Asheville Bread Festival

2012 Festival Announcement

Local artisan bakers will showcase their bread at the eighth Asheville Artisan Bread Bakers Festival on Saturday, March 24, 2012. This all-day event begins with a bread tasting and sale at the Magnolia Building on the A-B Tech campus in Asheville, NC from 10am to 2pm. Hands-on workshops and lectures will take place from 9am to 6pm at the same location.

The theme of this year's festival is “Local Grain, Local Flour, and Local Bread”; the festival will feature experts on local grain production, milling, and baking with local and heirloom wheat. Thom Leonard, a professional baker for more than 35 years, and currently a consultant for Heartland Mills, will be presenting workshops on milling and baking with local wheat. Professor Stephen Jones, a world-renowned wheat geneticist and breeder from Washington State University, will be lecturing on the local-grain movement and recent results in the breeding of organic grain and a perennial wheat.

In addition to Leonard and Jones, the festival will feature presentations on gluten-free, sugar-free baking by Peter Reinhart, baker and author of eight bread cookbooks, from Johnson & Wales University, and Jennifer Lapidus, director of the North Carolina Organic Bread Flour Project.

“Asheville and its surrounding area, with a very small population, supports more artisan bakeries than most states. The bakeries are all small but truly artisan in the purest sense of the word," Reinhart said.

This unique festival, the first of its kind in the southeast, has been overwhelmed with attendees for the past seven years. More than a dozen local artisan bakers will be showing, sampling and selling their bread this year.

For bread-enthusiasts who want to improve their baking skills, there will be many workshops and lectures at A-B Tech taught by Leonard, Reinhart, and several local bakers. Tickets are required for all the workshops.

The festival is being sponsored by the local bakeries, the Bread Bakers Guild of America, Slow Food Asheville, Lindley Mills (an organic flour mill in Graham, NC), the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, and the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association.