Help Michael Scale His Bread Baking

Greetings, good people. I've been hovering over the keyboard for weeks at a loss. The truth is, I have spent most of my life avoiding this very moment. This is the moment where the thing that I have dreamed up, and put my whole heart into, needs your help. Intellectually, I understand that asking for help is an ordinary human interaction; however, it is one of the hardest things I've done.

Tell your story, they say. So here it goes. I'm 41 years old, I have a wife and two kids, a community of support, and I'm sick. I've been chronically ill for close to 20 years. The fundamental root of my illness is still an opaque and haunting set of interconnected mysteries. However, we know that whatever the cause(s), my gut is at the center of my body's dysfunction. After a particularly vivid journey through several realms of psychological and physical torture that lasted four years, I have learned a lot about health and disease. Armed with this intimate knowledge, I would watch with foreboding as my two wonderful daughters would eat sandwich after sandwich, pancake after pancake, and so on. As someone who has always loved to make things, with food being a particular joy, I set myself on a mission to make better bread for my family. Luckily for me, a close childhood friend Sara Bercholz shared my passion. Sara also happens to be an owner of a publishing company (Shambhala & Roost ) that had recently won a James Beard award for their book, "Sourdough," by the brilliant author Sarah Owens. It is good to have friends in good places. So I bought the book and dove in. (Below is the book-selfie I took for my friend Sara in the car after buying my copy.)

I fell for the book, the author's approach, the whole world of naturally leavened bread, and organic heirloom wheat. I fell hard. I patiently waited while I cultivated my own sourdough starter, and as soon as I could, I started baking bread. When the first loaf came out of the oven, some kind of deep satisfaction and joy filled my heart/mind, and I haven't stopped making bread ever since. My eldest daughter teases me and says my bread company should be called Endless Bread. It is safe to say that I am obsessed, enraptured really. In the process of making naturally leavened bread, I found a kind of peace. This peace was composed of a grounding in my sensual experience, a connection to my health, and some far-off calling that felt almost ancestral. What started out as a personal and intimate experience, a conversation with life in all its pain and joy, soon included family, friends, and neighbors. (Below a photo of my first bread.)

It was one of my neighbors, Daniela Papi-Thornton, who first suggested that they would buy a loaf of bread once a week from me. I was hesitant, but I figured it would give me an excuse to make more bread, so I took her up on it. That evening as I was telling my family about my first customer, I noticed a notification on my phone that Daniela had transferred some money through Venmo. When I opened the app, I saw enough money for a loaf of bread a week for 3 months! I was stunned. I quickly wrote Daniela and said that she had far too much confidence in me. Before she wrote back, I saw she had sent another transfer for 3 more months of bread, and a smiley face. In a lot of ways this was the first inflection point on my path to becoming a bread baker. Was I really going to commit to baking once a week for 6 months? Well, as fate would have it, the world erupted in a global pandemic, and it became necessary to stay close to home. All of a sudden, my newfound passion became a touchstone of joy, sanity, connection, and grace as I continued to manage my illness and the fresh hell of "zoom school."

Before I really knew what was happening, word started to spread around my neighborhood, and with my friends and family. Within a few months I was baking around 20-25 loaves of bread a week. At that point, I mixed all the dough by hand, baked the loaves one at a time in my home oven, packaged, and delivered them to people's doors. Baking that way was a unique kind of madness where pain and pleasure unite. However, and oven rack burns not withstanding, every time the bread came out of the oven, it was all somehow worth it.

It was around this time that I started working on a gluten-free loaf that did not have any added gums, starches, eggs, and all the other ingredients that people use to mimic wheat bread. It is true that I was interested in baking that loaf so that I could actually eat some of the bread that I made. Up until then, and still to this day, I would chew on the bread and spit it out like I was tasting wine. Still, my main inspiration was my dear friend and neighbor Liza Smith who was suddenly diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Battling my own illness, and the added precautions due to covid-19, I often felt powerless in my wish to support my friend. One thing I could do, however, was feed her. So feed her I did. If nothing more comes from this whole effort, than making that bread for Liza would be a grace worth its weight in gold. Soon, what I have come to call 'Liza's Bread' also developed a fairly devoted following of its own. (Below a photo of my home bake shop & Liza's bread.)

Worth it as it may have been, I was certainly feeling the cramp of baking at home, and my patient and supportive family began to grow weary of finding flour in all the nooks and crannies of our house. As it was at many make-or-break moments on this path, some situations would open up to offer a way forward. At that moment, what opened up was a chance to move my baking out of the house and into a commercial space. And not just any commercial space, in the corner of a coffee roasting facility run by none other than my eldest brother. I decided to invest in a Rofco, a cottage artisan oven from Belgium, and recommit to this unexpected bread journey.

(Below is my brother with the first bake from the Rofco oven.)

As time progressed, my passion struck a chord with people. Within months I had amassed an email list of 130 names. I was turning out over 70 loaves on Thursdays of every week. Luckily for me, I had a captive audience due to the pandemic, and I would try out all kinds of different recipes on them. I still marvel at the amount of loving support I received over what would turn out to be a year and a half. This is the website I made to collect orders for the weekly bread, and here are some of my favorite pictures of that time.

Several months ago, I was approached by the owner of a local specialty food shop here in Boulder called Cured. The owner had just lost their wholesale supply for baguettes which they relied on to make sandwiches for all the swells that move about west Pearl St. hankering for some noontime sustenance. As much as I wanted to take the next step and bake bread full time, I did not have the equipment to come anywhere close to fulfilling his needs. Then he said, how about I pre-order enough bread to pay for a new oven and mixer? I'm still in awe of this fortunate turn of events and the confidence the owner had in me. What followed was a months long covid supply chain comedy that finally culminated in some beautiful new equipment from American Baking Systems landing at the production facility on a 70 mile/hour windy day. I did my best to steel myself and slowly but slowly pulled the large oven off the back of the delivery truck with a forklift in the howling wind. Thankfully it all went well, and I've been testing loaves of bread ever since. (Some pictures of the new oven...)

So this is it. I'm so close to making this next step. I'm looking to raise $10,000 from my community to give me a runway so that I can weather the first month of producing bread at scale, plus a few more critical pieces of equipment. Here is the rundown:

That is my story. I am a heart lost and found. As improbable as it is, this making of bread is my path back to health, and to my connection with life. May this bread shop be a source of goodness for those who work there, and those who buy the bread and eat it. May we find our way back from whatever ails us.

I hope that you can help.

With love and appreciation for this life, this planet, each other, and this fleeting moment.

Michael

--'To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it'- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time