Regenerative Baking

Little Loaf Bakeshop 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 can actually fuel creativity, and so much more.

Carla Finley 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 chat on a couch in the (temporarily) packed-up bakery and discuss Carla’s food industry journey, her love of bread, the elusive question of work-life balance when working in kitchens, the concept of not-for-profit restaurants, a technique to make cinnamon rolls especially soft, her plans for a hands-on European bread education (which she’s now fully in the midst of, and chronicling via social media and Substack), and so much more.

What memories do certain foods bring back for you? And how do you go about preserving those memories? Estefania Trujillo Preciado 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, using video to preserve ancestral cooking techniques, a traditional Colombian dessert that's also a community gathering, collages, creatively avoiding censorship, the power and possibility of food memories, and much, much more.

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 reading a report on underutilized crops from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Listen in for what it means for something to be labeled an underutilized crop, the realities of starting a small food business, linking environmental science to pop culture and food history, crop databases, universal basic income, foraging in New York City, and so much more.

This is a thematically-organized summary of the 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, the realities of farming at hand scale, fermentation in its broadest sense, "loving the solution" and not just "fixing a problem," the complexities of our current food system, some of the effects climate change is already having on agriculture, building community via food, and an in-depth discussion of whole grain baking.

Jack Algiere is the Director of Agroecology at Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, 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, agroecology, and much more.

Rachel Fukumoto’s Instagram handle is @thepastryfarmer, and she’s bridging 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 with local ingredients, vanilla in Oahu, and much, much more.