Q & A with Kate Pepper of "Kate's Bread"
If you haven’t tried Kate’s bread, it might be time to jump into the Ojai vortex and understand the hype behind Kate Pepper, Ojai’s bread-baking, style and so-much-more icon. Kate amassed a following of 39,600 on Instagram and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Magazine.
The first time I picked up bread from Kate’s bread shed tucked away in Ojai’s Arbolada neighborhood, I witnessed another customer in a neatly pressed power suit and heels race to her Tesla with a large paper bag filled with Kate’s delectable goodies. She managed to open the front door and sit, but before she could swing her legs inside, she proceeded to shove a massive cinnamon roll into her mouth. Watching as sticky, buttery crumbs dribbled all over her face, suit and car, I knew I needed to learn more about the baker behind this irresistible bun. What follows is a rare interview (probably because I bugged her with emails until she finally relented).
Kate proved to be one of the most inspiring women I’ve ever met, and I’m grateful for her refreshing perspective and insanely tasty breads that have transfixed our community.
Who inspires you the most?
I don’t think one person inspires me the most, but a lot of people are very inspiring. It’s important to have that perspective, to really tap into all those people.
What is your most memorable food experience?
When I was 18, I lived in Ecuador for six months and that experience just really stuck with me—because what we were eating was so different. I was staying with a family in the countryside, and a little old lady in the family took me into her kitchen, which was basically just a hut with a dirt floor, a fire pit, a bunch of pots, and guinea pigs just running around. Guinea pigs are one of the food staples [in Ecuador]. We’d gone out to her garden and harvested a bunch of potatoes, we cooked up the potatoes, she just threw on cheese—just a massive bowl of potatoes and cheese. It was a lot to take in, especially with all the guinea pigs everywhere. And so I ate it. And it was great!
During this same trip, I ended up going into a tiny community in the Ecuadorian rainforest for a few months, and I had to eat forest rats and iguanas, or soup with every part of the chicken floating in it—the head, the beak, the feet, everything! I was, like, “I’m going to eat this because this is their food. And this is what they’ve offered me in hospitality. And this is what, as a visitor and as a guest, I must eat. Even if you’re, like, ‘Oh no, how am I gonna do this?!’”
So, my most memorable experiences are the ones that put your mind into a whole new world of the possibilities of what food offers.
What is your least favorite thing to bake?
I hate baking cookies. I really don’t like eating them. I don’t mind cookie dough, though!
What is your favorite thing to bake?
I love making bread because it is modest; it’s been around for so long; it’s humble. The idea of bread as an offering is humble; it’s something that we give to people as an offering of friendship, or love, or care in some way. I especially love sourdoughs and how alive the process of sourdough baking is. You’re working with a product that is still moving and changing; you’re on a time schedule; it’s fermenting; it depends on the environment, the weather and the temperatures. There are so many facets and things that contribute to what the bread is going to be like. If I pull a sourdough out of the oven, and I mess it up, I backtrack for two days. Where in the process did I mess it up? Did I go wrong at the starter build? Was it in the hydration? Was it the temperatures? And I don’t know until I pull it out of the oven and I just have to accept it. Bread, to me, is this very bizarre sort of process where we’d like to think we have a lot of control, but I don’t believe we really do. I think the process is more organic, which creates different loaves for everybody. I always hope that people get excited about the fact that their loaves are always going to be different, yet very true to where they come from, because they’re a product of their environment.
What do you love in particular about sourdough starters?
There are so many fascinating things about sourdough starters. Some people think a really old sourdough starter is the best; however, I think it depends more on when you’re using your starter as to how the flavor turns out—everybody does it differently. They say that a baker’s hands have organisms on them that most people don’t have. They have a whole system of micro-organisms that are very specific sourdough breads. The starter’s ability to survive is incredible—they say that they’ve found sourdough in ancient Egyptian loaves that were buried in tombs, and they’ve actually been able to revive the sourdough! They also say that women are really good bakers because we are so yeasty, which is super interesting.
What are three words that describe your baking philosophy?
Intuition, acceptance and endurance. Yeah, the idea of “Don’t quit, keep going, just don’t stop.”
What was the last thing you baked, and why?
The last thing I baked were these Media Lunas because I tried them at Gusto Bread (in Long Beach) on a visit to LA, part of a larger project to start documenting bakers and bakeries I know around the world. Through Instagram, I’ve met so many well-known people in the food industry, which seems incredible, being in tiny Ojai. Anyway, the idea is to take photos, do little movies about them, tell their stories, and understand what the baking world is, and what the food world is, globally. That’s what I really love to do. So right now, my visit to “Gusto’s Bread” is what’s inspiring me. I put up their story on my website, and I want to post a little recipe about Media Lunas. It’s part of my vision to create content around food, and this food world that I’m in, and hopefully people find it interesting.
Do you prefer baking alone or with other people?
I really do well alone… but I also love working with people because it is fun, and there’s an energy to it. However, in my life, my baking has mostly been alone. It’s how my business started, and just how I ran, because I’m a mother, a creative and a little weird. Working alone as a baker, I can put my daughter to bed at night and still do my work. It’s a more meditative experience alone. It’s more my style of thinking.
Do you follow recipes when you bake?
I never write things down. Everything’s usually in my head. Everything’s just sort of running around in there. People tell me to put a timer on for the oven… Well, I can’t do that. It’s done when it’s done. I’ll check it and I know when it’s done. So my baking is very intuitive. It’s very organic. It’s very, very not professional in any sort of way. It’s completely made up, self-taught, and I completely made up my system myself.
Do you always listen to music while you bake?
Yes. I listen to all kinds of music and whatever I can find. I have no real judgments towards any of it. It’s always very eccentric. I have pumped up music for when I’m mixing and kneading. In the evening, the music shifts to jazz. In the mornings, I listen to beautiful piano or classical music. There’s a real sort of ebb and flow of not only the baking, but also of the music that you’re baking with. Music really takes you through the baking process, it’s really cool.
What are your baking hours like?
At 1 o’clock in the afternoon I mix, and then I do the shaping. And I run like that until 12 o’clock at night. And then I sleep for an hour and a half, or two hours. And then to get back up and start rolling. I have very little storage space, I have very little refrigeration, and I am working with minimal equipment, so my timing of everything, and staggering of stuff, has to go a certain way.
What do you prefer with bread: butter or olive oil?
Butter. I guess it sort of depends on where you are when you’re eating it, but if you’re fortunate enough to be that person that gets to pull the loaf out of the oven hot, slather butter onto that! It’s the best bite of anything you can eat.
How does being a mom influence your baking?
As a mom, I don’t have the luxury of being able to put my head down, go into a bakery and work without thinking about my daughter at home. My business is built around the time schedule of being a mother. I need to be able to change my schedule in order to be around to take my daughter to school in the morning, and be there for her whenever. I think it has made my baking process a lot slower than it is for others. Mothers tend to run a home bakery, and they get creative with how they run it. I hear of a lot of men who are high on the ranked list of bakers, or best pizza makers, and women don’t tend to be up there unless maybe it’s for baking cakes or cookies. Being a mother really has, I think, driven the direction of my business and my choices.
If someone, like me, wants to be a baker, what advice do you have?
I would say, bake! I remember somebody saying to me, “You can learn a cooking technique in a weekend, but you will never be a baker unless you are baking all the time.” I think the best, most interesting, most inspiring bakers are the ones who are self-taught. They have picked up things that have resonated with them, and they’ve worked with that. They’re all scrappy bakers, just trying to make it work. They haven’t gone to culinary school; they just decided they’re gonna learn how to bake. And they’ve talked to people and they’ve interned from people; they’ve gotten really creative with how they figure out how to bake or how to sell. There are some really fascinating, nutty bakers out there, a very crazy group of people. So just start baking and I think you find your path through that.
What do you want to be doing in one year?
Well, I started a paid membership on my website and I hope it can work as my main source of income, so that I can travel to document bakers, and so I can have a tiny little space—like a creative food art studio. I’d like to bake bread for everybody once a week, cinnamon rolls on a Wednesday, or space to host dinners. I just want to have a creative space where I can do whatever I want and give it to the world. I want the membership page full of crazy information: how to start baking, books that I went through to self-learn how to bake, equipment that I’ve found … I want the membership, and my life, to be creative and fun. I want to be traveling, seeing things, experiencing things and have a little shop. I think it’d be fun if I could figure it out.
Explain your “Embers Only Pizza Club Dinners”
The food industry has become pretentious, especially fine dining. There’s this big upheaval about industries where people work so hard for such a little amount of money, not even a livable wage. It’s a toxic environment, there’s a lot of toxicity to the food industry, to push out food, where you’re charging an exorbitant amount of money for it. And most often, only the elite can really afford it. There’s this feeling around chefs and that energy of egotism within the industry that, in my mind, really takes away from the feeling of food. With the pizza dinners, I want to get back to that feeling of “Look, we aren’t making anything great, but we’re just making you food. And we’re gonna set up a table so that you all can sit and eat.” That’s what I want. As far as the pizzas themselves go, they are just straight up my sourdough with a little alteration and a few other ingredients. But it’s straight up sourdough pizzas: They go in the oven, they come up beautiful.
For more on Kate's Bread visit katesbread.com.
