking: 100 percent sourdough and incorporating whole grains. She eventually felt uninspired at work, so she started an Instagram account to pursue creative things and learn food photography, baking out of her tiny home kitchen and posting images of her baked goods on Instagram. Her project began to evolve into a little business doing wholesale for a small café and then making a wedding cake for a friend and pies for another wedding, and soon she was Levee Baking Co. She had an opportunity to do pop-ups every Saturday at a place called Mosquito Supper Club, owned by her former boss from Satsuma, and this offered her boundless opportunity for creativity and she incorporated what she’d learned at Satsuma, working with local and seasonal ingredients. She also sold at farmers’ markets and was able to establish relationships with local growers.

For three months, Christina did pops-ups while also working full-time. But when she started making more money in a single day at the pop-ups than she was making in an entire week at work, she quit her job and Levee Baking Co. became her full-time gig.

Ten years after graduating, Christina launched Levee Baking Co.’s brick-and-mortar bakery on Magazine Street, with all of her farmer friends in attendance at the grand opening. Levee is part of a new wave of bakeries embracing seasonality and locality, inspiring employees, and educating customers.

Meghan Bourland: Meg’s Bread

Cookeville, Tennessee

“Bread dough is like how I wish clay would feel,” explains Meghan Borland, the “Meg” of Meg’s Bread. Meg is a ceramicist turned baker, though more accurately, she is an artist who changed her medium. On her application to become a Carolina Ground wholesale customer, she wrote, “The bakery will be a connection point between people and their food, a way to tell the story of the farmers who grow and of the baking process itself. Seasonal ingredients are the focal point to highlight a local producer; through this, a customer learns what’s in season, who grew it, and why it tastes so good when it’s fresh.” And although she does not consider herself a farmer, farming was the catalyst for her transition from art studio to bakeshop and continues to inspire and inform her baking. Meg’s husband, Luke, is the farmer.

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As a ceramicist making sculpture, Meg sought to engage all the senses. She experimented with using essential oils to add scent to ceramics, and she honed in on sound and feel through installations that required walking on ceramics. But when she started making pastries, she realized baking was the ideal medium: “I could put rosemary on top of something and you smell it and the texture of it and the way it looks and the way you hold it and the size, and so that was all of a sudden my aha, like, ‘This is my ceramics now.’ ”

When I ask Meg what she loves most about baking, she responds, “I love being creative. And everything I do is in season, so I love that challenge, the restriction of what can I do with this and what accentuates that and what completes this whole circle. So for me it’s kind of that creative puzzle of restrictions but then of what you can do within it. What my husband likes most is the preproduction, and I love the postproduction. There’s magic in both sides. The magic of a seed to a vegetable, that’s magic, and then there’s another step of magic, like a sweet potato is so sweet when it’s in season, you don’t have to do much to it to make it the postproduction of a sweet potato galette or a sweet potato pie.”