I think I have always been a baker, and bread is my first baking love. It is a soul thing. I love the science, the art, the precision and the magic of it. There is nothing else like it. Combining the simplest ingredients into something so spectacular is always an awesome experience. Bread is sustenance, bread is connection to others, bread is culture, bread is our story, bread is life.
After a couple of decades of distraction as a programmer, I decided to up my bread baking game and get back into baking. I trained at the San Francisco Baking Institute in bread baking, and was off to the races.
In 2017, on a whim, my wife Andrea and I drove down to a desolate part of the Mojave desert that the locals call “Wonder Valley” and less than a month later we were living there. Our home is on 10 acres off a dirt road called Moon Way. Using that as inspiration, named we named this property Terra Manna. Terra Manna means “land of sustenance” and it is the area on the moon next to the Sea of Tranquility.
One of the first things I did was to build a cob, wood burning-oven and get to work using the desert as inspiration for my baking.
The desert has a thriving (albeit sometimes hard to find) food culture that celebrates the roughness and rawness of desert life.
This was the perfect incubator for starting a school focused on teaching all things bread. Bread is not hard to bake, but there is no substitute for learning it from another baker. There is so much ancient and modern baking wisdom that can not be conveyed in a recipe or a YouTube video. After baking under the open desert sky in our wood burning oven, you may even feel a connection to your bread baking ancestors.
I focus on small group baking experiences for up to 4-6 people usually over 2 to 3 days. We usually do most of our baking outdoor in the wood burning ovens, but we also do some baking in the house oven (in case you don’t have a wood-burning oven at home (yet)).
