It was dark at night when they awoke, and Hansel comforted Gretel and said, "Wait, when the moon comes up I will be able to see the crumbs of bread that I scattered, and they will show us the way back home."

–”Hansel and Gretel” Translated by D. L. Ashliman

Welcome to BreadCrumbs.

I’m Graison Gill. I’ve been baking, milling, and sharing my passion for bread around the world for sixteen years. My work has been featured on the cover of Food&Wine, Forbes, British Vogue, The Southern Foodways Alliance, and The Wall Street Journal. I founded Bellegarde Bakery in New Orleans in 2011 and in 2020 I was a finalist for a James Beard award as the best baker in the country. These days I teach, write, and consult on bakeries both large and small.

I love bread because of its alchemy. When we take three of the earth’s most elemental ingredients—flour, water, salt—and combine them with our hands we make make more than bread. We create stories. And the bread we make becomes the story we tell about ourselves: flour is its alphabet, memory its grammar, and how we leaven the dough is the plot.

Sometimes in life, we get lost in the woods. The woods of fate, the woods of pain, the woods of bewilderment. And when we’re lost, we drop bread crumbs so that we can find our way back home. But what if we never get back home, what if we can’t find our way? What if staying lost is our way of being found?

In my life I have found that food permits us to answer questions–about other people, other places–that we are too afraid to ask about ourselves. So BreadCrumbs is a series of essays, interviews, and recipes where I explore the bread crumbs we leave along the way: the ones we remember, the ones we forget, the ones someone once told us to look for.

Most of all, it’s stories of the world in which we eat and make our daily bread. Because these are the stories which bear witness to the power of food not just to feed, but to nourish those who eat it and those who make it.

Two paths in the woods diverged…and I took the one with bread crumbs.

“Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.”

― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow