Press release here:
Local artisan bakers will showcase their bread at the seventh Asheville Artisan Bread Bakers Festival on Saturday, April 2. This two-part event begins with a bread tasting and sale at the Greenlife Grocery in downtown Asheville from 10am to 2pm, followed by hands-on workshops and lectures from noon to 6pm.
The featured bakers at this year’s event are Didier Rosada from Uptown Bakers, near Washington, DC and Lionel Vatinet from La Farm Bakery in Cary, NC. Rosada and Vatinet are both certified Master Bakers and have coached the American teams which have won the Gold medal in the world baking competition, La Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie in several of the recent competitions. Both have also been instructors at the San Fransisco Baking Institute and continue to be highly respected teachers, consultants, and writers.
In addition to Rosada and Vatinet, the festival will feature presentations by Peter Reinhart, well-known author, baker, and teacher at 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 six 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 are afternoon workshops and lectures at A-B Tech taught by Rosada, Vatinet, and Reinhart. Tickets are required for all the workshops.
The festival is being sponsored by the local bakeries, the Bread Bakers Guild of America, Greenlife Grocery, Slow Food Asheville, Lindley Mills (an organic flour mill in Graham, NC), and the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project.
For more information contact Steve Bardwell at 828 683-2902 or wakerobinfarmbreads@main.nc.us or visit the festival web site.