Artisan bread

I am a food technologist by profession.  I tried my hand at gastronomy seven years ago. I have had the opportunity to work in and contribute to restaurants such as Funicular, Keto and Kote, Stamba. I feel that my career is developing at a good and fast pace, which in itself is due to my constant self-improvement, an insatiable desire to grow and a thorough study of my profession. I try to travel a lot and get acquainted with different cuisines of the world and modern approaches.

Recently I have been paying a lot of attention to baking bread with natural yeast. I first introduced this trend to the Zerti chain of Georgian grocery shops. Today I am the executive chef of Batonebi, an artisan bakery. At Batonebi you'll find many varieties of breads, pastries, sandwiches and salads. Best of all, none of the recipes, including the artisan bakery, use a single gram of additives.

I remember well the bread my grandmother used to bake, its taste and aroma. Bread with butter and its accompaniments (jam) seems to me to be one of the important components of childhood memories. Because of my profession, I also decided to pay more attention to bread and restore the technology of making it with natural yeast, the same  bread sourdough. It was at that moment that the flavors of my childhood were revealed to me, the aroma of my grandmother's bread, which took me back to my childhood for a moment. And baking bread became a kind of ticket to a journey back in time. I always say, and I'll say it again, that in the baking process, apart from the right use of physics, chemistry and mathematics, some kind of power is needed. Something mystical, something otherworldly.

Working in the bakery sector is quite time-consuming, more time-consuming than it seems from the outside, to the naked eye. Basically, when you work in this profession, you forget what sleep is. You have to get up before dawn to greet your clients in the morning with a fresh and high-quality product. Maybe if you ever change career, you will have to learn to sleep again. Germany, for example, is taking certain measures and motivating the new generation to get them interested in baking. The German government needed such measures because bakery work is less popular among the new generation, and the reason is simple: young people don't want to do hard and time-consuming work when office work is much easier. Therefore, remember that by the time the delicious bread reaches you, it has gone a certain way and a lot of hard work has gone into each slice or crumb.

Avtandil Tsetskhladze