About Mosquito Creek Bread

   I have been baking bread since I was young back in West Virginia. I loved baking from scratch and using natural ingredients, to the point of an experiment with acorns that I leached, roasted and ground myself, making a tough, lumpy and bitter loaf.

    Baking for my family just came naturally, recipes coming and going and skill improving. But always in the back of my mind was my father, requesting a chewy, crusty, old world style of bread, he must have had something in mind from his European travels. While my bread was tasty and wholesome, I was never able to achieve that kind of bread purposefully. I had even tried sourdough, repeatedly. Then declaring it an impossibility, sourdough isn't authentic if you need yeast, I gave up. We stuck to the tried and true whole wheat or whole spelt breads that nourished my children well.


   Until one day, my sister called and gave me a recipe over the phone about a no-knead bread that you bake in a cast iron Dutch Oven. I had one of those so I got busy! That was my launching pad to the crusty, chewy, old world type of bread my father always wanted me to make!
  So, in the middle of raising 6 children and growing and putting up a huge garden we started selling bread at the farmers market during the summer.We were very encouraged by the response. Our repertoire grew to include the much in demand pizza crusts, Garlic Potatoe and Artisan Sourdough bread. Sourdough wasn't impossible after all!

   .... and a few years later a wood fired brick oven was started.

   My father has since passed on and never did get to see my oven, but when I make a loaf of white, chewy sourdough I always think of him.

I am an Artisan Baker now, I think he'd really like that.