Saving Bread
Saving Bread explores sourdough, grain, fermentation, craftsmanship, and the people keeping real bread alive. Join baker and educator Allison White for practical lessons and thoughtful conversations with bakers, millers, farmers, oven makers, and others shaping the future of bread. Long live real bread.
Episodes
Interviews E13 Laila O'boyle of The Early Rise on Bread, Community & West Coast Breadfest
Send us a question or voice memo!What happens when you take a community that's grown online and bring everyone together in person?This week on Saving Bread, Allison sits down with her longtime friend Laila, the baker and educator behind The Early Rise and founder of West Coast Breadfest.After attending Asheville Breadfest, Laila was inspired to create something similar for the West Coast. Wha
Interviews E12 Building Trust, Finding Your Voice & Baking with Jill Nguyen of Capitol Jill Baking
Send us a question or voice memo!Jill Nguyen didn’t grow up baking. In fact, she didn’t start until 2020.What began as a pandemic bread obsession eventually became Capitol Jill Baking, her Washington, DC microbakery known for naturally leavened breads, inventive pastries, and colorful, highly personal cakes.In this episode, Jill and I talk about how she built a baking style that feels unmistakably
Interviews E11 Jon + Amanda of Proof Bread - From the Garage to Five Bakeries
Send us a question or voice memo!This week on Saving Bread, Allison sits down with Jon and Amanda of Proof Bread in Arizona.Proof began in 2017 with hand-mixed dough, one farmers market, a few wholesale accounts, and a home bakery. Today, Proof has grown to five locations, nearly 100 employees, an in-house milling program, relationships with local grain producers, and an entirely sourdough menu.Jo
Rabbit Hole E03: The $60 Rye Loaf, Mexico City, Napa & What Bread Is Worth
Send us a question or voice memo!Leah is back for another Rabbit Hole episode, and this time we’re talking about what we’ve been eating, where we’ve been traveling, and the loaf everyone in the bread world seems to have an opinion about.Leah shares her visit to Moulin in Napa, where whole grains and freshly milled flour are worked into breads and pastries. Allison takes us through her trip to Mexi
Lessons E08 The pH of Sourdough | Microbiology, Fermentation & Whole Grain
Send us a question or voice memo!pH is one of the topics I’m asked about most often, but the number on a meter is only one part of understanding fermentation.In Lessons E08 of Saving Bread, I break down what is happening inside a sourdough culture and explain how I use pH in my own baking and production.We talk about the relationship between yeast and lactic acid bacteria, the enzymes naturally pr
Interviews E10 Anujay Krishna - High Hydration Sourdough, Open Crumb and Reading the Dough
Send us a question or voice memo!What does it take to build an incredibly open, delicate sourdough crumb when you are working with different flour, a different climate, and different equipment than the bakers who originally inspired you?This week on Saving Bread, I am joined by Anujay Krishna, a baker in Lucknow, India, whose beautifully open, lacy country loaves have made him one of the most requ
Lessons E07 - Whole Grain Chat with Baylin Speidel
Send us a question or voice memo!How do you choose the right whole grain flour when the names on the bag start to feel overwhelming?Baylin Speidel, head baker at Chimacum Valley Grainery, returns to Saving Bread for a practical conversation about grain selection, flour functionality, extraction rates and scalds.We break down hard red, hard white and soft wheat, along with rye, spelt, buckwheat and
Lessons E06 Whole Grain Sourdough: Fermentation, Microbiology and Adding More Whole Wheat
Send us a question or voice memo!What actually changes when you start adding more whole grain to sourdough?In this Lessons episode of Saving Bread, Allison White breaks down what happens when a familiar country loaf moves from mostly white bread flour toward 40, 50, 60, or even 100 percent whole grain.Whole wheat is not white flour with a little extra color. It is a different raw material, and as
Interviews E09 - Jenny Berg on Wholesale, Cottage Food Laws & Knowing When Enough Is Enough
Send us a question or voice memo!Jenny Berg of Crumb Sourdough Microbakery joins me for a conversation about what it actually looks like to build a home-based bread business and how many different paths that can take.Jenny started baking sourdough in 2020 and eventually turned that obsession into Crumb Sourdough Microbakery in Central Oregon. Along the way, she helped organize a grassroots effort
Interviews E08 Eric Pallant - Sourdough Culture
Send us a question or voice memo!This week on Saving Bread, we’re stepping away from the pH meters, fermentation charts, and troubleshooting for a conversation about the other side of bread: history, culture, memory, and story.Allison sits down with Eric Pallant, author of Sourdough Culture: A History of Bread Making from Ancient to Modern Bakers, to ask a deceptively simple question: What actuall
Lessons E05 Common Sourdough Failures — Country Loaf Troubleshooting
Send us a question or voice memo!Why is your sourdough flat? What causes huge tunnels surrounded by dense crumb? How do you know when bulk fermentation is finished? And when a loaf goes wrong, how do you figure out which part of the process was actually responsible?In this Lessons episode of Saving Bread, Allison walks through the basic country loaf from start to finish and breaks down some of the
Interviews E07 Tom Cucuzza of The Sourdough Journey: Bulk Fermentation & Starter Health
Send us a question or voice memo!How do you actually know when bulk fermentation is finished? What makes a sourdough starter strong and healthy? And how can understanding the science of fermentation help you become a more intuitive baker?This week on Saving Bread, Allison White talks with Tom Cucuzza, creator of The Sourdough Journey, about his years of experimentation with sourdough bread, starte
Interviews E06 Parker Cook of Basil & Bloom: Becoming a Better Baker, Building Trust and Learning Sourdough
Send us a question or voice memo!This week on Saving Bread, Allison talks with Parker Cook, baker, educator and content creator behind Basil & Bloom.Parker has built a large online community teaching sourdough bread baking, fermentation, starter maintenance, whole grains, freshly milled flour and microbakery production. But there is already a lot of information online about how Parker makes br
Interviews E05 Inside Great Bakes with Martin Sorge: Local Grains, Rye and Midwest Baking
Send us a question or voice memo!This week on Saving Bread, Allison talks with Martin Sorge, self taught baker, writer, winner of The Great American Baking Show and author of the new cookbook Great Bakes: Modern Classic Recipes from the Midwest.Martin has spent more than a decade baking with local flour, whole grains and unique grain varieties, and his approach makes experimenting with unfamiliar
Interviews E04 Stone Milled Flour and Whole Grain Sourdough with Baylin Speidel of Chimacum Valley Grainery
Send us a question or voice memo!What changes when flour stops being the background of a loaf and becomes the whole party?In this episode of Saving Bread, Allison talks with baker and miller Baylin Speidel, head baker at Chimacum Valley Grainery in Chimacum, Washington.Chimacum Valley Grainery brings farming, stone milling, baking, malting, and brewing together on one property. Baylin shares how w
Lessons E04 How to Make a Sourdough Country Loaf from Start to Finish
Send us a question or voice memo!In Lessons Episode 4, we take the country dough formula we created in our Baker’s Math episode and finally turn it into a loaf of bread.I’ll walk you through the entire process, beginning with the night-before levain build and continuing through the autolyse, mixing, gluten development, bulk fermentation, folds, pre-shaping, final shaping, basket proof, cold retard
Rabbit Hole E02 Pineapple Sourdough Starters, Beloved’s Bakery & Meaningful Inclusions
Send us a question or voice memo!Ally and Leah are back down the Rabbit Hole for a casual conversation about sourdough experiments, bakery field trips, and the stories we tell through bread.Inspired by Sourdough Culture by Eric Pallant, Leah creates a sourdough starter from scratch for the first time—funky smells, mysterious liquid, daily feedings and all. Meanwhile, Ally compares a traditional fl
Interviews E03 Campbell McFarlane - Building RackMaster and Supporting a New Generation of Bakers
Send us a question or voice memo!What began as Campbell McFarlane’s own obsession with sourdough eventually became RackMaster- an oven designed to give home, cottage, and small-scale bakers access to thoughtfully engineered equipment without requiring a traditional bakery.In this episode, Campbell shares how he moved from baking in Dutch ovens and a small deck oven to designing one of the most rec
Lessons E03 Baker's Math Made Simple | Understanding Hydration, Levain & Bread Formulas
Send us a question or voice memo!Baker's math doesn't have to be intimidating.In this episode, we're breaking down one of the most misunderstood topics in bread baking into something practical and approachable. We'll walk through baker's percentages, hydration, total formula, mixing-day formula, and pre-fermented flour (PFF)—without getting lost in complicated equations.To
Interviews E02 Alexandra Allen - Sourdough Cookies
Send us a question or voice memo!What happens when you treat every ingredient like it matters?In this episode of Saving Bread, I sit down with Alexandra Allen of Wildwoman Bakery to explore how freshly milled grains can completely transform sourdough baking—from cookies and pastries to naturally leavened breads.We dive into how Alex thinks about flour selection, butter, vanilla, levain behavior, a
Lessons E02 Sourdough Starter Variables
Send us a question or voice memo!Your sourdough starter is alive—and small changes in how you feed and maintain it can dramatically change how it behaves.In this episode of Saving Bread, we explore the four biggest variables that influence a sourdough starter: hydration, temperature, flour choice, and inoculation (seed percentage). Understanding how each of these factors affects fermentation will
Rabbit Hole E01 Exploring Sourdough Culture
Send us a question or voice memo!What can we learn when we slow down and connect with the people growing and making our food?In this episode of Saving Bread, Leah and I reflect on our visit to the MAUM Market, where we explore the value of shopping locally, supporting small makers, and building stronger connections to our food and communities.We also introduce the Saving Bread Book Club, a new ser
Interviews E01 Josh Fairbanks - Reading Your Dough
Send us a question or voice memo!What if the best sourdough baker you know isn't following the recipe exactly?In this episode of Saving Bread, I sit down with Josh Fairbanks, a bread and bagel baker from Portland, to talk about the balance between technical knowledge and intuition in sourdough baking.We explore what it really means to know your sourdough starter, why learning to read your dou
Lessons E01 Beginner Sourdough Starter Care
Send us a question or voice memo!Welcome to the first Saving Bread Lessons episode.If sourdough starter has ever felt confusing, intimidating, or just plain high maintenance, this episode is for you.In this beginner-friendly lesson, we’re covering the foundations of starter care: what a starter actually is, how often to feed it, refrigeration, common mistakes, weird smells, and how to stop overthi
Welcome to Saving Bread
Send us a question or voice memo!Welcome to Saving Bread — a podcast about baking, grain, fermentation, craftsmanship, and the people keeping the traditions of real food alive.
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