Home Made Country Bread with Junko Mine

A few weeks ago I attended my first barter event at Seattle Harvest Fair hosted by Seattle Tilth with two of my friends.  My friend Junko invited us to join the event.  She brought her amazing homemade artisan bread.  The quality of her bread is so high that it was easily one of the most popular items at the barter.  This is why I keep pushing her to sell her bread! 

Junko is a mighty women with many talents. I am pretty sure it comes from her curious and detail oriented mind.  She is a patissier, photographer, cook and chemist.  She is so brilliant and dedicated at creating products from bread to bath salt by using the natural resources that surround us.  

Recently she has been using natural plants and trees like cedar, pear, apple, peach, rose, etc… to make her bread by adding a natural infusion from the plants. I have been very curious what she was doing lately so she came by my house to show how she makes her leaven loaf!  I love seeing people do what they do so well.  There is so much to learn from her.  

I am often rushy and a bit hectic in my kitchen, but it was a pleasure watching Junko work with her skills and methods in my kitchen.  She has worked in many renowned kitchens and it shows.  

She showed me how to make the bread dough by using her wild starter and brew pear water.  Then I was left to do the rest on my own as the dough had to sit for a couple of hours. I took the task very seriously and followed all the instructions she left for me meticulously.  Everything went so well until I had to move the raised dough from the bowl to the cast iron pan to bake it.  I messed up this stage, which cause the finished bread to look a little sad.  Nevertheless, it was my first time and the bread tasted excellent!

I served the bread with some ginger carrot soup for lunch for the family.  Everyone was very excited for the bread and satisfied with their lunch : )


There's no recipe for the bread, but here's the book that she recommends for making this kind of bread. This is a good site that discusses making your own wild yeast starter and another site for brewing from plants and fruits.  The recipe for ginger carrot soup is found in this post.