BETTER THAN THE ROMANS
Photographer and sourdough maven Lucie Monk Carter tried her hand at Ford’s recipe for Challah in New World Sourdough, allowing her two daughters’ to help in the process.
The Art of Rising
CHEF BRYAN FORD CHALLENGES ALL WE KNOW ABOUT MODERN DAY BREADMAKING
Story by Swathi Reddy • Photos by Lucie Monk Carter
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midst scenes of kneading dough and tossing it high up in the air, baker Bryan Ford lays down the gauntlet of his baking credo: “Let go of all your preconceived notions, I got Black skin but I make it better than the Romans. Yeah I make sourdough but don’t be foolish, you already know that I could pull up with the poolish. You already know that I could throw dough down from the ground up, make it levitate and look ghoulish.” Filmed in his hometown of New Orleans this summer, Ford and his partner (in life and business) Bridget Kenna released “Homeslice,” a music video in collaboration with New Orleans artist Kr3wcial, as the inaugural work of their newly formed production company Flaky Biscuit Media. Playful, humorous, and celebratory, the video is a remix of Kr3wcial’s original song “Eat’n Pizza” and encapsulates the pure joy of breaking bread together—or, more specifically, of throwing a backyard pizza party with your best friends, sharing slices handcrafted by a master artisan. These are the inclusive types of spaces the award-winning baker Ford inhabits: where improvisation is celebrated, boundaries are dissolved, heritage is embraced, and passion is a guiding force. “Your environment dictates the bread you can create—and I’m not talking about climate and temperature,” he wrote in his debut cookbook New World Sourdough (2020). “I’m talking about how you feel and the emotional connection you have to your roots, upbringing, and city.” Ford’s presence as a young American
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with Afro-Honduran roots, born in the Bronx and raised in Louisiana, is one not frequently seen in professional baking circles. The former accountant soared to nationwide prominence after the publication of his cookbook in the summer of 2020. In it, he pairs explanations of various baking techniques with generous doses of gentle guidance. This approach, also reflected on his Instagram @artisanbryan, serves as the foundational tool for home bakers to recreate the breads he champions from North, Central, and South America, as well as other parts of the globe. Sourdough bread, in particular, is what Ford has become most closely associated with—a result of his efforts to redefine the breadth and scope of the naturally leavened bread in the public space. In contrast to the visually iconic, crusty, boule-shaped loaves of San Francisco, he spotlights the sourdoughs of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where his mother is from, and beyond—focusing more on the term as a means to “make different kinds of bread rise in a healthier and more natural way,” as he writes in the introduction of his book. He goes on, “A dense loaf of pan de coco is no less ‘sourdough’ than a crunchy batard with an open, light crumb.” What Ford has brought to the forefront is a question many of us had yet to ask: Why is bread, which has served as the bedrock of global cuisines for thousands of years, represented world-wide almost exclusively through a Euro-centric lens? “Bread is a representation of life,” he said in a recent interview. “I think of bread almost like a movement, as opposed to just being a food item. It is
D E C 2 1 // C O U N T R Y R O A D S M A G . C O M
something we have in every culture, and he said, as far as food was concerned; lunch at school would be red beans and it is present across every background.” In his book, Ford imparts gems rice with cornbread, and his mother learned from baking in his mother’s would serve arroz con pollo for dinner. kitchen (“the Honduran secret weap- From helping his mother in the kitchen, on to a good tortilla is coconut milk”); he learned to cook meals for his youngshares recipes that evoke poignant epi- er sister after school, eventually preparsodes from his life—including semitas, ing meals for the entire family while his an after-school treat his father would parents and brother worked. While in bring home from the nearby Honduran college, he worked as a line cook (among bodega; his grandfather’s Jamaican hard other restaurant roles) in New Orleans, dough; and pão de queijo, a Portuguese which led to a deeper recognition of his cheese bread he came upon while living love for cooking, and especially, baking. Ford spent a few years in in Miami. He also weaves in recipes inMiami, eventually offispired by Louisiana classics, like New cially trading in his Orleans-style French bread, bananas accounting books foster sourdough, and his “next-level” for a baker’s whole-grain pineapple cream beignets. apron. While Discarding the modern day focus on waiting to aesthetics, crumb structure, and hyhear about dration levels, Ford emphasizes breada potential making as something much more injob at a tuitive. He roots his own practice in bakery and memories of learning how to make mulling over cinnamon-raisin bread for his father the idea of and watching his mother’s hands knead tortilla masa. For him, baking is rooted in the primal joy of nourishment, in feeding those one cherishes most: a labor of love. Louisiana, where his parents moved after immigrating to New York in the 1980s from Honduras, was home to Ford for twenty-six years. He had the best of both worlds, Photo courtesy of Bryan Ford
