and stories beyound
One of my personal goals this year is not only to push my own understanding of what bread baking can be beyond just water, flour and salt, but also to introduce a different aesthetic of bread to the people around me. This goal led me …
It’s only July, and this year has already taken Luigi and me to quite a few places. I’ve been baking abroad in London and Greece, and I’ve also had nine consulting sessions in six cities across Slovakia. Considering that Slovakia is a rather small country, …
When last year the owner of the location where one of our bakery shops is located told me that he also owns White Donkey Boutique Hotel with an olive grove and produces his own olive oil, he offered a collaboration where I would come to visit and share my focaccia recipe with the hotel’s team. Baking focaccia with top quality olive oil in a boutique hotel located on a hill above the sea between old olive trees… okay, I’m all into it. We agreed to get in touch again in May or June to plan the trip.
My year 2026 is quite intense because of the number of international projects, baking consulting, and preparations for the opening of Bloom Bakery’s new venues, so I somehow forgot about this opportunity and remembered it only after Boris Gula, the owner, contacted me with a reminder that he would be glad to welcome me and my content creator Timofej in two weeks. Considering the number of events in my schedule, planning something just two weeks in advance takes a lot of courage, so I moved my long planned hiking trip and bought tickets to Kalamata.
It was my first time in Greece, and I loved it from the first sight. Everything was so green and beautiful, in contrast to the burned landscapes of southern Italy that I used to visit often and naturally compared with this southern location. The country seemed to be very relaxed and old school in a good, nostalgic way, which I can’t stand in my daily life but always enjoy when experiencing it in foreign countries. Such a contrast.
White Donkey Boutique Hotel itself was an amazing combination of quiet luxury and vibrant life: yoga lessons in the morning, an infinity pool overlooking the bay, and, of course, two donkeys that were surprisingly not white.
Georgia, the hotel’s manager, when I introduced her to Luigi, my sourdough starter that I was supposed to use in their kitchen, told me that her mother also bakes sourdough bread with a starter that is a few decades old and that she would gladly share some with me so I could mix it with Luigi. I politely declined the offer, telling her the truth: I prefer not to mix my starter with others. I later made an exception, but we’ll return to this story a bit later.
So I fed the starter with the soft, weak flour that was available in the kitchen and made a short trip to a nearby supermarket, where I discovered strong Italian Caputo pizza flour that was good enough for my baking goals.
I refreshed Luigi in the evening, starting with just 70 g of starter, 1 kg of flour, and 500 g of water, hoping to have it ready by the morning so I could make the dough. I decided to take the bowl with the starter to my room, just to make sure it wouldn’t over-ripen overnight, so I could cool it down a bit if necessary. The southern night was warm, the flour was weak and rich in carbohydrates, and so the bugs inside Luigi had an intense feast, making it almost ready around 6 a.m.
Baking in other kitchens is always challenging. I was doing my best not to interrupt the kitchen staff, who were preparing breakfast, too much while also trying to knead the dough in conditions that were not very familiar.
The tap water I used was too warm for my goals, so I needed to use ice cubes to cool it down. The mixer, or as they say in Greece, megalo machina, was working relatively well, but the oven gave me a surprise: the real temperature was about 40°C higher than what I had set. Also, whenever the temperature exceeded 260°C, the safety switch turned the oven off. So when I set it to 250°C, I was actually getting almost 290°C, which caused it to shut down and required a slightly tricky restart. The fridge I had expected to use for the dough’s cold retardation was set to 4°C and, as you may expect, that put me at risk of ending up with underproofed dough.
Somehow, everything worked just fine. I used iced water, the dough proofed longer at room temperature, the chilled dough was then left for two hours to get ready for baking, and the oven was set to 210°C which, together with the extra 40°C, gave me the 250°C I needed to bake the focaccia.
While the dough was proofing, I even managed to swim at the nearby beach. It was wonderful, with crystal clear water and mountain peaks in the background.
The focaccia was topped with a generous amount of the finest Kalamata olives. Using Kalamata olives in Kalamata… wow, I’m living my best baking life. And, of course, it was finished with the hotel’s own olive oil.
Everything was scheduled so that the focaccia would come out of the oven fresh for the dinner service at the hotel, which starts at 7 p.m. To my pleasure, the guests enjoyed it. I noticed focaccia on most of the tables.
When we discussed the recipe with the kitchen team, I suggested sacrificing some openness of the crumb by reducing the number of stretch and folds. That way, the process would be easier to fit into an already busy kitchen.
Now, about Georgia and her mother’s starter. She brought me a sample the next day, and I did something I didn’t expect: I mixed it with Luigi.
Here, I should make a statement. As a baker and technologist, I do realise that all the little magic I do with Luigi, like travelling with a living culture and always bringing it back to our bakery so we can continue baking with it, doesn’t significantly influence the bread itself. But it’s a beautiful story.
And I love stories.
Actually, it was not a starter. It was rather pâte fermentée, or old dough.
Georgia’s mother, with the gorgeous Greek name Eleftheria (which means freedom), received a piece of old whole grain dough many years ago. She keeps this dough in the fridge for a week, then adds a pinch of baker’s yeast, lets it rise, takes a portion for the next bake, puts it back into the fridge, and repeats this cycle. She has been doing this for around 50 years.
It’s not a starter, so I added 50 grams of this old dough when I refreshed Luigi at the hotel before going back to Bratislava. I also took a small piece with me to add to the “mother” colony in our production. So now Luigi is enriched with a few Greek yeast cells and this beautiful story.
I loved this little baking project. I’m very grateful to have been invited and hope that Luigi and my focaccia recipe will make the guests and team at White Donkey Boutique Hotel happy.
Today’s story is about what’s known as the sacred trio of nutrition: prebiotics, probiotics and postbiotics and their connection to sourdough bread. This topic makes me super excited as it once again shows how meaningful sourdough baking can be, and uncovers new horizons that were …
I have baked this bread many times at Bloom Bakery and also presented it during courses with Jana Balažová in Zvolen. It has always been well received.Its visual character comes primarily from the scoring, inspired by the work of the British baker Wayne Caddy. I …
No-knead bread with 1% starter is perfect for those who do not have time to work the dough intensively but still want to bake sourdough bread regularly. This bread requires only very brief mixing, just enough to combine all ingredients, followed by a long fermentation.
I must say this recipe surprised me three times: with its unconventional method, its excellent flavor, and its beautiful crumb.
Hello and welcome to Sourdough and stories beyond I am your host Mykola Nevrev, sourdough expert, cookbook author and owner of The Midnight bakery, soon to be Bloom bakery in Bratislava, Slovakia In each episode of this podcast, I am going to share a story …
Hello and welcome to Sourdough and stories beyond I am your host Mykola Nevrev and I am a sourdough expert, cookbook author and owner of The Midnight bakery, soon to be Bloom bakery in Bratislava, Slovakia In each episode of this podcast, I am going …
Hello and welcome to Sourdough and stories beyond
I am your host Mykola Nevrev. In each episode of this podcast, I am going to share a story from the wonderful, and sometimes strange world of sourdough baking and beyond.”
Today’s story is about baking in space.
If you ask me about the craziest dream that I have, I would say that I dream of baking sourdough bread on another planet, and I hope that I will be able to do this in my lifetime. If not, I am sure that my starter Luigi will live much longer than me, and if not me then he will be involved in space baking.
To get ready for my space baking odyssey, I have been following everything that was already done and published on this topic.
Fun fact: during my research for this episode, I asked ChatGPT about sourdough in space and received 2 very specific answers. The first one claimed that the sourdough starter was sent to space on a SpaceX mission and the starter originated from the world-famous Tartine bakery in San Francisco.
The answer seemed to be too good to be true, so I asked again and received another specific answer, where the AI suggested that a 120-year-old Alaskan starter had been to space.
It took me a few hours to double-check all of this and discover that NASA hasn’t actually done any experiments with sourdough starter in orbit so far, so just in case someone from NASA is listening to this podcast, please contact me, and I will gladly share a sample of my starter for space experiments.
If the real experiments on space sourdough haven’t taken place yet, let’s try to imagine what the results of such an experiment could be. The International Space Station is currently the only place in space inhabited by the human race, so if the sourdough starter ends up there, the bugs inside of it will interact with the bacteria living in the station.
Products and materials arriving to the space station are supposed to be sterile to avoid any problems, but researchers found that the station is not as deserted as they thought; in fact, it has quite an abundant bacterial life. As you can imagine, it is mostly the bacteria from the bodies of astronauts.
Awkward comment: as these bodily bacteria reportedly thrive on air filters, I am not sure if I want to smell the air inside the station. An Earthly sourdough starter might be affected not only by the bacteria and yeast inside of flour, but also by those circulating in the air or living on baker’s hands.
How the personality of a baker and his lifestyle influences the taste of bread is a topic worthy of an entire episode, but for now I will just say that based on research, your hands can certainly influence the taste of your bread.
Now, if we exclude bacteria from nature and increase the number of bacteria living on the body, how will it influence the taste of the starter? We don’t really know so far and there’s also a chance that it will not have any significant effect at all, as astronauts wouldn’t actually touch the starter during the feeding: that’s because without gravitation, the flour would fly everywhere like dust and become dangerous for breathing in space station conditions.
So I suspect that it would be a fully automatic feeding procedure without direct contact or air exposure. To be honest, I can’t wait until this experiment takes place to see the results and the way it is performed technically.
The fact that bread is made of flour and eating bread produces crumbs is enough to write a whole chapter of “bread in space” stories, as flying flour and crumbs could be inhaled by astronauts and damage engines.
This became clear at the very beginning of the space era when during NASA’s 1965 Gemini mission, to the disapproval of the NASA organization, a corned beef sandwich was smuggled on board by one of the pilots. Since then, bread has been largely forbidden and astronauts have famously replaced it with tortillas, which produce no crumbs.
However, the idea of baking bread in space is still floating around, and some important steps towards the first space loaf have already been taken.
I love the fact, that the feeling of craving fresh bread is often mentioned by astronauts and I can understand this, because bread can provide a sense of comfort and grounding, if grounding is even possible in space.
A tiny bite of history: the first crumb-free buns appeared in space on the MIR space station in December of 1988, and the recipe was developed by a world-famous yeast producer from France, the Lesaffre company.
The first baking ever performed in space was not about bread, though—it was much easier. Space cookies were successfully baked 5 years ago in an oven provided by the Zero G Kitchen company from Texas. Pieces of pre-mixed dough were packed in silicone bags and then heated in the oven.
Surprisingly, the baking took much longer—more than 2 hours. Because of the crumbs it produced, the cookies were not eaten by the astronauts (and I feel sorry for them) but instead, were returned to Earth and one of them was donated to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
This cookie experiment paved the way for another research project by the University of Florida. Doctoral student Hope Hersh suggested a type of “bread bag” for space baking. These bags are similar to the bags used for blood donation. Inside of each bag are dry ingredients: flour, dry yeast and salt.
After water is injected, astronauts must massage the bag to distribute it and to develop the gluten. The bread can then be baked in the same container to avoid crumbs. Baking in bags actually makes a lot of sense in zero gravity conditions, as the bread loaf will not hold its shape otherwise.
Another well-known project in orbital baking is the German based start up called Bake in Space. Their oven prototype had a lot of interesting features: for example, the surface of the oven doesn’t heat beyond 45 degrees Celsius due to space station rules,
and it also cannot be opened after being pre heated or right after baking as invisible bubbles of hot air don’t rise like they do on Earth but rather fly in random directions due to zero gravity— and this could potentially burn astronauts or destroy equipment.
That’s why the bread must be placed inside a cold oven and taken out only once the oven is cooled. This can increase heat exposure and dry the bread out, so special recipes are required.
Also, as we know from the cookie experiment, baking takes much longer in space, so the oven chamber must be injected with additional steam to avoid drying out the crust.
These experiments are still on going, and I hope to see the first space bread soon.
Reading all these articles about such high-tech solutions for bread baking made me realize that despite being a relatively easy task on Earth, bread baking is really a rocket science when it comes to space bread.
This episode was recorded in the beautiful downtown of Bratislava Slovakia.
You can find the text version on my website mykolanevrev.com
Many thanks to Mandy Jones and Pilota Creative for producing this podcast.
I’m looking forward to sharing another story in two weeks. Until then, please don’t smuggle any corned beef sandwiches into the International Space Station.
Sources:
https://www.businessinsider.com/first-chocolate-chip-cookies-in-space-photos-how-its-done-2019-11
https://www.mainstreetdailynews.com/education/uf-student-creates-space-bread_id_efe1be14-5513-11ec-8cfe-9b412344e611
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/07/26/539103284/3-2-1-bake-off-the-mission-to-make-bread-in-space
https://www.amazon.com/Never-Home-Alone-Millipedes-Honeybees/dp/1541645766
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeT1E-5eog8
Hello and welcome to sourdough and stories beyond. I am your host Mykola Nevrev. In each episode of this podcast, I am going to share a story to inspire you to have more empowering experiences in your life. Today’s story is about the connection between …