Page 18 - The Valley Table - Summer 2021

born & bread Four artisanal breadmakers discuss
their craft and its evolution.
by steve fowler photos by meghan spiro
“BREAD IS A LIVING THING,” MUSES Norman Jean Roy. “It’s this organism that you basically go into some sort of agreement with before you make it.”
Case in point, before Roy and his wife, Joanna, could even start producing bread at their new Hudson bakery, Breadfolks, they had to populate the bakery with a bacteria colony so the facility would have the ambient yeasts needed to support their sourdough starters — a fact of paramount importance since all of their breads and pastries are made using sourdough.
Naturally leavened bread has long been the trademark of artisanal bakeries, lauded for its
more complex taste, variable crumb structure, and — to true artists — for its unpredictability. But the quarantine period of 2020 ushered in
a widespread embrace of sourdough doctrine that left supermarket shelves looking like the chocolate aisle on February 13. Between April and November, King Arthur Baking Company sold almost double the amount of flour it sold in all of 2019. In its 2019 “Year in Search,” Google revealed “sourdough bread” as the most searched recipe in the United States.
Yet to lump in sourdough with fizzled fads like zoodles and charcoal ice cream undermines its primitive elegance in the eyes of Aaron Quint,
16 the valley table june – aug 2021