“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…”
“I use my sourdough starter, I don’t use my discard when I’m making cookies… and I maintain my acidity in my feedings, so i’m never going to have a super sour. If I’m looking for that well then I’m going to look for a grain that will be a little more active faster, and maybe leave it to bloom a little longer… and see how the flavor is changing and imparting on the cookie dough.”
“Sourdough…. It’s like a meditation for me, it’s getting my hands into the dough, feeling the dough, connecting with the earth, connecting with the Spirit. And it’s helped me so much. It still does. This is, perhaps, not the material point of sourdough, it’s more like a spiritual one.”
“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.”
I had no idea what I was doing and what my voice was…but I really let that come out in my films, and slowly I had a lot of bread kneading scenes in my film, and a lot of eating lunch, and making food, I started photographing food a lot more, and it suddenly all made sense. When I came out of NYU, I was like OK... my goal is going to make a living shooting food, photographing food, directing food, cause I feel that is what I’m drawn too, I followed that intuition.
“I thought it was funny that of all the things that I bake, baguettes, croissants, all these other cultural breads, it was the pan de coco, which is MY roots, that got people to see me. And that was the point where I was like, hold on a sec, I’ve always been a proud Honduran, but I was like, well, I definitely need to be more in touch with my roots in baking and try to find out what, if any, bread culture is there.”
“...billions of people have daily relationship to bread. The bakeries, the restaurant owners, the home bakers - we all have a duty - to raise our voices and start making demands on the flour industry and the distribution of it, the whole process chain, to make it more sustainable and to help our planet.”
“If you think about it, without Instagram there would be no pan. I mean, even if I invented it, would would I have done with it? How would you reach bakers? Without the community that sustained me and that I’m giving back to, there really would be no pan. There would be no way. It’s really unbelievable to me.”
“I wake up in the morning and wash my face with soap that my friend made, I pour myself a cup of coffee that’s coffee roasted by somebody I know, every step of my day is built around the people that live here…. that’s my heart and soul… they support my business, I support their ventures and it's like a huge collaborative effort … and feel like that's step one. It’s laying the ground work within your community to create a web of support”
“I have tan grains, brown, rust colored grains, blonde grains, something in between. Sometimes buckwheat that can turn it different colors of purple. Thinking of that as a baker, you don’t want all your breads to look the same...
It’s ARTISANAL. We’re artists too... “
...I like to make bread that looks like my desert - the desert where I live. It’s kind of this initial picture I have of the loaf I want to create and I can just go LIKE A PAINTER into those grains and get the pigments and draw them out and that’s what I did with the line up of breads...
“Sourdough taught me….that it’s OK to do things differently…it’s OK to mess up, it’s OK not to have the perfect score on my loaf, it’s OK not to have oven spring somedays. All these things teach you valuable lessons and they take you to the next level. I really think it’s a journey that is ongoing for everybody and it’s so powerful to share with others because you end up learning so much from each other.”
