My thoughts about bread...
Over the years i’ve developed a deep connection and understanding of bread making, something which connects me more deeply to who I am and who I want to be. I wasn’t expecting to find that in baking when I started, it opened me up to so many new ways of thinking and being. Was that just a delicious accident? Or maybe it gave me a pathway to come home to who the person I’ve always been, the one who got lost along the way?
After five years of learning my craft the time came to quit the stressful and (for me) anxiety ridden corporate world I was living in. I needed to do something different, something I truly loved. I wanted to learn a craft, a yearning for something more honest and simplistic. Although not the same for everyone I just found in the corporate world I could never really be myself. For 20 years it always felt that I was in the wrong room somehow. Despite becoming very successful at what I did, leading hundreds of people across various operations in a global FTSE 100 company. I never really felt that I fitted in. I experienced two major phases of burnout over that time, I remember the panic attacks and sleepless nights, the anxiety and dread before so many interactions and meetings. I was good at fitting in and showing up, but inside it was killing me, literally. During the first major period of burnout which coincided with the start of Covid, I knew I had to get out. I didn’t know how but I knew then I needed something else.
Two things around that time which changed me. The first was discovering the magic of bread making, something about creating something from flour, water and salt and turning it into a nourishing and delightful loaf of bread just got me. The trials and errors, the challenges of understanding all the different elements required for this strange alchemy to work. The failures, the constant re-evaluation and improvement again and again and again in search of that perfect loaf. The feeling as your souls sails opening the oven door to see the thing you created, the smell, the taste, the feeling of the hot curst cracking in your fingers as you gently press it. The sound of the loaf quietly cackling as it cools. Each loaf different, each loaf unique, never to be repeated, each bread with it’s own gnarly identity. The simple yet deeply complex flavour of the bread itself and the stories of the flours and the grains that made it possible, created to nourish and feed us.
The second change was a growing understanding of me, my psychology, my past and my place on this planet. The realisation of my own mortality and my life ahead not yet lived. What did I want that future to be? How did I want to fill the time I have left on this planet?
It took another 4 years to find a way to move from the corporate world and into my new skin. But I managed to do that in 2024. I remember the deep delight and feeling of joy I got when I first started to say with belief that I was a Baker, it just felt right in so many ways.
My core goal now is to help others make great bread and re-learn simple bread making skills which last a lifetime. Somewhere along the way in the modern world we have forgotten so much, I want to help people rediscover the joy in bread making the way I did. I can’t promise it will change your life as fundamentally as it did mine, but maybe there are others out there, like me, who have a desire to reconnect to a craft or indeed to come back home in someway to themselves.