In 2008, bakers Dragan and Penny were among the pioneers in teaching microbakery business courses and among the first to sell real bread in Oxford. Now based in Devon, UK, their mission is to teach people how to bake real bread, pastries and pizza. Sourdough, heritage and gluten free breads are their specialites.  

Dragan’s story

“My fascination with breadmaking was born of necessity in the mid seventies, when I first arrived in this country. The bread in England then was, and still largely is, fast to produce and chemically induced.  No wonder that today we have such a huge number of people suffering from bread allergies.

Coming from a macho culture, barely able to fry an egg, I was forced to learn how to bake a decent loaf, just to survive. But my really passionate quest for the perfect loaf began later on in my life. Wanting to learn absolutely everything about what makes dough work, I picked up tips from master bakers everywhere, as well as trying one  thousand and one ways of making bread.  The answer was to ditch everything but the essentials (good flour, clean water, salt and yeast) and give it all plenty of time.

Today, to make my perfect loaf, I prefer to use heritage flours (or gluten free flour), coupled with the time-honoured method of long fermentation, which makes delicious and beautiful breads that are good for our health. My dough takes a minimum of 30 hours to develop and each loaf is carefully hand-crafted. That’s why I call my loaves ‘artisan’.

My greatest pleasure is when people come to us saying that they can finally eat bread again, because properly fermented dough is easy to digest, or our students telling us that they’ve learned more than they could have ever expected!”

A bit about Penny

Penny was fortunate enough to have a mother and two grandmothers who were all great cooks, and happy to have their kids in the kitchen.  The teaching came almost by osmosis. As a three-year old Penny remembers coming in from the garden to poke a curious, muddy finger into a  mesmerising pillow of white dough rising in a bowl and squeaking with guilty alarm at the grubby dent she had made.  To her astonishment, the dent disappeared, just as her laughing mother said it would.  Penny’s lifelong passion for creating good food made it natural for her to bake bread, but it wasn’t until she met Dragan that she really developed those skills.  The Rise of Real Bread Conference in 2009 was her first encounter with the artisan bakers, millers, farmers, scientists, ecologists, writers and activists that are fighting for a better loaf on Britain’s tables. It was a watershed moment.

Penny says “We can only change the way people bake and think about bread one person at a time. But if we do it often enough, for long enough, we will contribute to positive change.  That’s our reason for being.”