♪♪
-My mom was great at allowing us to experiment in the kitchen.
And she was a baker. She used to bake bread.
I can say that I was a professional baker at age 13.
My best friend and I were trying to earn money
to go to Marriott's Great America, to the amusement park.
And my mom said, "If you want to go,
you have to sell something that you made yourself."
And we decided that we would make baguettes.
And so every couple of weeks, we would get together,
and it was an all-day process, making these baguettes.
They were delicious.
And we sold them for $0.75 apiece.
About eight years ago,
I started having some weird digestive symptoms
and learned that I couldn't tolerate gluten any longer.
And I've always loved to bake,
and I've always really loved eating baked goods.
They're just my happy place.
And I tried a bunch of recipes and products
that were on the shelf that frankly,
at that point, were terrible.
And I realized that if I wanted to continue eating those things,
that I needed to make them myself.
I have a variety of flours that I use in order
to mimic what happens when you bake with wheat flour.
And I have -- use primarily brown rice, sorghum,
oat flour, coconut flour, arrowroot starch.
And then I have a variety of different flavors that I do.
So the pumpernickel would have chocolate and molasses
and caraway in it.
I do an orange bread that grinds up
half of an orange for each loaf.
And then I also do crackers
that have lots of different kinds of seeds in them --
flax seeds and pumpkin seeds,
sunflower seeds, chia seeds, and olive oil.
-Hey! -Hey!
-I found out about Charlotte baking gluten-free bread
from a neighbor of mine.
And my son and I have been eating gluten-free forever.
And Charlotte's loaves are incredibly crusty
and heavy and satisfying.
This is fig pecan.
And my other favorite is her pumpernickel breads.
Bread's really like the -- I don't know, the unicorn,
I guess.
You can get great cookies.
There are places that do cakes that are pretty good.
And bread is this -- you know, you really need gluten.
That's what makes the bread stretchy
and it allows you to get the big pockets of air in there,
which helps it to rise.
And so recreating that without gluten requires
additional things to kind of shore up the dough.
And it definitely took a while.
-Hey. -Hey.
-I usually order two, and this time I only did one
because I'm probably going to eat it by the time I get home.
-Yeah, it's still warm, too. -Your favorite.
-I know. -I know. [ Laughs ]
-IT's the chew. It's the flavor. It's the crumb.
-In terms of the finer tuning the texture and the flavor,
that's all, you know, what feels good to me,
what smells good, what looks good out of the oven.
What I'm trying to create is a food experience for someone,
and that feels like art to me.
-There you go. -Thank you!
-Multigrain.
-I love toast in the morning.
Put a little edamame hummus on it,
slice of tomato, and it's perfection.
♪♪
-A big part of my M.O. in how I live my life
is to try and make food for people
so that everybody feels welcome to eat.
So when I have people over, there a variety
of different things for meeting people's different eating needs.
You know, it's how we come together,
and I feel so strongly that people really feel welcome.
♪♪
-For more information, including how to sign up
for Charlotte's regular e-mail updates,
go to WellFedBakery.com.
♪♪
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