Sarah Owens is a cookbook author, baker, professional horticulturist, and culinary instructor. She was awarded a James Beard for her first book Sourdough and released her second in 2017 titled Toast and Jam. Her much anticipated forthcoming title Heirloom: Time Honored Techniques, Nourishing Traditions, and Modern Recipes will be released September 2019. Sarah believes strongly in the power of baking to foster community and social change; she is an advocate of sustainable agricultural practices to rebuild global grain sheds and believes stone milling can bring good bread back to the table. As a teacher of nourishing food traditions, she travels globally to encourage an interest in fermentation. 

Jason Perkins is the Brewmaster of Allagash Brewing in Portland Maine He was one of the first employees in the company and he has been there for the past 22 years. Prior to that, Jason enjoyed opportunities to work at The Kettle House in Missoula Montanta and Gritty McDuff’s in Freeport Maine. He began his brewing career like so many craft brewers as a homebrewer during college and the early years thereafter. He is also a graduate of Bates College in Lewiston, ME.

My education in baking began under the tutelage of a fourth-generation baker of Spanish and Italian descent from whom I learned old-world techniques and where I came to know the dance that is production baking. Eight years later, after exploring a handful of vocations, I returned to baking in my own way — with a rigorous eye, inquisitive palate, exacting standards, and a desire to bring my customers products that feed both the spirit and the body. OWL Bakery has become my pulse and my practice, where I blend a formal education in food anthropology, a passion for improving my craft, and my experiences abroad, in the kitchen, and in the garden.

My name is Beesham Soogrim, Living in Sweden. I am an artisan baker and a vegetarian chef with over 30 years of baking experience and sourdough baking for almost 20 years. For the past 8 years, I have been doing baking workshops traveling the world been in over 20 countries, just to mention a few. Almost all Europe, USA, Asia, Middle east. For teaching both professional and home bakers about sourdough baking. Doing bakery consultation.

My main focus is natural fermentation working with sourdough and predough with slow and long fermentation and whole and heritage grains.

Social media page on FB is Beesham The Baker and my Instagram is beesham_the_baker

My main focus is natural fermentation working with sourdough and predough with slow and long fermentation and whole and heritage grains.

Social media page on FB is Beesham The Baker and my Instagram is beesham_the_baker

Amy Halloran followed her love of flour back to the field and wrote THE NEW BREAD BASKET: How the New Crop of Grain Growers, Plant Breeders, Millers, Maltsters, Bakers, Brewers, and Local Food Activists Are Redefining Our Daily Loaf (Chelsea Green, 2015). A native of upstate New York, she runs a community meals program, and teaches cooking, food justice and writing. She never tires of pancakes.

David Kaminer is owner operator of Raleigh Street Bakery, a cottage food operation in Denver, CO. David’s career in baking started while he was in high school. He worked at a local bakery just down the street from his home just south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Pennsylvania Institute of Culinary Arts in 2002 and jumped at the opportunity for an externship at the Broadmoor in Colorado and moved there the same year. David has had amazing opportunities to grow and refine his culinary know-how at bakeries and restaurants in Colorado before he converted his garage into a bakery and opened up Raleigh Street Bakery in 2014. He bakes a variety of naturally leavened breads that are made with house milled whole grains. He sells them at markets and from his home throughout the week.      

Amber Lambke is president of the Somerset Grist Mill, LLC and its Maine Grains label, carried by specialty food stores and used by fine restaurants and bakeries throughout the Northeast. A driving force behind Maine’s sustainable foods movement, Amber has worked with local business leaders and community members to successfully bring the cultivation and processing of heritage grains back to Skowhegan, Maine. Her efforts through the Maine Grain Alliance have generated a broader understanding and appreciation of the nutritional and economic value of heritage grains and oats, as well as their exceptional flavor. The alliance’s Kneading Conference, co-founded by Amber, now draws thousands of attendees from throughout North America each year and has spawned similar conferences across the country.

Dusty Dowse has been baking bread for nearly a half-century and it is his prime avocation. He is a semi-professional baker in addition to his day job, which is being a Professor of Biology and Cooperating Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Maine. He has applied his formal scientific expertise to his baking, resulting in studies on sourdough and yeast microbiology and the physics of refractory materials and heat flow in masonry ovens. He is a charter MGA board member. He directs the Maine Artisan Bread Fair, is Director of Education for MGA as well as its resident baking advisor. Last September, he led a team of bakers that produced nearly a half-ton of fresh bread in wood-fired ovens on site for the volunteer kitchen at the Common Ground Fair.

Michael Hanson was born to bake. He is a third-generation Master Baker who stepped into his grandfather’s bakehouse aged 7. Fifty years later he still can’t resist the smell of a warm

loaf. He has run his own bakeries and worked with some of the most influential bakers in the UK artisan baking scene. He has been a sourdough teacher for over 20 years, he was the Head of Baking at the Brook Bakery School in the UK. He created and ran a successful wood-fired restaurant for several years which regularly featured in the top 5 Neapolitan pizzerias in the UK 

Michael also created and oversees a community initiative based in the UK  called Bread For Life. Through the ancient arts of farming, milling, and baking supports food aid programs and community projects worldwide. Michael worked with John Letts to create the UK Heritage Grain Trust.

Michael’s wheat and baking research have taken him to Iraq, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Italy where he worked with traditional bakers using wood-fired ovens and indigenous wheats.

Most recently Michael has been conducting field research in the Republic of Georgia, searching out almost-extinct ancient grains and traditional bakers. He is working on the definitive bread book. 

Cathy Zabinski is a plant/soil ecologist and professor at Montana State University in Bozeman. She is the author of “Amber Waves: The Extraordinary Biography of Wheat, from Wild Grass to World Megacrop”, published last fall. Her research program centers around interactions between plants and soil communities, extending from disturbed and restored lands to farm fields, particularly focused on how we can restore sites or manage our agricultural lands to increase soil community diversity and nutrient cycling.  At Montana State, she teaches courses in restoration ecology and belowground plant ecology.

BEGINNING
The bread that I make today isn’t so very different from when I first opened ZU in 2000- naturally leavened and baked in a wood-fired oven; made from a mixture of freshly-milled whole grains, sifted flours, water and grey sea salt.  Over time and with repetition has come an ability to more precisely observe the dough and the oven, but there is always variation in the results.  This variation is what a word like artisinal really gets at.  That is, bread made in limited quantities  by hands in a somewhat primitive environment. Bread that is affected by the weather, the flour, the heat of the oven and the baking schedule. Artisinal bread should be rightly considered an ethic rather than an aesthetic.
INSPIRATION
When I first started the bakery, there was a single book I scoured endlessly from cover to cover:  The Village Baker by Joe Ortiz.  Ortiz’s book gave me something both tangible and etherial to dream of.  With the craft of baking came tools and techniques, the physicality of work and a deep satisfaction in unloading loaves of bread from the oven.  But there was something else that captured my attention in Ortiz’s description of the village bakeries that he so admired. He gave me a sense of the long lineage of bread bakers that I wanted to insert myself amongst.  Each flour laden workshop he described was a variant of the same mechanism, arranged to provide bread to the villagers.
With the help of a skilled mason, I built a modified Alan Scott wood-fired masonry oven.  I began to imagine myself a village baker, albeit in a country with nutritional trends that consistently put bread under scrutiny and scorn.   All along, I have resisted speculating on the health benefits that the breads I make may or may not possess and I have mostly avoided commenting on dietary preoccupations of gluten or carbohydrates.  Instead, I  have relied on the basic pleasure of eating real bread with butter, cheese, olives, fresh vegetables, cured meats, soups and wine to suffice as justification for its vital role in the village.  It must also be true that the long lineage (now 14,000 years) of bread eaters has cemented an immutable collective dietary craving.
BAKING
For me, baking is a solitary act in which, much like long drives, my mind simultaneously stays attentive and drifts off.  Baking nights are long and physical tasks  carefully arranged  so that there is always bread in the oven and doughs fermenting at staggered stages. In between there are short breaks for a bite of dinner or sip of beer. One of the unexpected pleasures of baking in a wood-fired oven is the utter silence of the machine.  Music, podcasts and the occasional visitor are interspersed.   
SELLING
By contrast, the farmers market is an entirely social event.  Before market and while setting up for the day, vendors (my colleagues) catch up while exchanging quips and coffee.  Then I am visited by customers (my companions), in which the transaction of bread for money is one made up of many exchanges. Some ask of my family and I of theirs, some mention politics, others describe meals or travels and then there are conversations about bread.  This is meaningful commerce.
BREAD RECIPES
From the first time I tasted the breads of  Lionel Poilâne and Jean Luc Poujauran on a trip to Paris years before I had the bakery, I wanted to emulate them and so I came to favor certain techniques. I prefer working with a stiffer levain (sourdough starter).  Despite the many advantages of retarding or cold-fermenting the dough, I prefer to work with dough that remains at room temperature.  My doughs are fairly high in hydration but not excessively so.  My shaping is gentle and doesn’t involve the now very common technique of stitching. I bake the loaves dark but not to a point where there is bitterness to the crust. And still . . .there is always variation.