“ Bread is the story that we tell about ourselves.  You’ll hear your voice when you stop listening for it”. This is number ten.  Of the ten rules of Real Bread laid out by baker Graison Gill.  I suggest reading the other nine too.  If you visit his website you can.  For the sake of now, I will summarize with some key words:  karma, method, fresh, soul, value, flavor, ancestors, forward, poetry, stories.  If not thinking in terms of bread, I would imagine these words to represent values for a kind, healthy, mindful life.  To Graison, his practice of bread is a practice of this mindfulness and how his choices effect and influence a larger picture.  Whether he found a calling in bread or something else completely, I believe these same words would apply.  But as a symbol of compassion, longevity, spirituality, nourishment, and humanity it seems appropriate that he found his way to bread or bread found it’s way to him.

Wayfarer Bread sits along La Jolla Boulevard  in Bird Rock, San Diego.  A quick glance down any side street opens to a stunning view of the ocean, so close you can walk straight to the beach with a pile of croissants or a loaf of Crystal’s country bread. Crystal’s bakery is situated in perfection and gives you exactly what you are craving at any point in the day.  She is very proud of her passion fruit that vines thickly over the old San Diego taco joint now bakery, home to hundreds of loaves of bread and pastries every morning.  The walls are painted with vines too.  The vibe is jungalow, San Diego chic, boho surf and skate with the European old school smell of crusty bread and flaky butter.  It is Crystal clear perfection, reflection in the San Diego salt water past the neon taco shop sign across the street.  She says the sign is new, like a wall street neon number crunch, but I like it.  I like neon signs that shout out color and lights in an otherwise dark night.

I am visiting for a few days and beautifully, Graison Gill is too.

Graison is holding a whole grain bread workshop out of the Wayfarer kitchen.  On days and evenings off the space is welcoming of a large group of eager bread enthusiasts.   Graison is fully prepared and upon welcoming his guests it is apparent he has a knack for teaching and a natural charm.  His skills as a baker, and bread enthusiast himself, shine through in his obvious commitment and dedication to the craft of bread and even deeper, his love of grains, his favorite ingredient.

“Grains are the most misunderstood and neglected ingredient in our cuisine,” he writes in his most recent post to his Substack, Sourdough Madrigals.  “Flour is an ingredient.”

It is perhaps the fault of bread’s staple quality in any kitchen, or it’s character of sustenance that it has been taken for granted, assumed modesty in a culinary world of flare and flavor.  Flour is seen as a mass milled product to create mass produced bread in an over populated and hungry world.  As he states on day one of his class, “Wheat is the most grown crop in the entire world.  One in five calories consumed worldwide comes from wheat.” 

So why the neglect?

White flour became an in demand commodity during the industrial revolution when in the 1870’s the modern steel roller mill was invented.  New machinery and equipment allowed for a faster and more efficient way of milling and sifting wheat bran and germ from milled wheat flour.  Before this, white flour was a sign of wealth as the process of separation took more time and energy and the “white” result was a symbol of purity.  The less privileged lived off of a diet of whole grains or brown grains that were considered harder to eat, chew and much harder to digest.  With the invention of mechanized milling, white flour became more available and affordable.  It became a symbol of modernity and set off a new trend that has prevailed to this day.  It is only as of the past thirty or so years that whole grains have become more widely studied regarding digestion and health benefits.  It is taking time to dispel the theories that whole grains are not as digestible and make denser and more unpalatable breads.  That perhaps these grains grown organically, stone milled and fermented properly can, in fact, yield beautifully light loaves with deep and complex flavors that imbue a myriad of healthy and nutritious benefits.  So,  such is Graison’s quest and passion for this incredible and flavorful “ingredient”, whole grain.

He walks his students through the process of fermentation.  They discuss temperature, time, ph, different grains, levain.  He asks me to top the snack time focaccia before throwing it in the oven and goes on to pre shape baguettes.  His dough is hydrated and soft.  He juggles the fermenting times within this production bakery smoothly, accounting for possible variations of temperature and trouble shooting along the way.  He discusses the ability of the baker to adjust to the environment and the variables at hand. “Baking is not about being patient or being slow, or even being gentle.  It’s about noticing and nurturing what is being noticed”.  He is not particularly taken by the open crumb fad, but ironically, his bread has a crumb enviable by the most adamant open crumb fanatics, and to make more impressive this feat, he is doing it with whole grains.  He believes bread is a form of self expression.  He is concerned with “how we suffocate our creative potential as bakers by using the same lifeless product everyone else uses.”  It is apparent that bread is his story.

In trying to piece together this story I have found myself swimming hours in the writing genius of his Sourdough Madrigals.  Now, as well as this man can bake, I might suggest that he writes even better.  He bakes with precision and calculated systems, a perfectionist in form.  The self expression he speaks of in his baking has boundaries to a degree, guidelines and systems.  It is in his writing that these senses and expression find freedom and voice.  He tells stories.  These are not lectures of the science of bread, but instead stories of his passion and experience finding his place and his peace in the throes of dough.  I have often said that most bread bakers find their way to bread in an unusual way.  It is not as if as children we say, “I’m going to grow up and make bread!” Life takes us there in a series of twists and turns.  We find identity in dough and late nights and early mornings by hot ovens.  We hawk our bread any way we can, and what’s left we give away.  We become different people along the way.  Perhaps over time we become exactly who we were meant to be.  Graison tells these stories in hearts and spades.

“When I got to town I had nothing but a hangover and a criminal record.  But suddenly, the day after I arrived, for no reason at all, I just started baking.  In my apartment, I just started baking bread.  And I never stopped. Until that point in my life, I never found anything as powerful as bread- something which could conjugate all my passion and hunger and anger and all the other ingredients youth ferments.  Bread was something I could touch and move and shape and change.  Bread was something I could make, something I could do myself.  It was something I could share.”

Excerpt from “Parts and Labour: the day I got the money”  Sourdough Madrigals:  Graison Gill Substack……please go read it.

I was in and out of the bakery visiting with Crystal, morning walks along the beach, Jen’s delicious breakfast sandwich, a tourist adventure with Graison’s cousin Quintin from Belgium.  I laughed when he told me his mother packed a whole suitcase of chocolate to bring over to the American family.   We took an unconventional tour of the old pink hotel over looking the ocean.  Hallways of crystal lights and garden courtyards.  Time travel and a climb to the rooftop peak a view of pacific splendor.  Dinners of tacos and tacos and tacos again culminating in Cameron’s perfect Mixto baja style taco.  His tortillas thin, soft and crisp at the same time.  He says it’s in the lard.  His mother helps him top the tacos with cilantro and onion in the back kitchen pop up at Wayfarer on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.  He has a half built out bread oven in his backyard and makes tortillas on a comal in his home kitchen, layering them two on top of each other for maximum speed and production.  Two hundred tortillas for two hundred tacos with carne asada and roasted chili.

Second day and Graison bakes off with the students.  A whole wheat country, baguettes, a loaf pan bread with seaweed, wild rice and toasted sesame and a couronne with that beautiful Mexican chocolate.  The flavors were stunning.

He dives deeper into thoughts on bread and environmental implications of our agricultural systems.  “I don’t think the discussion should be about innovation, a proposed solution that has failed us in so many many ways.  Instead, we need to start looking at how we eat what we already grow.  Because what we grow and how we eat it are not just facets of climate change.  They are the main ingredient.”  He claims that we can get more bang for our buck and have less of an environmental impact with the consumption of whole grains verses processing wheat into white flour.  We can produce more flour on less land if we are not discarding 25 percent of the wheat in the milling processes.  If we use 100 percent of the wheat for healthy flour production we are saving land, soil, energy and in turn creating a healthier population.  Instead of reinventing the way we do things around food production perhaps we just need to readjust and pivot.  This can only happen if there is a shift in the way bakers use their flour and find a way to make whole grain a priority.

I was there just to visit.  I took photos.  I got more plums when the diced plums plummeted to the floor and the young woman in the yellow apron with long black hair nervously apologized.  Kitchen accidents happen.  When I asked Graison how many plums we needed to restock he told me five. I went and bought five pounds instead.  Shopping accidents happen.  We all ate plums for snacks.  Everyone seemed happy.  A bread kitchen makes people happy.

Crystal took me for an evening spin in her old blue Camaro by the ocean at high tide.  Windows down and the lights of La Jolla Boulevard caught glimpses of her smile.  I drove home Wednesday morning with a box of pastries and a bag of bread.

* Graison Gill is the founder of Bellegarde Bakery in New Orleans, LA: Co-founder of Alma Mill and Bakery in London: Co-founder of Chisholm Trail Milling in Oklahoma: Consultant and Educator in the fields of baking and milling. He was also a James Beard Foundation finalist for the best baker in the country in 2020: Quotes burrowed from his substack platform Sourdough Madrigals ( it’s an excellent read)

SAN DIEGO: A SHORT ( that is sort of long)