About the project
The Bread Companion was a nomadic, teaching bakery and online platform for 'breaducation' that ran between 2014 - 2021 by baker Julia Georgallis. Initially, TBC started life as a travelling micro bakery in 2014, using a wood-fired oven built onto the back of a trailer and pulled by a van. Inspired by communal bread ovens of the past, The Bread Companion began life as a moving, micro bakery to encourage people to eat, bake and buy real bread and provide for themselves. The point of the project was not just about bread – the aim was to get people thinking about everything they eat, with bread being the perfect gateway to that. Most people don’t have the time or space to grow their own vegetables or the land to farm their own animals, but knocking up a homemade loaf is doable and empowering. TBC was started in London, but the project ran all over the world, from fields on a Swedish island, to the rural Californian High Desert. In 2018, The Bread Companion moved bases from London to Lisbon. Over the years, three different iterations of the mobile wood fired oven were built so that the project could travel the UK and further afield to run workshops and bake bread. After six and a half years of teaching hundreds of people how to make their own bread, baking bread and cakes for wholesale customers, as well as providing useful online bread tips, the project ended in early 2021 after the Covid-19 pandemic, but you can still access TBC's blog, The Bap, and videos containing lots of useful bread making tips, Bitesized Baking.
About the founder
The Bread Companion was founded by baker, food writer and entrepreneur, Julia Georgallis, whilst she was a student at the Royal College of Art, London. Julia worked in a bakery on Saturdays whilst studying design and saw how bread could be used as an important tool to empower and teach people about food on a wider level, and TBC became part of her graduating work. She left the design world shortly after and has worked in hospitality ever since. After closing TBC in early 2021, Julia now writes about food and still works as a baker/chef. Her new project, theediblearchive.org also looks at food as a powerful teaching tool.