Greetings from Pleasanton Township

By Gerard Grabowski and Jan Shireman

Dear Neahtawanta Friends,

Greetings from Pleasanton Township and our homestead in the woods! We've been meaning to write to you for some time to tell you how we're doing with our micro-bakery experiment.

We have kept the hearth warm for just over a year now, and the sacred nature of baking bread is ever unfolding before us. While we still have an enormous amount to learn and experience, we would like to share with you how our journey has been so far.

The inspiration for a home-based brick oven bakery came from the merging of a number of our values. The desire to root ourselves firmly in our immediate environment and have our homestead generate for us a sustainable lively-hood has always been our dream. We wished to create a living that reflected our beliefs in organic agriculture and whole foods nutrition, and we wanted to produce something that would be useful and valued by our community at large.

Our challenge has been to blend our dreams, values and ideals into the economic necessity of providing a lively-hood for our family. We wanted our daughter Anna to grow up in an environment where the rhythms of daily life integrate work, play, art, and community into a seamless, creative dance. We searched to find a way for our daily endeavors to reflect our spiritual orientation toward celebrating the mystery of the four elements -- Earth, Water, Air and Fire.

We felt that if we were indeed going to make this happen, we would have to fully engage ourselves in creating our own reality.

So why bread? One of the first events that pulled us into this organic orbit of traditional hearth-baked, naturally-leavened breads was a chance encounter with a chewy piece of bread at the Bliss Music Festival in the summer of 1990. Paul Bantle, an elfish-looking man with a healthy grin, offered us a taste of bread he had made in his backyard oven in Ann Arbor. "Yummylicious," our mouths said, and as Paul explained to us the wonder of the bread's nature, we knew that this was what we had been looking for.

As we researched and connected with a greater circle of artisan bakers, crafts-people, organic grain providers and assorted "bread heads," we saw in this kind of bread-baking a chance to realize some of our dreams. The hunger for organic, flavorful, and non-toxic foods coupled with a revitalization of traditional methods and a resurgence of community hearths is creating a bread renaissance in our country. It seemed to us that making this kind of bread would nourish both body and soul.

The dynamic of working at the local level connects us with other small businesses in our greater community as well. We purchase our grains from small farmers and millers, and we order nuts, seeds, dried fruits and herbs from natural food suppliers. The local printer produces our labels, and the small grocery stores that sell our bread enjoy 20 percent from our sales.

And when we make our bread, we are comforted and inspired by the awareness that we are interacting with those elements of Earth, Water, Air and Fire in a respectful way:

First of all, organic fresh-milled flour is essential to the process. This coincides nicely with our desire to support the organic agricultural community and whole foods nutrition in general. Our source for grain is the Daily Grind in Ann Arbor, a milling cooperative and long-time advocate of organic growers and those who work to make sustainable farming and food production a reality.

One of the consequences of using organic grain and milling it ourselves, as well as using other organic ingredients, is the added expense. For example, our flour costs more than five times as much as the kind that most commercial bakeries use. However, one of the fundamental problems of the dominant economic system is that not all the costs of a product are factored into the equation. When the costs to the Earth and overall health of consumers is considered, using organic fresh-milled flour and organic ingredients makes economic and ethical sense.

Secondly, since the natural fermentation action of the starter we use would be degraded by chlorine or other man-made chemicals, the bread demands Water that is the purest we can get. Our water is from a deep well and "un-citified" in the best of ways. We are grateful that we have access to good water, and we don't take such a fortune for granted.

Next, the bread requires a slow fermentation to encourage flour, water and air to work together. In addition, a daily interaction with the "desem," (which is the type of sourdough starter used), is required. This process of natural leavening has been described as "working with the expansive and contractive forces in the universe," a breathing in and out, an interplay of fresh-milled flour, water and air expanding and warming, then contracting and cooling.

Here was the Air element we desired -- a chance for us to be cognizant of our own breath while breathing with the world around us. Wow, this was some pretty cool cosmic bread we were dealing with here, no wonder these bakers we met seemed so naturally leavened!

Finally, the fourth essential requirement is to bake the bread in a wood-fired brick oven. We built the bakery ourselves and fuel it with downed and dead wood as well as piles of scrap wood from the local sawmill. The design of the baking chamber allows for nearly complete combustion, so it all has a limited effect on the environment. Furthermore, the hearth has traditionally been a sacred place, a gathering for the community, a place to revel in the power and richness of Fire.

The designer of our oven, Alan Scott of Tomales, California, summed it all up for us:

"The advantage of this kind of baking is that you start getting re-connected to the world around you in a more intimate way. You try and maximize your benefits from what you do with your life, from working in a wholistic way with the Earth, to getting your grains to yield a bread that is truly nutritious. When you bake this way you start looking at bread real close, and you just can't waste your time processing that commercialized stuff from the store. Our work and our food should have a deep and sustaining value."

So, there you have it. We discovered a way to merge our wants, needs and values into our lively-hood. We are often asked, "Are you making it?" Our answer is not a simple one. The path towards living our ideals while making a living is sometimes hard to find. This is uncharted territory for us, and in some ways we are making our own map to find the way.

There have been a number of road signs that tell us we are heading in the right direction. We see that all kinds of people appreciate and support nutritious and delicious whole grain bread. Nearly every loaf that the hearth has given us has found a home.

Our current level of sales provides us with enough money to pay for our operating expenses, and to meet our basic needs. We are mindful that work can become all-consuming, and we are trying to figure out the best way to thrive! We think we can see where we're heading, and we know that it isn't about getting to that place, but how we travel.

Peace be with you!

-- Jan, Gerard and Anna Rose

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