About

Those of you who know my other blog, the French-language Bombance (which I don't have time to update anymore unfortunately but which I'll keep alive as long as it gets visitors), already know that I am French, that I have been living in the US for over 30 years and that I am passionate about bread, bread making, bread tasting, bread eating, bread blogs, bread books, bread pictures, bread everything.
I love to visit bakeries, purchase and taste bread and talk to bakers, I also love visiting old-fashioned mills, buy flour and talk to millers. (I have only done it twice so far but both times it was a great experience.) 
I come from a long line of bread-baking women as my paternal great-grandmother and her mom and grandma and great-grandma (I'll stop there, I'm sure you get the picture) before her were in charge of baking the family bread. It was customary in Southwest France in the old days, not that I ever saw it done as that way of life disappeared way before I was born but I guess it's in my genes. My Dad however remembered it very well. Every two weeks dough would be mixed at home, then baked in the communal oven. Every woman scored her mark on the loaves so that they could be identified when they came out of the oven. These loaves were enormous six-pounders and, being made with starter, they kept very well...
As to "farine", it is the French word for "flour". Why would I want to give a French name to an English-language blog? Well, because you can take the proverbial woman out of France but not France out of the woman ;-) and anyway you'd be bound to notice that Farine isn't 100% American even if I tried my best to make it so.
My interest in passion for bread goes back a long long time. I can date it exactly back to the summer when my husband, our 3-year old daughter, our 2-year old son and I went from France to Scandinavia for a summer vacation. We had family in Denmark but we went first to Norway where one of my first cousins lived. He was then married to Anja, who was from Finland. At their house, the very same day we were introduced both to incredibly delicious home-made bread (at the time, it hadn't even entered my French consciousness that bread could be made at home, which shows how disconnected from my ancestors I was) and to a very educational (especially for our kids who were goggle-eyed) extended family sauna session. So how can I ever forget when it all started?
To show you that I am not kidding when I say I fell in love with homemade bread on that day, look! Here is the recipe! I have saved it all these years (38 and counting) and it followed me from Norway to Denmark to France to the United States. Doesn't it tell you something?

I never made Anja's bread as none of the ingredients were available in Paris at the time, so I am not going to translate the recipe unless someone writes to tell me they really really want it. But I just re-read it and I can see that Anja was using a sour starter and no yeast at all, and that her starter didn't contain any flour, it was made with 100% sour milk.
So my interest in wild yeast goes indeed way way back (my interest in saunas wasn't so long-lived and no, I have no pictures of that day!) and it lay dormant (just like wild yeast) for years and years.
The person who woke it up is Nancy Silverton. When her book, Breads from La Brea Bakery, came out in 1996, I got one of the first copies and never looked back. The bread bug had found me again and this time, it bit me for good and never let go.
Twenty-three years later, in 2009, retirement helped make one of my dreams come true: in January of that year, I attended two Artisan bread workshops at the San Francisco Baking Institute. It was truly the learning experience I had hoped it would be and I enjoyed every minute of it.
I am going back there for more classes throughout the year and hope to be able to share with you on Farine what I learn.
Meanwhile I practice, practice, practice (just as if I were going to the Carnegie Hall of bread) and we eat, eat, eat bread. It helps that my daughter now has 5 kids and lives close by. No bread goes to waste here, unless it is so awful that I can't even foist it onto the birds.
So please come on board for the ride, share your ideas, leave your comments, send me pictures and recipes, I am game for anything as long as it has to do with bread and most especially, with wild yeast. Welcome to Farine!