Bread is one of the oldest baked foodstuffs of mankind, present from Antiquity through all human cultures and civilizations. It is deeply codified in our common consciousness.
My earliest memories related to bread are those of all our neighbors getting together in my home village to bake bread. As a kid, I was fascinated by the process of preparing the dough, shaping huge loaves, heating the furnace (in Hungarian “kemence”), putting the nicely proofed loaves inside and taking out deep brown baked bread outside with an irresistible scent, giving it a wash (in Hungarian “mosdatás”).
I just couldn’t wait to break off a little corner and put it in my mouth just like that or with sour cream or half a teaspoon full of pig or goose fat. I made a point of always joining our elder neighbor Julis neni (auntie Julis) when she was baking. And when Eszti neni (auntie Eszti) was baking, I knew only too well where her bread basket was, and would either beg or if that didn’t help steal the corner of the freshly baked bread which was my idea of bliss.
With the deepening of the economic crisis of the last years of Communism in Romania, it was more and more difficult to get good bread and sometimes bread at all. In the countyside the effects of the situation were not that strong, however, the big community bread baking events kept getting fewer and fewer.
After the Revolution of 1989, we suddenly woke up on the Capitalist side of the world. As a sign of “progress” the country was invaded by puffy white “breads”. This new food product had precious little to do with the real bread as we had known it for centuries, and over the decades to come its quality would decrease even further. This development was, however, not limited to Romania: sadly, you can observe it everywhere.
As time went by, I managed to maintain my special with bread. We kept baking in our family, and I kept up the tradition but we used industrial yeast and bread baking machines, embracing “technical progress”.
During the pandemic and everything slowed down, my dear friend Johanna gave me some sourdough suggesting I could bake bread with it. I felt a kind of obligation to not let “little sourdough die”, so I decided to give it a try.
The first bread was not perfect but as I took the first bite and enjoyed that special taste, I realized, that this is the taste of bread as it should be, as it had tasted for millennia, even tough I never tasted this pure artisanal sourdough bread before. That memory was still there in some deep layers of our universal consciousness and revealed itself to me.
Since then, I have become a sourdough nerd. I tested a lot of recipes, was learning from the internet and passionate bakers. It has come to a point where I can’t enjoy any other bread but sourdough or long fermented ones; not just for the taste, but also for its health benefits.
So bread has kind of become my passion and my mission. So I would like to share what I have found and learned and experienced in the blog with “my personal bread stories”, my favorite recipes, and other interesting facts or information on healthy bread!
