Bakes

Grandpa Wayne

My grandfather was Oscar Wayne Schade, born in White Haven, Pennsylvania in 1934. He was an Air Force radar technician on B-47 bombers, stationed in Arkansas, at Lockbourne here in Ohio, and in Africa. He spent most of the rest of his life as a baker, and part of it as a route salesman for Omar Bakery.

Growing up I knew he had worked at a bakery before he retired. That was about all I knew, and I did not learn the rest of it until long after I had started baking myself.

So I did not follow him into this. I arrived at it on my own, and only afterward found out how much of it he had already done.

Grandpa Wayne, 1934 to 2014.

The van

I bought the van in California. We drove it back through Lake Tahoe and Yellowstone when we moved home to Ohio, and it has been the bakery's storefront ever since.

Every bread is ten dollars. The basket at the back says Local Ohio Wheat, which is the part I care about most.

Learning it properly

My first real lesson was the art of the baguette, with Craig Ponsford at the Artisan Baking Center in Petaluma.

Ponsford won the individual gold at the 1996 Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie in Paris, the first time an American took a category, and he took it for baguettes. So my introduction to shaping a baguette came from the person who had been judged best in the world at shaping a baguette. I was not particularly good at making baguettes in that class.

After that I went to the artisan bread and pizza convention in Atlantic City, twice, and met Peter Reinhart, whose Bread Baker's Apprentice I had already been working out of at home.

I also came home from that convention with a bag of dried starter. The keynote speaker was the owner of Sourdough Willy's, and he gave me a piece of his culture, dried. They trace it to the Klondike gold rush of 1897, it has been fed continuously at the pizzeria since 1984, and it is catalogued as number 104 in the Quest for Sourdough heritage library in Belgium. Prospectors used to sleep with their starters so the cultures would not freeze, which is how the miners themselves ended up being called sourdoughs.

Every loaf that comes out of that van is raised by a descendant of that culture. I did not make that culture. I only keep it fed.

The people who made me open a bakery

At Camp Bread I met Jon and Amanda of Proof Bread, in Mesa, Arizona. They ran a bakery out of a garage and filmed the whole thing, and their YouTube channel is the single most direct reason Powell Artisan Bakery exists.

They filmed the ordinary running of a bakery, the hard parts included, and it turns out that watching someone actually do it is what makes you think you could.