The Handmade Bakery on tour

It was -16 C when we set off from my mother's house. It was still dark, although the snow gave the landscape an eerie glow. The sky had grown pink by the time we reached my brother's house, where the fire in the masonry oven had been blazing for four hours. We carried in my late grandmother's wooden barrel containing the rye sourdough started three days earlier. My father kneaded the dough and we tucked into the freshly fried catch of vendace, a treat made possible by the freezing over of the lakes. The dough was left to rise.

It is January and we are in Finland visiting my parents. We happened to hit a bread making weekend. When I was a child, Saturday was always a baking day, but sourdough rye bread was only made a few times a year. I remember crawling under the kitchen table to take a sneaky peek into the barrel of vinegary smelling mystery, a week-long build-up to a very early morning and an exciting day full of hustle and bustle at my great auntie's old and dark house.

Baker Dan Lepard describes someone asking him why he bothered to make bread by hand. He had no answer for them because he couldn't understand why they didn't just know. We can buy anything, everything, but it leaves us feeling hollow. The making with our hands is what reconnects us with being human. Perhaps living a decade in a foreign country has hightened my appreciation of my family's traditions. I want to know how they used to do things and I want to carry those traditions on, because it is my culture. As such it defines me, tells me who I am, where my roots lie. Starting The Handmade Bakery is an attempt at reconnecting with tradition, with meaning and with simplicity that hopefully leads to understanding life's true complexity.

We all took a share of dough, shaped it into round flat breads with a hole cut in the middle. Years ago, when freezers (or preservatives) didn't exist, the rye breads were threaded on a pole and suspended over the hearth to dry to be eaten as crispbreads when fresh bread had run out. The breads were proved on a long wooden board from which they were easy to slip onto the peel and the stone bottom of the slightly mellowed out oven. Just enough time now for a quick lunch of smoked moose, potatoes, wild mushroom gravy and gherkins. The breads came out dark brown with patterns like dried out river beds seen from the air. We couldn't wait for one to cool down, but tore one open, smeared its steaming insides with butter and bit our teeth into its fragrant flesh. The day was crowned with a long soak in the darkness of the smoke sauna. We didn't roll in the snow. It was too bloody cold.