Sitting at the High Table: The Asheville Bread Festival on April 22nd

On April 22nd from 8:30am to 12:30pm we will be at the Bread Festival in the New Belgium Brewhouse

Short summary for locals in a hurry: Next week we are at the Asheville Bread Festival on Saturday, April 22 (8:30am-12:30pm) and will not be at RAD market on Wednesday, April 19. Things go back to normal for the week of the 24th.

Remember the Harry Potter series, all magic and teen age adventure, set in a British boarding school inside a towering castle full of wizards and witches?

I recently revisited the castle by reading the last three Harry Potter books in Italian. Yep…turns out reading Harry Potter in a language you’re working on is a great learning tool! It’s got plot you already know and (mostly) practical vocabulary: sliding, whispering, gossiping, fighting, good vs evil…much of the drama of life. After 2000+ pages of reading my brain is più forte for it!

Anyways, do you remember the scenes at suppertime in the Harry Potter movies? First you would see the big hall with its lower tables in tight vertical rows filled with noisy students, all packed together. Then all the faculty and special guests, seated at the front of the grand hall at the horizontal High Table. There was always intrigue and quarreling at the high table (and the lower too!) and the professors weren’t always the most coherent (because, of course, Harry and his friends were the ones who ended up saving the world, not the professors) but in the end the high table at Hogwarts was something inspiring, a place where students or visitors wanted to be—good food and rousing speeches.

Well Urban Peasant fans, we are going to be at the local equivalent of the High Table at Hogwarts — the Asheville Bread Festival — this Saturday April 22nd!

Asheville Bread Fest is back after a three-year hiatus and it is looking good!

We will be the only GF bakers at what we consider the High Table of local bakers and millers: OWL, Farm & Sparrow, Flat Rock Village Bakery, Hominy, Carolina Ground, Underground Baking and others, including at least one from Eastern NC. This line up will be at the vendor market on Saturday from 8:30am to 12:30pm at the New Belgium Brewhouse. No tickets required for the market. There is also an educational component with classes scattered around the greater Asheville area.

You are invited to bring your friends and check out the bread buzz—and this time, if you are gluten-free you will actually be able to have a snack or buy a loaf! We’ll be featuring two types of sourdough loaves as well as our Golden Milk mini-breads and Double Chocolate Fennel Sourdough cookies. No pre-orders and get there on the earlier side.

You may ask, why aren’t there more GF bakers at these sort of events? Why are GF bread eaters so limited on quality choices?

Well, first of all it’s not the GF eater’s fault, even today Gluten bread is still pretty much considered the only “real bread” and Gluten bakers the only “real bakers”. The reign of wheat is mighty and monolithic. This despite the fact that in early human civilization when wheat wasn’t as widespread there were actually lots of other bread grain ingredients like millet, corn, buckwheat, cassava, sorghum and sawdust (if times were really tough).

Then large-scale wheat farming got figured out and machines starting make wheat cheap to grow and process. Gluten bread was industrialized and cheap; more recently it became hip and amazing with heirloom wheat, fresh-milled sourdough and then flavored with nettles or your favorite herb. That said, gluten bread for the most part is still industrial, and lacking in nutrition, even if you can eat gluten.

Meanwhile medicine got better at figuring out that gluten just doesn’t work for some people: celiac, auto-immune, assorted digestive ailments, allergies and the list goes on. There are lots of legitimate reasons people can’t handle the wonders of glutinous baking. Savvy entrepreneurs saw this and started baking GF, developing the field that is still very much a work in progress. Look in any Natural Foods store or big Supermarket and you’ll see shelves stacked with GF products.

Let’s face it though, most GF breads still aren’t very good. Many of you have told me about picking up a loaf at the supermarket and being very disappointed. Several of you have used the words “barely edible”.

And that’s perhaps a key part of why there aren’t many GF bakers at Bread Fairs.

I think a lot of GF bakers have settled for a “Good Enough” philosophy and make bread products full of highly processed starches and/or strange binders like psyllium. It results in loaves that are visually similar to their gluten counterparts but hard to eat.

Those commercial GF breads may be “good enough” as a hamburger bun replacement at a restaurant with great hamburgers or as a cracker crust at pizzeria with great toppings, but they are not something you want everyday for breakfast or with hummus and tangy olive oil on a summer afternoon.

“Barely edible” or “good enough” are not the kind of baked goods that Artisan Bread Fairs want to promote, even if means excluding GF eaters. So they don’t.

We’d like to think we are part of a different GF baking flow. The Urban Peasant way is about reinventing Bread by adapting traditional bread methods using alternative grains and seasonal flavors. We like to think that this approach, emphasizing the art of grains, wild yeast and seasonal ingredients, helps us sit at the “high table” and we truly hope it will become more common among other GF bakers.

So though we won’t be at RAD market on the 19th we’ll be trying to do you proud. Stop by and say hi. We’ll be back at RAD market soon with our summer selection of breads, cakes and focaccias. Stay tuned! Website will be open for pre-orders on Thursday, April 20th.

Flavio and Beth for the Urban Peasants