Hello, I’m Cathy, the face behind Bread Experience.
For years I worked in the corporate world as a project manager, and baking bread was how I came back to myself at the end of a stressful week.
I baked on the weekends, letting the dough slow ferment to bring out the flavor and the nutrition, and found that the hours at the counter did something no amount of time off ever did.
Eventually I stopped treating it as the thing I did around my job. I left the corporate world, and helping you bake great bread is now my full time work.
Baking bread, for me, isn’t just a hobby; it’s a way to relieve stress, ignite creativity, and connect with a centuries-old tradition. From slow-fermenting dough to experimenting with ancient grains and milling my own flour, every loaf is a new adventure.
My passion is helping you make great bread!
In 2025, LUXlife Magazine named Bread Experience Best Home Bread Baking Resource 2025 – USA. Their awards are decided by research and assessment rather than public voting, which is why this one means something to me.
Why I created this site
Bread Experience site was created out of a passion for bread baking and a desire to share that passion with others. This labor of love began as a project for my masters in 2007, but has turned into much more.
The site launched in 2008 and I started blogging a few months later. What began as a Master’s project, quickly developed into an intense passion for all things bread and grain-related. I’ve become enamored with ancient grains, in particular, as well as sprouted wheat and milling my own flour.
Milled Einkorn
Mission of the Bread Experience
To help home bakers learn how to bake bread by offering helpful resources, delivering quality products & exceptional service, and providing a unique experience to enhance your quality of life.My Bread Baking Journey
I started baking yeast breads in 1999 when I bought my first bread machine, but my bread journey really began when I was much younger. I grew up in the South so I learned how to made quick breads, biscuits and cornbread with my mom and sisters at a young age. I had fun creating concoctions of flour and water in the kitchen with a childhood friend, and even made mud pies in the vacant dirt lot next to my house.
Perhaps the playing in the dirt part explains my love of gardening and the burning desire to build an adobe oven or some type of wood-fired oven. I haven’t found the right spot to put the oven yet, but it’s on my bucket list.
If I claimed to be a self taught baker, that would not give credit to the many mentors I’ve had along the way. I’ve learned from bread baking books, from conferences and workshops including the Asheville Bread Festival, the Maine Grain Alliance’s Kneading Conference and the Grain Gathering at the Bread Lab, and from the lessons and experiences I’ve shared with baking peers in online baking groups.
The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge was the first virtual challenge I ever joined, and I baked every bread in the book. I’ve learned so much from the bread community at large, and sharing that passion is what this site is about.
Some of My Favorite Bread Baking Books
- Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart
- Bread Revolution by Peter Reinhart
- Flour, Water Salt & Yeast by Ken Forkish
- Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson
- Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman
The Experience
The bread experience is about so much more than just baking bread, it’s about the whole experience, from the wheat field to the table.
Where does your bread come from?
If you make it yourself, you’ll know exactly where it came from and what’s in it!
Bread is Community!
The final and most important part of the bread journey is community. Sharing a loaf of bread with family and friends is one of my favorite things. Then the process starts all over again to create the bread experience.
That community is a real one. I bake each month with the Bread Baking Babes, a group of bread bloggers who have been baking together since 2008, and in August 2026 I hosted the group’s kitchen, choosing the Tabatière and writing the recipe everyone baked from.
Tools I actually use
Along the way, readers kept asking what I bake with. The Bread Experience store carries a small, deliberately short list of tools I use myself, including handwoven rattan bannetons for baguettes made by artisans in Vietnam.
Every product comes with instruction because a tool without the knowledge to use it is just an object on a shelf. The baguette set ships with an eBook of formulas, and I’ve since revised that eBook based on what customers told me they needed from it.
Some of my top posts
- Here is a post I’m really proud of – Sourdough Sprouted Wheat Loaves
- I’m really proud of this one as well – Kefir Milk Asiago Spelt Semolina Bagels
- This post got a whole lot of comments – Sprouted Wheat Bread with no Flour
Favorite bread recipe & a Funny Story
One of my favorite breads to make is yeast rolls. I enjoy making these rolls because my sons love them and I love to see the expression on their faces when they know I’m baking them. Actually, these rolls smell so good, my sons used to run downstairs because of the aroma. I didn’t even have to tell them I was baking them.
I like to bake bread on Sundays and one day, I got so caught up making these rolls, I forgot about dinner. My oldest son came in the kitchen and asked what was for dinner and I remember thinking “Oops!” However, I just said, “yeast rolls” like that was what I had been planning all along. He said “sweet” and filled up on the rolls never complaining about not having anything else for dinner. That’s how much he loves these rolls.
Here is the recipe for My Family’s Favorite Yeast Rolls
My other love
My other love is dance. I studied dance for years so it ranks right up there with baking. These days, you’ll find me baking bread and dancing around the kitchen.
Did you know that the women of Ancient Greece kneaded their dough around a worktable with a musician playing the flute? They sure did. If you don’t believe me, check out Benard Dupaigne’s The History of Bread to find out for yourself. I’m just carrying on the tradition by listening to music and dancing a gig.
Let’s Get connected!
Bake along with me. My newsletter brings baking inspiration to your inbox, built around what I’m baking that month and the techniques behind it. Join the newsletter.
Browse the recipes. The blog has hundreds of them, covering sourdough, whole grain, ancient grains, sprouted breads, no knead, bread machine, quick breads and more.
Get in touch. Submit your comments and suggestions via the Contact Us page, or connect with me on social.
Whether you’re pulling your first loaf out of the oven or milling your own einkorn, I’m glad you’re here.