Pleasanton Brick Oven Bakery Builds Community Through Bread

Gerard and Jan Shireman- Grabowski make bread the slow, old fashioned way because it’s good to eat and keeps the family together.  The family bakes crusty, tasty sourdough bread. They hand mill the grain and naturally leaven the bread without using yeast.  They operate Pleasanton Brick Oven Bakery in Bear Lake, Michigan and can sell every loaf they make.  Nick Vander Puy from the Superior Broadcast Network talked with the bakers. click here for live stream broadcast

the hands become part of the bread, all the hands that grew the wheat into bread

Jan Shireman and Gerard Grabowski bake bread the slow, old fashioned way because it’s good to eat and keeps the family together.

Jan  and Gerard and their children Galen and Anna Rose are our family from Michigan. They visited us, in the summer and taught us how to make sourdough bread.

 

We got the process going by mixing some starter, warm water and fresh ground whole wheat flour in a bread bowl. 

 

After a day the mixture began to bubble.

 

Now Gerard adds some more flour and water. When the consistency is right he takes the mixture out and begins kneading it on a marble surface.

 

“We mixed the dough this morning with the just the right amount of starter.  Water, flour, salt. All that’s in this is water, flour, salt.  The starter is made out of water and flour.  So all that’s in the bread.  It just astounds people when I tell them this, is water, flour, and salt.”

 

The key to sourdough bread is starter, pure well water, and fresh milled wheat flour.

 

Notice there’s no yeast in this bread to make it rise. This bread is leavened with fermented flour. It’s called starter.  We keep the starter in a crock in the frig. But it can be kept without refrigeration, too.

 

It’s a way people have been making bread for thousands of years.  Commercial yeast is a relative newcomer on the scene.  And, according to Gerard Grabowski commercial yeast is one of the main culprits for food allergies.

 

“The reason yeasted bread is bad for you is, and I didn’t know this and we didn’t know this until I’d baked for a number of years and then dieticians were recommending our bread to their patients,  the dieticians were saying no, no, no, you don’t use yeast, the natural leavening process digests phytic acid because you’re body can’t.”

 

When wheat originated in the middle east ten to eleven thousand years ago the farmers knew this.

 

“And those that cultivated wheat fermented the dough. They knew they had to let the dough go through a long rising process. Yeasted breads came about about a hundred and fifty years ago, when beer brewers in Europe isolated puff, whipped these malts in large vats and said, Look, we can save the baker the long toil.”

 

Gerard shapes the dough into two loaves.

 

Making bread the old fashioned way involves muscles and time.  Hand-grinding the wheat berries for flour, letting the starter ferment, and kneading the dough.

 

There are family values, too.  Jan Shireman appreciates, living closer to work, raising a family, while raising the bread.

 

“We’ve been able to be a more integrated family.  Gerard didn’t have to get in the car and drive off to work.  I didn’t have to take the kids to day care.  It has kept our family closer together.  The family that bakes together, stays together.  So that’s been really good. And the other thing that’s good is the kids have an idea where the money comes from.  I think most kids don’t know where there parents go off and work. So I think it gives them a little better appreciation for the money we have.”

 

The  shaped loaves rise for an hour. Then we warm the stove to four hundred degrees. Jan marks the loaves with a knife to let the crust expand.

 

“Let’s slide’em in.  This is Showtime.  That skin is freed from its bounds of being tightly wrapped.  Now it gets to explode in the oven.  It grows most during the first ten minutes.   Ta dah! Let them bake!”

 

I’m Nick Vander Puy for the Superior Broadcast Network

 

     

To contact;

Pleasanton Brick Oven Bakery

10040 Alkire Rd.

Bear Lake, Michigan 49614

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