How Breadmaking Became an Art

What Is Traditional European Sourdough Baking?

When Kathy Hester describes herself as a Traditional European Sourdough Baker, she’s not talking about a flavor profile. She’s talking about method. “More often then not sourdough in the US is thought of in terms of California Sourdough, and is experienced as a ‘flavor,'” she explains. The San Francisco Bay Area’s distinctive tang comes from the local microclimate, which allows wild yeast spores to permeate any sourdough starter nurtured there. That organism — called Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis in Kathy’s original description, and formally reclassified in 2020 as Fructilactobacillus sanfranciscensis — gives SF sourdough its unmistakable character. It’s region-specific in a way that can’t be replicated elsewhere.

But the title “Traditional European Sourdough Baker” signals something else entirely. “What it means is that I use a Sourdough Starter to leaven my breads rather than using commercial yeast,” Kathy says. “I also focus on time and temperature to develop my bread dough.” The comparison she reaches for is instructive: she has more in common with a micro brewmaster than with most commercial bakers. Both are working with live cultures. Both are managing fermentation. Both are at the mercy of ambient temperature, humidity, and the specific organisms in their starter.

How Close Are BakeHouse Breads to Their Old World Originals?

“Apart from growing my own wheat and grinding my own flour,” Kathy says, “what identifies our breads with the breads of past is the method of baking, i.e., using a traditional wood-fired oven, and the formulas (recipes) that I use.” The wood-fired oven is not a design choice. It’s the same heat source these breads were baked in for centuries, retained in mass and radiated slowly into the loaves, and the BakeHouse oven is a specific piece of equipment: an Alan Scott-designed wood-fired oven, the same model used by serious hearth bakers worldwide.

What sets Kathy apart from most bakers who study old methods is that she researches the history of every bread she makes — including the bagels and bialys. When she decided to bring bialys to Las Cruces, she read Mimi Sheraton’s The Bialy Eaters, which traces how this simple bread from Białystok, Poland, nearly disappeared during the Holocaust and reappeared in Brooklyn’s Jewish communities. The research isn’t background material. It’s the reason she feels she’s earned the right to bake these breads at all.

That right was confirmed at the Las Cruces Farmers’ & Crafts Market, when a Jewish customer stopped at the BakeHouse booth, gasped at the sight of a bialy, and shared that her grandfather — just a boy — had survived Białystok. A bread that almost didn’t make it out of Poland was on a table in New Mexico. This is the kind of thing that happens when a baker knows what she’s making and why.

What Makes BakeHouse Bread Different from Everything Else on the Shelf?

Kathy reaches for a beverage analogy when asked this: “It can be compared to drinking ‘Bud Light’ versus a quality, small batch, regional micro brewed beer.” The comparison works because the difference isn’t one of degree — it’s one of category. Commercial bread and BakeHouse bread are made by fundamentally different processes, using fundamentally different ingredients, toward fundamentally different ends.

BakeHouse uses no commercial yeast, sugar, oils, stabilizing chemicals, or additives. The bread develops through fermentation alone. Kathy uses flour that is specifically milled for hearth bread baking — untreated, unbleached, unbromated — and typically combines three to four types in each loaf. Her four sourdough starters each have a role:

The scale is as deliberate as the ingredients. BakeHouse bakes 25 to 30 loaves at a time. A single firing of the wood oven builds enough retained heat to bake up to 100 to 115 loaves before it cools. Everything is weighed, not measured by volume. Nothing is kneaded — the dough is hand-stretched like taffy over a three-hour window to develop the gluten without tearing it. It’s an approach that would be impossible to automate without completely changing what the bread is.

What Does “Artisan” Actually Mean — and Does Kathy Even Like the Word?

“Personally, I do not like the term ‘artisan,'” Kathy says flatly. “Basically, the term is used today as carelessly as the term ‘all natural.'” It’s a fair point. Walk through any supermarket and the word artisan appears on mass-produced rolls baked in a facility that never sees natural leavening. Labels collapse nuance. They let people form a quick, false knowledge about what something is — and that’s exactly what the artisan bread movement was supposed to push against.

What Kathy does instead of defining it is describe the process, which makes the label irrelevant. Preferment starts two days before baking. Once the dough is mixed, it’s hand-stretched at room temperature over three hours. Then it’s scaled — weighed to the gram — shaped into loaves, placed into linen-lined baskets, and moved into a walk-in cooler held at 48 to 52 degrees. It proofs there for 12 to 14 hours. Kathy starts baking at 4am.

BakeHouse Process Timeline

Total elapsed time from start to finished loaf: 25 to 30 hours. That’s the answer to what artisan means, whether or not the word appears on the bag.

Why Is Interest in Artisan Bread Growing Now?

Kathy’s answer to this is less about bread than about what bread represents. “I find it interesting that there seems to be seasons in our existence when we look back into history,” she says. “As we make our way through our busy weeks and hectic schedules, it’s as though our very existence is racing into the future and we long to slow down and find a peaceful rhythm in our lives.”

The desire to tend a garden, raise chickens, or simply buy food directly from the person who grew it — these are not nostalgic impulses, Kathy suggests. They’re corrective ones. The industrial food system is efficient and consistent, but it costs something in the transaction. “We want to go to the market and buy fresh produce directly from the grower, buy fresh eggs from the farmer and purchase our bread directly from the hands that sculpted each loaf.” That phrase — “the hands that sculpted each loaf” — is the thing. The labor is the point, not just the product.

What BakeHouse makes isn’t positioned against the industrial food system by argument. It’s positioned against it by existence. There’s a Saturday market table in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where someone stands at 4am to bake bread that took two days to make, then sells it to people who hug it on the way to their car. It’s a simple transaction. It’s also a very old one.

Frequently Asked Questions About Artisan Sourdough Bread

🍞 BakeHouse Bread NM — Quick Reference

The essentials on Las Cruces’s traditional sourdough micro bakery