“There are so many experiences and stories of lockdown and you know, I know, how important baking was to so many people. Sourdough in particular. We know that when we feed our starter it comes alive. We know that we renew it and we see it respond, and we create a dough and we see it respond. And that life and renewal that came out of it, I think, was also another positive element. People going through the confusion and that awful time that we had. But also then the connection that it gave people… it was huge and it brought a lot of us together.”

“In February of 2020, I was looking at commercial spaces, building out a business plan, and trying to decide between moving into a space or building a space… and I was like set to meet in March to create our own space in Bentonville. And then, obviously, March 2020 everyone’s lives changed significantly and my my choice either scale way up and take a huge gamble and buildout a bakery in the middle of a global pandemic or scale way back and move back into my house, and bake out of my house again…”

"If you are a winemaker, and someone said ‘what are you blending for your wine?’ And you said I don’t know, it’s grape. They’ve recognized the difference that terroir has, the difference that varietals have, that climate has, how important those are in your ultimate product - and it’s no different in wheat. A wheat grown in Saskatchewan is very different from a wheat grown in Arizona."

“We opened those bags of fresh flour, it was like ‘holy smokes!’ We’d never experienced something like this before. We had always just had white flour that was all about function and performance and not so much about aroma and flavor. And so we said, ‘we’ve got to do this, this is like nothing we’ve ever experienced before.’ So that was the impetus.”

“But for me honestly, bread is not about holes. I say it many times. I say it many times in my workshop. I keep saying it. First of all, we have to ask the question: Why do we want to bake? If you have a business you want to give your clients good bread. You want to bake for yourself or your family to be able to eat good bread at home. For me bread is about flavor and nutrition.”

“Farmers are like anyone. Old and tired, and probably have a lot of debt. But they got into it for some reason - because soil, and plants, and the sunrise, and flavors and smells, that you can’t describe because they are too beautiful, thrills our hearts. And sometimes, farmers need to remember why they started. And if someone can go to them and say ‘we can create something beautiful and good’ most farmers would be willing to take a pay cut to do it.“

“I pushed the starting date for my starter, probably, back to 1893 in a gold mining town in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. But that doesn’t answer the question of how it got there. And so that’s when I realized I have to start at the very beginning. While I’m working backwards to see where does my starter come from - can I work forward and create a path to where those two lines are going to intersect. That meant going back to who made the first sourdough starter? Who made the first bread? …and now I’m suddenly I’m back 10,00 years.”

“I learn more, personally, as a baker, when I allow myself to completely mess up. And not mess up in the way that I’m not paying attention, but more like, I’m going to let this over proof so I can see how far it’s going to go. Or, I’m going to really push the hydration to see what can it take. We don’t follow recipes. We follow formulas. Even if you have something that isn’t what you were hoping to accomplish, it’s going to taste better, I think, if you have a flavor forward flour.”

“You know how we’re always focused on the process for bread, and being mindful at each stage of the process for bread, that’s the similar mentality you’ve got to have for pizza, I think. It’s not an afterthought. It's its own little niche that you need to really pay attention to - pizza.”