the world is your oven

Worldwide Community Bake Day was created to inspire and empower people to come together and share baking traditions around the world. We believe that these community connections can foster creative economies, entrepreneurial growth and the revitalization of town centers.

We are enlisting YOU to rise up and join Worldwide Community Bake Day by hosting or joining an oven event that supports the growth of regional grain economy of your area. These events may take many different forms, big and small. Our hope is to help create connections and share grain traditions and innovations from earth to table across the world.

Whether you bake in a home oven, wood-fired oven, or commercial oven, we hope you will join in!

Going It Alone- Decisions of a Solo Baker

With Barak Olins, Blair Marvin, Dave Miller, Jim Williams, Mike Zakowski

Choosing to bake alone in a professional setting brings with it challenges and rewards, many of which reveal themself only over time. In this conversation, we reflect on the decision we made to bake alone and explore how we might make that decision today. We will talk about everything from the role of equipment to the role of music. We will discuss our work schedule and techniques and formulas we have adopted to facilitate smooth bakes with two hands. We will talk about managing the aging and health changes of a baker. We will talk about finding shortcuts without compromise and decisions that we have made that occasionally make our job harder. And, we will leave time for Q&A and conversation with the viewers.

My Grandfather’s Bread with Brian Lance

"When my grandfather retired from running our family’s wholesale bread bakery after 60 years, he baked at home. He was an old-school Italian baker, mixed mostly by feel, and didn’t really need a scale to divide–never mind a digital thermometer. Pure art. He made three breads: Easter Bread, a lunchbox pan loaf, and Ciccioli Bread. I confess, I never liked the Easter Bread, so I won’t focus on that here. But the other two… those were the bread of my childhood and will forever recall memories of my grandfather. I love a pan loaf because of its utility. It’s the vehicle for happiness for kids and adults. Where would we be without PB&J? My grandfather’s was a modest yeasted dough with a little sugar and a little oil, baked lightly. I love a dark crusty loaf, but the soft pan bread is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. While my grandfather came from a white flour generation, I live in a grain-forward world. So we’ll switch up the flour here, keep it accessible, and preserve its utility. This is function over form all the way. While the pan loaf ruled daily life, the Ciccioli Bread was the center of feeding frenzies. It’s a basic hearth bread dough with the crispy bits (ciccioli) from rendered leaf lard and a little black pepper mixed into it. Crispy pork fat in bread! Enough said."

Sourcing, Milling, & Baking with Heritage Grains With Amber Lambke and Kerry Hanney

Join Amber Lambke, CEO & Founder of Maine Grains and Kerry Hanney, founder, owner, and baker behind Night Moves, as they discuss and demonstrate baking with heritage grains, sourdough and stone-ground flours. Amber kicks off the workshop by discussing a variety of topics around flour, such as white vs. stoneground four, “Bread Flour” (protein content, etc), vs. “All Purpose” vs. “Pastry Flour”, what do we mean by ‘heritage’, ‘landrace’, and ‘modern’ wheats, flour for feeding your starter, milling at home and SO much more! We then virtually transport to Kerry Hanney’s bakery as she demonstrates baking a 100% rye sourdough bread that is easy to replicate at home along with Night Moves popular brownie recipe, Mexican cacao brownies featuring flint corn!

Matnakash: The Armenian ‘Fingerprint' Flatbread With Andrew Janjigian

Join Andrew Janjigian to learn how to make matnakash, a soft, fluffy, and furrowed Armenian flatbread that is the perfect addition to any mezze spread or dinner table. Matnakash is an Armenian flatbread typically served as a table bread, as part of a mezze spread or alongside entrées. The word means “drawn by fingers,” referring to the way the fluffy, furrowed bread is shaped by dimpling and stretching the dough with fingertips before being slid into a hot oven to bake. Matnakash is a kissing-cousin of numerous other regional “fingerprint” flatbreads, including Iranian barbari bread, Afghan naan, Turkish pide, and Lebanese manaqish. Andrew’s recipe draws upon methods and ingredients found in each of these breads, along with the classical European baking techniques that are the foundation of his practice, all of which make it an easy-to-make, ultra-tender, and deeply flavorful bread. Come learn to create this bread (in both yeasted and sourdough versions), and it’ll become it a regular addition to your repertoire.

Sourdough 101 With Jim Amaral

Jim Amaral of Borealis Breads demonstrates the basics of sourdough baking, including how to create and maintain your own starters, how to hand mix, knead, stretch, proof and shape your sourdough bread and how to use the autolyse process and extended fermentations to enhance the quality of your bread. We will also discuss baker’s percentages and how to use them to easily create your own bread formulas. We will explore different baking options such as baking in a loaf pan on a stone or in a Dutch oven and will cover the three types of heat at play in the bread baking process. In addition, we will talk about the importance of ingredient selection and show you how to incorporate whole grains such as rye, oats and corn into your sourdough loaf.

.Art at the Intersection of Bread & Community With Gerald Walsh

Follow Gerald’s forking path from drawing with bread crumbs to baking for experimental art communities to designing ovens mounted on backpacks! Artist/Baker Gerald Walsh’s passion for baking began in 2007 when, within short time, he became lead pastry baker at Greenstar Cooperative Market in Ithaca, NY. In 2013, this passion fringed on fanaticism when he dove deep into fermentation and started slinging sourdough bagels for Forage Market in Lewiston, ME. Six years later with the founding of Knead Bakery he brought his original pretzels (proudly baked with Maine Grains whole wheat flour!) to the Lewiston Farmers Market and Brewfests across Maine. In 2016 he received the Maine Grain Alliance Technical Assistance Grant to explore the intersection of art, bread and community. This grant would open the door for Gerald to integrate his art and baking practices for some truly wild results.