 A quick and dirty little slideshow that just highlights some moments over the last four years, because that's actually when I started baking bread, was about four years ago. And I basically started baking because a friend who was traveling through San Francisco gave me a sourdough starter and he scribbled down some instructions. You know, I saw him, we were just chatting in my kitchen and I saw, he had a little yogurt container with a little brown lump in it and I was like, what are you doing with that? What is that? He said, it's sourdough, sourdough starter. He said, well, why do you have it? He said, because I bake bread. I like to bake bread. I'm traveling. I was like, but you can't bake good bread at home. And he kind of laughed. He said, yeah, you can. He wrote down some instructions on a piece of paper and, you know, within a week I tried it and I was just immediately smitten with baking. And I started doing it all the time. And I started doing it all the time, mostly because I loved the process of making a loaf of bread. I also love eating bread. But I could only eat so much bread. And so I started giving it away. And one day, one of my neighbors who might often give a loaf to, he said, hey man, I'll give you a few bucks for that. I was like, no, Michael, you don't need to pay me for it. He's like, no, really? I was like, that's a good idea. Yeah, give me your money, man. And very quickly, I realized that by selling the bread, I could bake more. And I could actually not be losing money. And so I think this, I started my blog in August of 2010. And I started baking in April. And I started selling bread to my coworkers over at UC Berkeley because five years before that, I was writing children's books and teacher's guides over at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley. And they knew I was falling in love with baking because I was blabbing about it all the time. And I talked a few of them into this wacky idea I had of a bread subscription. I said, listen, you give me 20 bucks. I'll give you a loaf of bread every week for the next four weeks. And I got like 15 people to do it. And voila, so this is my first blog post. Holy moly, it's happening. Hi, friends. Holy moly, it's happening. I'm selling bread and people like it. This is so totally rad, it's making my eyes pop out of my face. Not really, but I'm pumped up. So that was the beginning. And this is what's happening these days. This is in the mission. And this is a poster for Good Eggs, which is this really great company based here in San Francisco. And they're like an online farmer's market. And they were really influential to me because about a year in to baking my bread and doing my bread subscription, I'd quit my day job. I was going for it. But the bread subscription had become so much logistics to manage by myself and not really having ever done anything like this before. It was really taking up a lot of my time. And I had some bread sales that I was doing. The bread sales I was doing through the bar I was working and through a place where I was using their oven. And I stopped doing the bread subscription, but Good Eggs helped me pick that back up and helped me keep moving. Thanksgiving of 2010, I had a little article written about me in an online newsletter. It was just like, hey, there's this guy in the mission. He's baking bread, he's selling it out of this little shop. And I got a ton of emails from strangers saying, we want bread for Thanksgiving. Biggest bread for Thanksgiving. And I wasn't planning on doing that, but I don't like to let people down, so I went for it. And on Thanksgiving of 2010, I baked 60 loaves of bread in my home oven. It's funny, looking at these loaves of bread now, I'm like, oh my God, those look so crappy. But as you can see in my face, I was not thinking that then. I was just very excited as I am today, because all of you are here, and I know some of you, but I don't know a lot of you, so thank you again for coming. So that's me when I was baking bread at home, and I was still baking bread at home, which I know because I can tell by the way that loaf looks, but I was also working at this bar in the mission called Amnesia, and I would bring in the bread from my home, and I'd hide it under the bar, and I'd cut up a few slices like I did tonight, and I'd let people sample it, and after a few weeks of that, I'd have people coming in and saying, hey, is this where I can get the bread? Yes, it is. That's a little speakeasy bakery. But September 2010 to April 2011, because in April 2011 I said, screw this, I'm going in all the way. I'm going to quit my bartending job. I'm going to try to bake full time, and so that's about a year. It's about a year after I started baking, I said, I'm in. And I kind of, I was very scared to do it, but I put the pressure on myself to not have any other source of income so that I could really give it a go, because the reason I jumped into baking so lovingly is because I had this naive idea that my job could be something that I loved, because for whatever reason, it really stuck out to me how often I heard about people working eight hours a day doing something that they didn't like or they didn't find meaningful. And I said, I got to at least try, you know? And so I tried. And that's me at Mission Pie, which was this amazing pie, it is this amazing pie bakery in the Mission, and once I quit the bartending, I knew I needed to really go for it, and I needed a real oven. So I started walking around the neighborhood just going into bakeries and saying, hey, can I rent space from you when you're not using your oven? And most places were like, no, goodbye. But one place, two places, eventually one place in the Mission, Mission Pie, I went by a few times with Loaves of Bread each time, sort of reminding them that I was still interested, and Karen and Kristen, two really amazing women, eventually said, okay, let's give it a shot. You come in here once a week, you can come in between these and these hours, and you can only use this space, and you have to have 10 Loaves available for walk-in customers, because I was mostly doing the bread subscription at that point, and within a few months, I was selling 100 Loaves out of there a day, and we said, okay, let's do it two days a week. So I'm doing it two days a week there. I met another very generous man, Charlie, who owns Pizzaiolo over in Oakland, and we started doing the same thing over there, where I wasn't an employee of these businesses, I would rent space from them to run my business. Because I didn't want anybody telling me how to do it, because that was really part of the fun for me, was figuring out how to make the whole thing work. And part of making the whole thing work was delivering it around town on my bicycle, and so this was my setup for a while. Sometimes I'd bring everything with me. I'd make the bread, and then I'd bring everything away and deliver it around town, and so I had different pickup spots for my bread subscription at offices around town and different stores. I started selling it from Buy Right Market. One thing I don't have a picture of, which is good, is one day I had this stack piled up really high. I think I had about 100 Loaves of bread, and I went around a corner a little too tight, and I saw it in the driver's face before I knew what was going on. They went like this. I was like, what did they do? And I fell over. It was very sad to really bum me out, and obviously I couldn't bring that bread to people. So that summer, 2011, this guy emails me, who is a buddy, his name is Jeremy. He's the owner and founder of Four Barrel Coffee, which was a great cafe, Roastry on Valencia Street that I frequented and dropped off Loaves of bread. He emails me, and he says, hey, Josie, I've got an idea, and I got a space, and I want to know if you want to work on a project together. And he brings me to this place on Devisadero. This place right here, which it actually looks cooler here than it did when he first showed it to me. When he first showed it to me, it was just this totally abandoned, very messy market. He said, let's do a project together. I'll run the cafe and you can run the bakery. What do you think? And I was like, Jeremy, I have no idea what I'm doing. But yes, let's do it. I just got to let you know I have some things planned, so I'm going to need to be gone for periods of time. He said, no, that's fine, we'll figure it out. So I have some things planned. I like to have fun. This is me at Burning Man, shooting a flamethrower into the sky. I also went on a trip with my now-fiancee. We're actually getting married in a couple of weeks, but we traveled around Southeast Asia together for two months. I planned this trip to Southeast Asia with my girlfriend, and then Jeremy from Forberall says, hey, do you want to open a cafe bakery with me? I say, yes, I do. Right after that, I get a book deal. And so it was very exciting to have these opportunities, just like popping up. But I still really wanted to go to Southeast Asia and see things like this and do things like this. I don't know if you can see, up there, doing some rock climbing. This is the ocean down here. This is in Thailand, I believe. Shortly after this, I fell into the water like that. This is in Laos, on a river. Okay, so anyway. And so I come back from the months away, and the place still looks like this, you know? And I'm like, oh, right, right. I'm gonna have to get my hands dirty in this thing. And so I spent a lot of time in that space helping to turn it into what it is today. I learned how to tile, which I don't know if any of you have been to the mill, but it's got a lot of tile in it, and me and a few other people did that. There's some of that tile. And so we opened about a year ago, and it's funny that bread rack, that bread rack has gotten a lot bigger, because we now make a lot more bread than we did at the beginning. And so about three weeks after we opened, we shot all of the photographs for my book. I worked with this great photographer here in San Francisco, Aaron Kunkel. And this is me in her studio taking some photos. She took all the photos in the book. This is just, you know, imposing. It wasn't great timing, because as you can imagine, you know, opening a business, a bread bakery, took up a lot of my time and energy, and putting photography of a book on top of that was really challenging. But we got it done. So I think there's a photograph coming up that might be disturbing to some people, so I'm going to go a little quickly, but it conveys a really unfortunate thing that happened to me that I did to myself about two months after we opened. I fell off my bicycle, and I went ahead and I posted this picture of myself on Instagram while I was in the dentist's office. There we go. Yeah, so, yeah, I won't dwell on that one. But yeah, it was really, really challenging. Obviously it's challenging to have that happen at any point in your life, but, you know, I had to take a big step away from the business and had to heal myself, and luckily I had a team of people that were amazingly committed and talented and they didn't skip a beat while I disappeared for a week and a half. And I would wander in there, you know, every couple days and try to be helpful as much as I could, but I was really, I was pretty loopy. The fork on my bicycle broke and I took a face plant in Golden Gate Park and, you know, woke up in an ambulance and yada-yada. It was terrifying. But at the end of it, I got new teeth and they actually are better looking than they were before, so I'm grateful for it. And yeah, I mean, every day, we are trying as hard as we can to make the bread better than the day before. And we don't always do it, but hopefully over time, you know, the goal is to every day to be able to honestly say, this is the best bread ever. So this was a particularly pretty loaf. You get it? They're loafers. And so there's that thing, that little slice that we had no idea what a stir that was going to create. We started serving toast at the... We actually, so we had a tent set up inside of the mill for the seven months before we opened. And you know, I'm a bread baker and so I would bring in loaves of bread and serve them as slices of toast, which is how I eat the bread often. And it just seemed to make sense to serve it up as toast. Little did we know that it would become very popular, but it would also become very controversial. And there was a few pieces of press that came out that accused us of ruining San Francisco with our toast. And, you know, the article brought up some really serious issues, the rising cost of living in San Francisco. The city is changing now, as it has been, and as it will continue to. And it's becoming increasingly unaffordable for some people, and that's a problem, and a really complex one that I don't have the answers to, but it's a conversation that needs to continue to occur. I don't think that my toast is the reason for that. Nevertheless, something that I think my toast is a part of is a conversation around what the true cost of food is and the way that we've chosen to prepare our toast, just like the way Forberal has chosen to prepare their coffee, just like the way lots of restaurants and businesses here in the Bay Area and beyond choose to go about their craft, is it's expensive, and it's labor intensive, and our ingredients cost more than mass produced low quality foods. And I don't make any claims about everybody in the world needing to come to the mill and eat our toast the way that we choose to do it. Everyone is very free to eat or not eat toast, however they like, but if it's something that you find value in and you support the way that we run our business and the way that we conduct ourselves in our craft, then we'd love to share it with you, but no pressure. And recently I'm really excited about our pizza nights. We started doing pizza on Monday nights, and it's been really, really fun. Every Monday night it's like a party in there, and we just pick one vegetarian pizza to do each Monday, and it's been really great. And this is the mill from the outside, which is, other than my fiance, whom I'm about to become her husband, the mill is probably my closest relationship. And I know that was more of a autobiographical show, but just to give a little intro to the book, it's, in the grand scheme of things, I'm a beginning baker. I started baking four years ago, and I started writing the book a year and a half after I started baking. And so I really wrote it to the me of a couple years prior. And so the first chapter is a series of recipes and each one builds on the last. So the first recipe is called Your First Loaf of Bread. And it's just a bare bones, the simplest recipe that I could think of that would still get you to a nice home-baked loaf. Because I think the most important thing for someone who hasn't baked much bread or any bread is for that first experience, that first baking experience, for it to be encouraging. You're not trying to make the best loaf of bread in the world. You're trying to make a good loaf of bread. And then if you like it, you'll continue to do it because it's a really nice practice to be in the habit of. It's why I fell in love with it. So that's the first chapter. It starts off with your first loaf and each recipe gets a little bit more complex. And that's all with commercial yeast. And it starts off with a sandwich loaf. And then you get into mixing the dough in multiple stages and making loaves that are not in pans. And then we move on to sourdough bread. And then we get into all sorts of stuff, making bread with different grains, different flowers, pizza. The last chapter includes a bunch of recipes for sweets like cookies and scones and that kind of stuff. So my hope is that it has something for everybody. But really, my biggest goal is for it to help people who haven't baked that much to fall in love with it. Sure. Of what? Sure. Yeah, so I work with this really amazing small family company up in Petaluma called Central Milling, a quichousteau bakery supply. And they work with farms. I get wheat that's grown in Washington and in Oregon. My ryeberries come from Canada. But because we, taking on the milling, was a big enough task, ultimately I'd love to be sourcing the grains direct from farms. And I have a relationship with a farm that we're due to get a bunch of grain from their next harvest. That's just 100 miles south of San Francisco. But for the time being, it's too much for us to deal with. And so we work with this company and they source the grains and they do a really amazing job of it. And so basically we can say, hey, we're looking for this kind of stuff. Do you have anything you'd suggest? They say absolutely. So that's Central Milling up in Petaluma. And as far as bread machines, I think bread machines are great. They make it very, very convenient to make alofa bread. And it can be really hard. I think for lots of people, one of the biggest obstacles about baking bread at home is fitting it into your schedule. And so a bread machine can be really helpful for that. I think it's if you really want to get into it and get deep into making bread, you'll probably want to, or maybe not, I wanted to have more control over all of the phases of bread making. And so if you do have that curiosity, then maybe you'll do the bread machine bread sometimes and other times you'll do it. You do it all with yourself as the bread machine. But yeah, I got no problems with bread machines. Yeah. Yes, you sir? I have a two-part question. Okay. The first part is is bread good for you or bad for you? And the second part is, which is probably a better question. I like that. As part of an awesome nutritional, whatever, regime, where does bread fit in? Is it candy or is it like something you have every day? Awesome question. Yeah, I get asked this a lot and I think lots of people are asking themselves this question these days, especially as it relates to gluten and how it affects their body. And so I believe and I have experienced and I have heard from all people that I've talked about on this topic that whole grain sourdough bread is good for you. Factory made white bread that's made on a huge scale is not good for you. So my favorite bread to eat is a dark mountain rye bread. So that's 100% rye and it's 100% whole grain and it's 100% sourdough. And I don't have a ton of science to back it up. I have my own experience and the experience of my customers that it makes me feel good. And obviously if you eat too much of anything, it's not going to make you feel great. It's a nice question. It's kind of hard for me to believe that I'm part of that. But yeah, it's been very, very, very flattering to all of a sudden be considered a peer amongst these people who are really my heroes. And one of the things that I've, that I loved about baking from the very beginning was the sense of community among bakers. And we're a generous and friendly tribe, it seems. Yeah, I've always, I was just amazed at how willing other bakers were to share what they know and what they think about baking. And the nice thing about having a small bakery, a neighborhood bakery, is you're not trying to get too big a slice of the pie. And so we're not in competition with each other, you know? And there's so much room for more small bakeries in America, but absolutely in San Francisco. There's not a culture of small bakeries here, bread bakeries specifically. And I really am excited to see what happens as bread that's made in these ways becomes more and more popular and more and more people want to eat it because I think there's just going to be more and more of them bakeries. And I think it's going to be really great. It's going to be really exciting for everybody.