A year in the life of Instagram bread-baking sensation Tara Jensen as she teaches readers how to bake bread and pies, build the perfect fire to cook with, and live a simple, satisfying life.

Why do so many people make pilgrimages to Tara Jensen’s North Carolina Smoke Signals Bakery? Why do over a 100,000 people follow her Instagram feed @bakerhands? It’s because Tara bakes the most exquisite bread in the US, using a wood-fired oven that she tends with her own two hands. It could also be to learn how she makes her bubbly, deep-dish fruit pies or to see the crisp pizzas that are sometimes covered with fresh flowers. It could be something deeper: Tara Jensen has learned to live a simple life, close to the land that feeds her oven. In her first book, she shares her philosophy of simple living and her trove of recipes with others.

A Baker’s Year takes readers month-by-month through the seasons at Smoke Signals for porridge and waffles in winter, crusty bread in spring, pies and pizza in the summer, and celebration cakes for end-of-the-year holidays. Along the way, Tara writes about how to live in a more peaceful world, shares stories from her own life, mourns romances lost, and celebrates the promise of a new relationship.

Illustrated throughout with Tara's photographs and drawings, A Baker’s Year is a true American original destined to be a classic of cookbook shelves.

TARA JENSEN is an artist and baker living a solitary life at Smoke Signals, a wood fired bakery deep in the mountains of Western, North Carolina. Jensen baked her way through her twenties in professional settings around the country, keeping handwritten journals as she went. Baking has now become her personal practice, which she shares with students from around the world in workshops held at her home. When not teaching she spends her days chopping wood, mixing dough and studying the stars.

Categories

• Cooking / Methods / Baking
• Biography & Autobiography / Culinary

Product Details

ISBN: 9781250127389
ISBN-10: 1250127386
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Publication Date: February 13th, 2018
Pages: 208
Language: English

"Poetic , Personal & Profound... A Baker's Year is an eternal and daily reminder to serve things we love in a place we love with those we love .... The name of Jensen's bakery, Smoke Signals, is such a perfect metaphor to help us find and follow that smokey bread crumb trail of good intention and do something delicious with it ...."

—Chris Bianco, James Beard Award winning chef-owner of Pizzeria Bianco and author of Bianco: Pizza, Pasta and Other Foods I Like

"Tara Jensen represents an elusive ideal: the young breadmaker who structures her life around the rhythms of a wood-burning oven, not the demands of a high-volume production facility.... Her dedication shoes in each bread and pie." —Bon Appétit