About

Welcome to the Bread Experience!

Hello, I’m Cathy, the face behind the Bread Experience.

During the day, I work in the corporate world as a project manager and as you can imagine, my job can be very stressful at times.

I’ve found that baking bread is a wonderful stress reliever and a great way to get the creative juices flowing. I particularly enjoy baking bread on the weekends and allowing the dough to slow ferment to bring out the flavor and nutritional properties of the bread.

Slow-Fermented Sweet Potato Einkorn Sourdough Stout Bread

 

Why did I create this site?

The Bread Experience site was created out of a passion for bread-baking and a desire to share that passion with others. This labor of love began as a project for my masters in 2007, but has turned into much more.

The site launched in 2008 and I started blogging a few months later.  What began as a Master’s project, quickly developed into an intense passion for all things bread and grain-related.  I’ve become enamored with ancient grains, in particular, as well as sprouted wheat and milling my own flour.

Milled Einkorn

The Importance of Bread

Bread has a profound way of bringing people together. I like to think of it as common ground. In this crazy world we live in, we need some common ground.

I’ve also found that gardening, canning, making soup and fermenting go hand-in-hand with bread baking so you’ll find me blogging about jams and soups from time-to-time and using different types of fermentation methods.

 

 

My Bread Baking Journey

I started baking yeast breads in 1999 when I bought my first bread machine, but my bread journey really began when I was much younger.  I grew up in the South so I learned how to made quick breads, biscuits and cornbread with my mom and sisters at a young age and had fun creating concoctions of flour and water in the kitchen with a childhood friend, and even made mud pies in the vacant dirt lot next to my house.

Perhaps the “playing in the dirt” part explains my love of gardening and the burning desire to build an adobe oven or some type of wood-fired oven. I haven’t found the right spot to put the oven yet, but it’s on my bucket list.

If I claimed to be a self-taught baker, this would not give credit to the many mentors I’ve had through bread baking books, conferences, workshops, classes or the lessons and experiences I’ve shared with baking peers through online baking groups. I’ve learned so much from the bread community at large and sharing that passion is what this site is about.

 

Some of My Favorite Bread Baking Books

• Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart
• Bread Revolution by Peter Reinhart
• Flour, Water Salt & Yeast by Ken Forkish
• Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson
• Bread – A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman

 

The Experience

The bread experience is about so much more than just baking bread, it’s about the whole experience … from the wheat field to the table.

Bread is Community!

The final and most important part of the bread journey is community. Sharing a loaf of bread with family and friends is one of my favorite things. Then, the process starts all over again to create the bread experience.

What is it about bread?

Bread is the staff of life as the saying goes. There’s just nothing that compares to the aroma of fresh-baked bread or the feeling as you bite into a warm, buttered roll or biscuit or break into a crackly baguette or sourdough loaf.

Through the Bread Experience site and the bread baking blog, I want to share with you my passion for baking bread and to provide resources and tools to assist you in making great tasting bread.

 

 

Here are some of my top posts

• Here is a post I’m really proud of – Sourdough Sprouted Wheat Loaves
• I’m really proud of this one as well – Kefir Milk Asiago Spelt Semolina Bagels
• This post got a whole lot of comments – Sprouted Wheat Bread with no Flour

My favorite bread recipe and a Funny Story

One of my favorite breads to make is yeast rolls. I enjoy making these rolls because my sons love them and I love to see the expression on their faces when they know I’m baking them. Actually, these rolls smell so good, my sons used to run downstairs because of the aroma. I didn’t even have to tell them I was baking them.

I like to bake bread on Sundays and one day, I got so caught up making these rolls, I forgot about dinner. My oldest son came in the kitchen and asked what was for dinner and I remember thinking “Oops!” However, I just said, “yeast rolls” like that was what I had been planning all along. He said “sweet” and filled up on the rolls never complaining about not having anything else for dinner. That’s how much he loves these rolls.

• Here is the recipe for My Family’s Favorite Yeast Rolls
  

 

My other love…

My other love is dance. I studied dance for years so it ranks right up there with baking. These days, you’ll find me baking bread and dancing around the kitchen.

Did you know that the women of Ancient Greece kneaded their dough around a worktable with a musician playing the flute? They sure did. If you don’t believe me, check out Benard Dupaigne’s The History of Bread to find out for yourself. I’m just carrying on the tradition by listening to music and dancing a gig.

 

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