My Bread magazine launched today
Since I first got excited about bread, I have been dreaming of ways to use that love for bread for creating something worth sharing with the rest of the world. I have dreamed of opening my own bakery (not going to happen any time soon, but never say never). I have bought a bunch of domain names for starting a bread blog (such as BakerDad.com or 365breads.com to name two). But all the time, I wasn't quite sure what my thing should be. Well, I guess you can never be sure...
But today, after working on it since the beginning of January, I am very happy and proud of something I have created, and I'd love you to see it as well.
It's a free magazine on bread—called Bread, quite simply.
The magazine comes in PDF format that you can download to your computer and consists of interviews, stories, and some tips and recipes. Plus photos of beautiful loaves of bread. But mostly, it is about the people who make great bread.
As the magazine unfolds in the next editions, my goal is to dig deep into specific areas of bread making with editions dedicated to topics such as fermentation, flour, heat, and so on—starting from flour in issue number 2.
The first issue, which I published today, is an introduction to the journey, looking at the question of what bread really is all about: what makes it special, and how people fall in love with it. In making the magazine, I have approached this question through stories: I start by telling my own small story, and then move on to interviewing more advanced bakers.
Phil Agnew, a familiar face from The Fresh Loaf, tells about his relationship to bread.
Larry Lowary, a long time baker, is retired from active work but runs a small bakery on his backyard—as a hobby, he says.
And what excites me the most, I even got the chance to interview my baking hero, Richard Bertinet.
In addition to these baker interviews, there is an interview with Chris Young from the Real Bread Campaign and some beginner instructions for baking bread at home.
If this sounds too much like an advertisement, I'm sorry! I will return to normal bread posts next time... :) But I'm very excited about this today, and it's free... So, take a look!
Comments
I'm still reading but so far this is a great read. I love pictures that I am assuming are from Senegal. Great job.
Aytab
Hi Aytab,
Yeah, there are indeed two photos from Senegal in the magazine, on pages 4 and 5. Unfortunately, neither is from the very town of Fatick I tell about in my story... I couldn't find any bread photos from my family photo albums. But they are both from the correct country, so I guess it's close enough :)
I hope you'll enjoy the rest of the magazine as well!
Jarkko
I love the wide layout and your use of large photos. I shall start reading it now.
Happy new subscriber here . . . . Your magazine has a beautiful look to it and immediately draws the reader into the art and soul of bread. And an article about TFL's own PiPs (Phil Agnew) is a special added bonus! I love the way it's laid out and am looking forward to reading it "cover to cover."
I wish you much good fortune!
Janie
Hi Jarkko,
Nice work. Congrats!
-Floyd
A lovely magazine jarkkolaine,
Thank you so much for making this available in this way; very generous indeed
Best wishes to you
Andy
on your new venture. You put together a very interesting first issue. -Varda
That's an impressive and interesting magazine. Nice to have an article about PiPs; I wish I was one of his neighbours!
Thanks you for the result of what must be a lot of work. I look forward to further editions.
Patsy
but I can't find a privacy policy on the web page, and I don't like providing my email address without one. Did I miss the link?
Thanks for pointing this out! I forgot this completely, but I will find time to write one today.
Anyway, if you subscribe on the list, I will send you a notification every time a new magazine is published and possibly an occasional email when I create something that I believe to be useful for the readers of BREAD. These additional emails should be more like an exception—I don't have any other mails planned than the notifications at the moment. In all, I don't think you'll get more than one mail per month from the list.
Also, at the end of each email message, there will be an unsubscribe link, so if you decide you want to take your email off the list, just click it and that's it. I won't send anything to people who tell me they no longer want my messages.
So, I think this should be one of the safe lists to be on :)
Hi, I went on your website today and subscribed and I still have not received an e-mail to confirm. I went on and did it a second time and still have not gotten anything. Not sure. Would love to see both your first and your second one.
Thanks, Peggy
Hi, you can ignore my previous e-mail, I went back on and tried my other e-mail address and it worked and I received an e-mail to confirm my subscription. Not sure why it would not take my other e-mail, I even checked to make sure I filled it in correctly. Oh, but I got the magazine, thanks, Peggy
Hi Peggy,
Good to hear that you got the subscription working. I hope you'll enjoy the magazine :)
Cheers,
Jarkko
I was going to ask the same question as dsadowsk. Looks like a really fabulous magazine and I'm grateful you share it with us, but I'd like to read Terms & Conditions (especially if it's possible to unsubscribe it if needed) and privacy policy, if you don't mind. Thank you.
Upon subscription, they send an email with the pdf file link and a big "unsubscribe here" button.
Thanks for the reply and clarification, Eternal Grain. :) Just out of pure curiosity, can I please ask you how you cover the cost of publishing such a wonderful magazine, like travelling expenses to go somewhere to report about it or some gratitude for professional bakers for their interviews/articles? Or do they do it free in exchange for the publicity opportunity they can get by being featured in your magazine? Sorry for being so inquisitive with nitty-gritty questions, but my (old) background in financial sector is itching to find out how a dream-come-true magazine for bread geeks can be created. ;)
Hi Lumos,
Of course you can ask! These are the very questions I'm trying to figure out while working on the magazine.
The short answer is that people have been amazingly generous with their time and talents. Every baker I asked for an interview said yes, spent a couple of hours of their precious time, and did all of this for free. Every photographer I contacted let me use their photos for free (even though I did offer to pay...). So, in the end, I have spent very little money (but a lot of time :)) on the project: I bought a couple of fonts, the software for creating the pdf layout, web hosting and the domain. I think that's it. As I publish the magazine online, there is no printing involved and the distribution costs are low.
There will probably be some more costs as I make the future magazines, as I would love to do some articles where I actually visit the person I'm interviewing... but I don't have a big budget for this yet, so I have to scale things down for the time being. In the long term, I have some ideas on how to make Insanely Interested as a whole a profitable business that can support the magazine and make it even better... How it will work out, time will tell. :)
I hope I answered your question somewhat adequately. Great question!
Thank you for sharing the behind-the-scene info so generously. It's really lovely to hear those bakers and photographers are so generous in their contribution to your magazine. Presumably it's because they also feel the need for that type of magazine themselves and also they felt you're the right person to do that. Well done, and thank you so much for sharing the fruit of your hard work with us.....and best of luck with the future of your great magazine. :)
Would appreciate the same courtesy. While I could provide a gmail addy set up for questionable sites, it's one I rarely check since it gets a lot of spam and other nonsense. If the magazine is as interesting as it sounds, it would be nice to receive notices of new issues - providing there is a strong privacy policy and ability to remove one's email address from the list.
Thank you for this fascinating read, and your investment into the baking community. What a gift! :)
Marguerite
Thank you, everyone! The response so far has been amazing, and I was smiling through all of yesterday as well as this morning, thinking of your comments. You've made my day :)
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Also, although I already replied to dsadowsk's comment about the privacy policy, I'll say it again here so everyone will notice the answer. I'll add a privacy policy on the page, but before I have the time to do that, I want to reassure you that this magazine is not about spamming you. I run the list using a reliable mailing list system (MailChimp) that doesn't sell the email addresses or do anything fishy with them. And I'm not planning to anything like that either. :)
I collect the email addresses so that I can send you a link to the next editions as they come out. And there is a visible "unsubscribe from list" link at the footer of every message sent through the list, so if you no longer want to receive the magazine, all you have to do is to click on the link and you won't hear from me again.
I hope this clarifies the questions about privacy. Let me know if I left something unanswered.
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And again, thank you, everyone!
Thank you for your well written and interesting magazine. For all of us bread and baking enthusiasts I don't think we could have asked for anything more!
Great job.
Jarkko, I'd like to share this with my friends on Facebook but don't see a Facebook "share" icon, or Twitter, etc. Do you plan to add those to the insanelyinterested.com site? I could copy and paste the site address but don't know if that would be the most impressive way to go about it.
Thank you! Janie
Hi Janie,
I'm happy you want to share the magazine with your friends! Adding Twitter/Facebook buttons on the page is a good idea. Right now, I'm visiting family, so I'm not sure how soon I'll be able to do that—but I will :) Thanks!
However, if you want to share the work already now, maybe you can just paste the link http://insanelyinterested.com/bread/ to Facebook or Twitter. :)
Jarkko
I should really be commenting to all of your messages individually, but I'll say this to all of you at once: thank you! Your positive feedback gives a great boost for the next issue! :)
Hello Jarkko,
Please accept my belated thanks for the premier issue of your magazine - really well done and wonderful to read.
It's amazing that you've done this - thank you for publishing and sharing the results of your hard work!
:^) breadsong
I'm surprised no-one mentioned this already(!), but there's a new edition of this out. It is all about flour, and is wonderful.
JJ
*edit* maybe people won't see this, didn't realise it was your blog page... I might repost it in the forum section :D
Only discovered bread magazine today, in 2022... and it unfortunately stopped in 2020.
Such lovely articles still available on the web. Thank you for creating the magazine, Jarkko.