I've always had a passion for food ever since I was young. I always loved baking and being
in the kitchen but I learned even more so how much working in food you have to have
a passion because it kind of takes over your life. I can't really remember the first time
I baked bread. It was probably like after watching the Great British Bake Off or something like that.
I graduated from university and I had a lot of free time. I had a job and I was super
active. I spent days baking bread. It was quite often working in the evening so I'd have the
days off, spend the whole day making bread, listen to the radio. I wanted to go and teach
English abroad as a foreign language and live abroad for a while so I was able to go whiffing
and see if there's any places to take workers or bakeries so I googled it and Trace Bridge came off.
I visited Trace Bridge and met Katie and Gordon and absolutely fell in love with the place. It was
winter, it was muddy, Katie was really ill but I absolutely fell in love with the place and being in
the bakery and being here was amazing and I knew that it was something that I wanted to do and I
wanted to be here and I was quite determined that baking was something that I wanted to do.
I met Adam here. He is a really good friend of the family and he was an apprentice here a few
years ago and I met him first in the summer of last year. I think I beat him at Ping Pong about
three or four times. I didn't really get to know him properly until you know we were following January
but we got on really well and both had a connection to this place and to Katie and Gordon and the
family and both had a passion that we shared with bread really.
That's the great thing about sourdough as well is it's hard to do, it's quite, you need to be
very involved. Baking bread is a skill but then sourdough is the next level, baking wood-fired oven
is the next level and these are things that I was kind of realizing that I had talent for or being
around people that said I was good at it. During my time down at Tracebridge Adam had been offered
the opportunity to start bakery down here. He was the only person that would truly be seen to kind
of start this bakery down in Somerset with the help of a friend George who was keen on building
an oven on his site in Whitepost. This project down here at Somerset, this is the bakery at
Whitepost, was such a great opportunity that that was what I had to do. Probably the most
life-changing thing for me was when Adam came to visit me in Bristol. I mean I wish I could have a
warm romantic story about this but pretty much said I don't know why I'm offering you but I'm
offering you something. Cool, what an offer. I don't know if I'm making the right decision. I don't
know what we could do or if we can do anything together but there's an opportunity here. Would
you like to take it pretty much? And of course I had to say yes. Why spend most of your life
doing something that you don't enjoy? And why not make it something that you really want to do
and something that you can really enjoy and kind of go in between not have the difference between
time off at work.
