Please Help Me Get Professional Artisan Bread Training

My name is Joe Kim. It goes against my upbringing to speak highly of myself, but please pardon me as I share my story and my vision for my future.

I am a bread baker who is currently living in Harrisonburg, Virginia working for a cottage bakery called Mill Song Bakery. Nico Melas, the owner of Mill Song Bakery, was my past coworker, and is my current employer; I am helping him out for about one year.

By the end of summer, I would like to go to a baking school called San Francisco Baking Institute (SFBI). The school is internationally recognized for providing high-level artisan bread and viennoiserie education to those who seek excellence. This year, they are going to offer a professional training series that serves to prepare professional artisan bakers to go out and raise the bar in the food industry. The class is about seven weeks long and it is held in San Francisco, California.

One of the main reasons I want to go to SFBI is not only to learn the material, but to experience how they teach the material. I want to see how the teachers organize the information, how the classes are arranged throughout the week, and to pay close attention since what I want to do is teach artisan baking eventually.

This class would mean a lot to me because I would like to become an artisan baking instructor/teacher. For years, my coworkers at various bakery jobs have strongly recommended that I become a teacher. The reason was that it is obvious that I feel deeply fulfilled when I am training and teaching new bakers, even more fulfilled than when I am working in bread production. When I worked at Seylou Bakery, I was responsible for training and teaching the new hires, and I cherished it greatly. Thanks in-part to my rigorous, technical bread theory formation, many of my former students (including John Derry of Meadow Bread and Nico Melas of Mill Song Bakery, to name a few) have gone on to do notable things in the world of fresh-milled, whole grain, artisan sourdough bread made with local, heritage, and ancient grains. I am passionate about training a new generation of high-level American artisan bread bakers, especially at this time when, taken as a whole, the local food movement is almost totally bereft of quality local grain products.

I am particularly passionate and well-versed in the growing movement of using locally grown heritage and ancient grains, freshly stone-ground whole grain flour, and leavening exclusively with sourdough starter, having learned under great bakers such as Mike Zakowski from The Bejkr, the late Gérard Rubaud, Ciril Hitz from Johnson and Wales University, Joshua Bellamy of Boulted Bread, Richard Bourdon from Berkshire Mountain Bakery, Jim Williams from Backdoor Bread, Russell Trimmer from Motzi Bread, Stef Senders from Wide Awake Bakery and Jonathan Bethony from Seylou Bakery, to name a few. I am also trained to operate and service a New American Stone Mill, and to manage the mill settings to make even, creamy whole grain flour.

Despite my enthusiasm and diligence, I have only been able to save up HALF of the funds necessary to pay for tuition at SFBI and accommodations during the course. I need your help to make up the rest. Whatever money I raise through fundraising will be used towards my remaining tuition, Airbnb, and airplane ticket. Whatever help I can get is highly appreciated. Thank you for your time and consideration in reading this.

Sincerely,

Joe Kim