Growing up in Bremen, a city in Northern Germany, Heike Meyer loved baking from a young age. "I worked as a teenager in several bakeries," she said. But she never considered becoming a professional baker because of the early morning hours.
After she and her husband, Jens, moved to Vermont in 2008, Meyer managed the Westford Farmers Market. Nobody else in town, including legendary baker Gérard Rubaud, was looking to sell bread there, she recalled, so she stepped in to fill the void.
In 2011, she founded Brot Bakehouse School and Kitchen in Fairfax. Over time, she's moved away from production baking, although Brot sells a limited number of loaves and pastries at Burlington's Onyx Tonics coffee shop on Wednesdays and offers European holiday specialties in season. These days, the focus at Brot is on teaching classes.
Meyer, too, is still learning. At 57, she recently became one of only three American certified bread sommeliers through the National Bakers Academy in Weinheim, Germany. The program, which costs around $8,000 and takes a year to complete, has graduated 279 bread sommeliers thus far. (The academy began the English-language version in 2023, which partially accounts for the low number of American graduates.) This year, Meyer was the only American baker who qualified for the World Championship of Bread Sommeliers, where she'll compete later this month in Düsseldorf, Germany.
"Some grains have notes of honey; some taste like fresh-cut grass on a summer day." - Heike Meyer
Seven Days chatted with Meyer about what her new title means, the point of blind-tasting bread and what loaf she'd choose if she could only make one kind for the rest of her life.
The bread sommelier certification is restricted to high-level professional bakers. But, at least in the U.S., restaurant bakers don't typically emerge from the kitchen to talk about their goods with customers, and you don't run a retail bread shop. How do you share what you've learned?
A bread sommelier is like an ambassador for bread culture. There are breads in Asia and Africa that [many Americans have] never heard about. The culture is vast, and there's so much to discover, so it's so fun to educate people.
We get really creative in our classes, and [students] get super into it. People are getting more curious. What can we do with discard [sourdough starter]? Do we have to throw it out, or can we bake with it? Fermentation brings immense possibilities for bakers to play around with. It's a bit of a trend to talk about ancient grains. Nobody knew what quinoa was 20 years ago.
In my studying over the past year, I've learned that refined flour loses almost two-thirds of its nutrient content. We're throwing away the best part of a food item that can nourish us completely.
You include a bread tasting in all of your classes. What can a person learn by blind-tasting bread?
Every day I blind-taste different breads and whatever we [make] with grains. After a while, your senses expand to totally new dimensions.
You generally taste in bread a lot of nutty notes, although some taste more sweet — like spelt, for example — and some taste more earthy, like rye. Some grains have notes of honey; some taste like fresh-cut grass on a summer day.
The next step is how to pair [breads] with different foods. The other day we had a spelt tasting. We tried super-funky [pairings] and super-classic ones. The verdict came out that the mild, sort of sweet notes of whole-grain spelt bread were really good with bitter orange marmalade and coconut cream whipped up and slightly sweetened with honey.
We made a tahini spread with black tahini and then sprinkled maple syrup and kosher salt, and it was a complete flavor explosion in your mouth. These two were our favorites with the spelt.
You can easily think, How can I enhance [the flavors of the bread], or how do I contrast them? That's why cheese is a perfect pairing with bread, and everybody knows that intuitively. Cheese has rich, earthy flavors that complement the grains.
It gets really fun when you play around at home [after taking a class]. Some people write to me and say they tried things like smoked tofu and pickled mushrooms. Once you get more creative with bread, you see it in a really different light.
If you could only bake one loaf forever, what would it be?
I wonder if for everybody that would be "the bread of my childhood"? [In] Northern Germany [we ate] really dense rye bread loaded with seeds and nuts — the kind of breads you need to chew for three minutes. The flavors of the grains are so intense that you don't need anything on it.
You can leave me out in a cave somewhere in the mountains with that [bread], and I'll be happy living there. I'm picturing a cave around Mount Mansfield. Is there a cave out there?
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
The original print version of this article was headlined "Knead to Know | Three questions for bread sommelier and baking instructor Heike Meyer of Fairfax's Brot Bakehouse"