I am Elmer. A 33 year old human trained as medical biologist. I have a long standing interest for pretty much everything that runs software and I love to make things do they were not designed for. This has brought me to combine know-how of Unix-systems, hardware and programming to develop tools and solve biological problems.

So, how does it relate to baking? In 2018 I quite my PhD research because the competitive environment made me feel I always had to prove myself and to do better every day. I was very unhappy and I experienced so much stress that I wasn’t able to work for a while. That left me with a lot of time to do things I enjoy and bread baking was already one of them. I started baking bread for the community in which I live in and read a bunch of books about bread baking. Every week I spent one of two full days baking bread and was experimenting with many different recipes. I learned a lot about baking bread that year and although I was very eager to learn more and wanted to volunteer in a bakery, my post-PhD stress levels didn’t allow me to do so. Every time I was baking I was striving to make better breads than the week before and to ultimately find the perfect recipe for a certain type of bread. Those who visited this website in 2018 might have stumbled upon the phrase “I am challenging myself to create a better tasting, more beautiful and purer bread every time. Absolute perfection is what I am perusing in bread baking.”. I like to reflect on this sentence these days because it is such a pure expression of the stress I was experiencing. And in retrospect, that view made baking bread itself a stressful experience. Nowadays, I am not striving for the perfect bread anymore and instead try to make baking bread contribute to my happiness and that of my housemates: relaxed baking schemes instead of ones that make me stressed (and my housemates too!), taking into account the kitchen-needs of my housemates, buying not-the-perfect-baking-flour but one that does not have to travel the world and maybe most important, letting go of my views of a perfect bread. My breads no longer reflect the illusion of a perfect world, I mean bread, but they are good breads and allow me to be happy and appreciate and enjoy each of them.

Contact

In case you are in need of a sourdough starter or have any other questions, please feel free to send me a message.

Mail address: gro.lekcitsremle@liame
(Due to anti-spam measures copy/paste of my email address won’t work)