For Jennifer, baking is magic. “You have these very simple elemental ingredients—flour, water, salt—and you turn it into something beautiful through this alchemy,” she says. “There's all of these different forms that you can create. It's just endless. You're never done learning bread. There's something really attractive about that endless process of possibility.”
Those possibilities got a big boost after Jennifer tried artisan flour. “I can't describe how different it was. It was just the best thing I ever had. The flavor and the aroma and the texture, it was just beyond. Better than anything I thought was possible.”
When Tartine co-founder Chad Robertson met Kevin (our own founder) and fellow members of the Skagit Valley’s farming and milling community everything changed. “He was so inspired ,” remembers Jennifer. “It was actually my first mandate when I started running the bread program—change everything over to this flour. And it was a cool process of learning what we needed to do and then working directly with Kevin.”
Some of that time was spent adjusting Tartine's recipes, but for Jennifer that was just the beginning. “One of the most rewarding things about working for Chad is his perspective on how to go about the process and the community of putting a bakery together. It's analogous to how we make bread. It's always going to take tinkering—our relationships with the farmers and the mill, the broader community, is ever-evolving. And since we started working with Cairnspring, knowing that we're supporting farmers who are farming responsibly and millers who are being careful about their practice, having a bigger impact has become more and more important.”
Just like the magic of bread itself, getting there is both simple and complex. “It's showing people what we're doing so that they can do the same,” she says. “The food that we're making has better nutrition. It's bread that's good for you. If anyone across the country can get our recipes and can order Cairnspring flours, then we're having this really broad impact. So there's this long-fingered reach of our thoughts and our process hopefully helping other food systems around the world.”