Regenerative Baking

The final episode of Season 3 features an incredible interview with Rae Gomes ( @raegomes ), the Executive Director of Community Kitchen , and a real food policy powerhouse. Community Kitchen ran a sliding-scale fine dining restaurant out of the Lower East Side Girls Club earlier this year, and gathered a ton of data from this pilot program, which they’re now reviewing in preparation for their nex...

Jenny Dorsey ( @chefjennydorsey ) is a professional chef, author, speaker, and researcher on food politics and social justice. She’s currently based in Singapore as a  Fulbright - National Geographic  Research Scholar studying the impact of government policies on hawker centres, and recently earned her Master’s in Education from Harvard’s Graduate School. I was introduced to her work years ago whe...

Continuing with season 3’s topic of alternative economies, Russell Trimmer runs Motzi Bread in Baltimore with his wife, Maya. In 2020, they fully shifted to a pay-what-you-can model, offering their naturally-leavened loaves at accessible prices. This episode is chock-full of great information about millers, bakers and regenerative farmers in the mid-Atlantic region, and everybody mentioned is link...

Jim Franks has traveled the world studying whole grain sourdough bread and local food infrastructure centered around ethical and regenerative ingredients. He's also a poet, and last year he released his book Existential Bread , which is completely unlike any cookbook I’ve ever read before, for two reasons. First, it’s written as a long poem. Second, it’s completely non-prescriptive. Instead of tel...

Today’s guest is community-supported baker Don Guerra, founder of Barrio Bread in Tucson, Arizona. He won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Baker in 2022, and takes pride in bringing together a network of farmers, millers, wholesale buyers and consumers to support each other and build a resilient and diverse local grain chain. Listen in for an interview jam-packed with information about herita...

What is a seed bank if not both the original economy AND a model for a regenerative economy? The seeds are saved, shared with farmers and gardeners, and then as the crops grow, a portion of those seeds also get saved and re-circulated. In this week's episode, Dressler is joined by Amy Smith, the E-Commerce Manager of Native Seeds/SEARCH in Tucson, Arizona.  Native Seeds/SEARCH was founded in 1983...

Could a fine dining restaurant be a place to feel at home, to eat for free? Telly Justice, head chef and co-owner of HAGS , says absolutely. Centering queerness in every corner of the restaurant and subsidizing a weekly pay-what-you-can brunch via a vibrant tasting menu the rest of the week, Telly and the rest of the HAGS team have created something remarkable in Lower Manhattan. Tune in for a cha...

How can the scaffolding and infrastructure of our world be repurposed to build a better future? How can social practice art open avenues for collaboration and and cooperation? This episode features an interview with Caroline Woolard , an artist, educator and technologist who's currently the Head of Strategy at Pollinator.coop . We discuss her past and current projects, all of which focus on buildi...

We're kicking off Season 3 of Regenerative Baking with Raeghn Draper, the executive director of CHAAD (Chicago Hospitality Accountability and Advocacy Database), an organization providing resources and information to restaurant workers, as well as, in Raeghn's words, imagining a hospitality industry that supports thriving and sustainable lives for the people who put in the bulk of the labor. Tune...

We're back with another thematically-organized summary of Regenerative Baking's last nine episodes, as told via clips of guests that felt like they were in conversation with each other. This season’s theme was, “What does it look like to bake with place in mind?”, and the clips in this summary cover the concept of “place” from every angle: from being involved with your local community, to making d...

Patrick Shaw-Kitch was the head baker at Blue Hill at Stone Barns for five years, and is now opening Brooklyn Granary and Mill ( @brooklyngranaryandmill ), a flour mill and bakery in Brooklyn that will source grain directly from regenerative farmers, and sell bread, pastries, and fresh-milled flour to customers. In this very bread-nerdy episode, Patrick and Dressler dig into the nitty-gritty hows...

Little Loaf Bakeshop ( @littleloafbakeshop ) is a queer woman-and-trans-owned bakery in Poughkeepsie, New York. In this episode, Dressler talks to co-owner Colleen Orlando about her journey in the food world, vegan recipe testing, building community through pastries, the inclusive culture of the bakery, how queerness shows up in baking, stoneground flour, vegan cheese and butter, how limitations c...

Luis Medina recently opened The Flour Bender Bakeshop ( @flourbendertroy ), a real-life regenerative bakery in Troy, New York--and we recorded this interview shortly before the opening, so it's full of the very potent excitement of celebrating a bakery about to be born. Tune in for a discussion of how the bakery came to be, Luis's plans for his menu and suppliers, dreams of a community space, his...

Carla Finley ( @apt2bread ) has seen her Brooklyn apartment-based micro-bakery take on a handful of evolutions. From the early days of the pandemic shutdowns to a full-swing bread operation, to slowing down and re-calibrating with an eye toward the future, Apt. 2 Bread has resiliently ebbed and flowed like the sourdough starter at the heart of the operation. In this episode, Carla and Dressler cha...

The dream of turning a garden into beautiful baked goods comes to life with Hayley McKee ( @stickyfingersbakery ), an Australian baker and author of the cookbook "Sticky Fingers, Green Thumb," which features almost sixty recipes celebrating vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers in cakes and other sweet snacks. In this episode, Hayley and Dressler chat about fennel in cakes, hands-on food education...

What memories do certain foods bring back for you? And how do you go about preserving those memories? Estefania Trujillo Preciado ( @iamestefa ) is a chef, educator, and artist documenting intergenerational culinary stories in Colombia. She teaches a class on food memories and all their inherent magic--and in fact, we get into magical realism a lot in this episode, along with Colombian produce, us...

Andrea Aliseda ( @andrea__aliseda ) is a Mexican-American recipe developer, writer, and forthcoming cookbook author based in LA. In this episode of Regenerative Baking, with the season 2 theme of "What does it look like to bake with place in mind?" we cover contemporary Mexican-American chefs baking with Indigenous ingredients like nixtamal and masa harina; Andrea's forthcoming plant-based Mexican...

What would it look like to step outside of the ingredients we’re used to baking with, and to hone in on some officially-labeled underutilized crops? This episode dives into just that with writer and entrepreneur Shreema Mehta ( @climatecookery ). She has a Masters in Public Policy and Conservation Biology, a background in journalism and PR, and launched a tamarind hot sauce company in 2020 after r...

The overarching question of Season 2 of Regenerative Baking is "What does it look like to bake with place in mind?" And we're kicking it off with Rose McAdoo (@rosemcadoo) , a brilliant food artist who takes baking with place in mind to extremes. Splitting her time between Alaska and Antarctica, Rose makes cakes that communicate climate science , often using the bitter wilderness as her pastry kit...

This is a thematically-organized summary of Regenerative Baking's first nine episodes, as told via clips of guests that felt like they were in conversation with each other. The result is a dynamic, conversational episode that names and explores the main themes that emerged throughout the first Regenerative Baking season; growing sweeteners and grains, cover-cropping/soil health, baking with fruit,...

Katie Gourley( @k.e.gourley ) is a farmer and baker deeply rooted in biodiversity and alternative economies. As one half of La Merenda Farm ( @lamerendafarm ), she operates a beautiful heirloom bean CSA, and also bakes seasonal whole-grain cakes through her small-scale community baking project, Sweet Clover Baking . Katie also has a Masters in Urban Planning with Distinction from the Harvard Unive...

Jack Algiere is the Director of Agroecology at Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture ( @stonebarns ), which is also home to the two-Michelin-starred Blue Hill at Stone Barns. First brought in to design the center’s boldly experimental organic farm in 2004, Jack Algiere warmly recalls his farming history, some of the projects Stone Barns is working on right now, his philosophy around farming, a...

Rose Wilde ( @trosewilde ) is a powerhouse of a pastry chef—she’s a former human rights lawyer turned writer, master food preserver, master gardener, and chef-owner of Red Bread in Los Angeles. She’s also the author of the fabulous new whole-grain baking cookbook, Bread and Roses: 100+ Grain Forward Recipes Featuring Global Ingredients and Botanicals . Listen in for an exploration of human rights...

Rachel Fukumoto’s Instagram handle is @thepastryfarmer , and she’s trying to bridge the worlds of pastry and farming in Hawaii. Right now, she’s a full-time farmer at Big Island Tea , a regenerative tea farm, while her dreams of tea-inspired pastries gently steep. Tune in for a chat about Hawaii’s biggest beginner farming program, the endless possibility of tarts, farming in a rainforest, baking w...

Solar Punk Farms ( @solarpunkfarms ) is a queer-run agricultural community space in Guerneville, CA founded by Nick Schwanz and Spencer Scott. In this episode, Nick and Dressler dive into cover cropping, farming challenges, garden design, planting a food forest, a special perennial grain, solarpunk as a movement, and—crucially—what a solarpunk bakery would look like. Full show notes and further re...