A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Asheville Bread Festival.  It was wonderful!  The event, held annually since 2004, began with local artisan bread bakers showcasing their breads at the Greenlife Grocery in downtown Asheville.

More than a dozen bakeries, from the Asheville area and Eastern Tennessee, offered samples of bread for sale. My friend and I enjoyed sampling the breads.  Here are some of the works of art.

A lot of the vendors were located outside the Greenlife Grocery so there were other items competing with the breads in these photos.  For example, the bike in the photo above and the top soil in the photo below.

As you can imagine, a lot of folks wanted to taste and buy bread.  I was just about to take a photo of some focaccia when someone decided to get some bread from this bakery.  I don’t blame them.  It looked delicious!

Here is the focaccia without an arm reaching across.

This bakery had some delicious pastries. We sampled a Pineapple Danish. I wasn’t able to get a photo, but it was delicious!

 

Look at this gorgeous Miche from the Hillside Bakery.

More beautiful breads.

And even more.delicious breads to choose from.

 

 

Here is some beautiful sprouted wheat bread. The baker who makes this bread used to be a carpenter but now he and his wife bake bread.  I love it!

 

 

There were more vendors inside but it was kind of dark and there were too many people sampling the wonderful breads to be able to get very many photos, but I did capture a few.

This is a beautiful bread from Farm and Sparrow Bakery.  It’s made with heirloom wheat that they grow themselves.  Very cool!

Rising Creek Bakery, from Mount Morris, PA also attended the festival. I got so busy talking with them about their method of bread-baking that I forgot to take a photo.  I’ll be sharing more about their salt-rising bread soon.

This part of the festival was really fun.  We enjoyed viewing and tasting all of the great breads.  I definitely want to do this again. The bakers were so friendly and their breads were exquisite.

The next part of the Asheville Bread Baking Festival included workshops with bakers. I will highlight that experience in another post.

Happy Baking!

Cathy