Top 10 Bread Making Videos To Get You Inspired

In the past few months, I have maintained a steady flow of one new post on BREAD Magazine’s Facebook page per day (and since more recently, on our Tumblr site Bread Feed). From time to time, I post links to blog posts or useful baking advice, but because of the nature of Facebook and how we use the social network, most of the time, I pick and share inspiring videos from the Internet, showing bakers from around the world work on their breads.

While doing this, I have gathered a big collection of videos and watched even more of them, and as usually happens, a smaller number of videos have taken their place as my all-time favorites.

In case you haven’t watched all of them already and are looking for some inspiration today, here are my top ten – in no specific order. These are all too good to be ranked one above the other.

Enjoy, be inspired, and then bake some bread!

Polestar Hearth

Polestar Hearth is a small, community supported artisan bakery in Guelph, Ontario baking sourdough bread in a beautiful wood-fired oven. The bakery run by Jesse Merrill and Scott Williams has been featured in two of our issues: October 2013 and December 2013.

Zak the Baker

Zak Stern runs an artisan bakery, Zak the Baker in Miami, Florida. His story is inspiring (check out our August 2013 issue to read some of it): he quit his university studies to travel the world and learn what life really is about — while learning the craft of bread making on the side. This month (April 2014), Zak is moving his bakery to a new, better location with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign.

These three videos (Yes I know… Now, this list will include more than ten videos in total. I just couldn’t resist sharing all three of these.) from the bakery are a testimony for the man and his team’s attitude and appreciation for tradition.

Heart Breads

Ever since I first saw this video about the small bakery in Byron Bay, Australia, I have been meaning to get in touch with the baking family and learn more about their business and bread. I’m sure Heart Breads will be featured in a future issue of BREAD, but for now, watch their video. It’s joy of baking and community at its purest.

Mike “The Bejkr” Zakowski

Mike Zakowski is an award-winning baker – this spring, he participated in the world championships of baking in Paris for the second time – but he chooses to bake in his small bakery, providing bread for the community of Sonoma Valley by selling at farmers’ markets and delivering bread by bicycle.

You can read more about Mike in the Autumn 2012 issue of BREAD.

Baltic Bakehouse

Baltic Bakehouse is a new, yet traditional bakery in Liverpool. The bread looks fabulous as does the atmosphere of the bakery café but most of all, this video inspires me because of how this brother and sister team is the perfect example of following a dream so that they won’t have regrets later in life.

Josey Baker

Josey Baker -- yes, Baker is his real last name – is a baker. But just a few years ago, he wasn’t. Through a lot of work and a never-ending passion for bread, in this short time, he has made his way from baking his first sourdough loaf in his kitchen to baking bread and milling flour at The Mill, a bakery café in San Francisco, California. And as that wasn’t amazing already, he also just published a book – Josey Baker Bread -- this Tuesday!

For an interview I did with this fine baker, check out the October 2013 issue of BREAD.

Nicolas Supiot

This video is in French, but even if you don’t understand the language, I urge you to take a look. The way Nicolas Supiot manages his small countryside bakery – the dough, the oven, everything – is like an ode for the craft of bread.

Tartine Bread

This video has been around for a while already and many of you have probably seen it by now, but I still wanted to include it in my top ten because of the big, lasting impression it made on me and how in many ways it shaped my relationship with bread, leading to the magazine and everything I am doing with bread at the moment.

Tartine Bakery and Chad Robertson probably need no introduction. The book is a classic, as is the bread.

Better Health Bakery

Bread is an amazing foodstuff in itself but it can also act as a vehicle for transforming lives. Better Health Bakery is a social enterprise in London, UK that provides people recovering from mental diseases with a possibility to learn the craft of bread making and get used to working with other people in a safe environment.

Raluca Micu wrote a beautiful piece about the bakery and its apprentices for the Spring 2014 issue of BREAD.

Aaron Brunet

I had no idea about this before I started collecting the list – I just admired the beautiful, relaxed bread making and barefoot atmosphere – but Aaron Brunet is the winner of MasterChef New Zealand in 2013. He is also a sourdough baker and a passionate family man with a lot to teach to all of us.

(Some time after publishing this post, I got in touch with Aaron – and published an interview with him in the Autumn 2014 issue of Bread Magazine)