Almost five years ago I moved to Austin, Texas, and started missing my home a lot.. as well as good bread from my favorite bakery.

It was so difficult for me to find something up to my taste in local stores that I decided to try to bake some bread myself, to feel this wonderful smell and crust of freshly baked bread at home. So that's how I started this baking adventure more than 4 years ago and still keep on falling in love with it over and over again.

I'm in the process of learning all the time, I try different courses, read lots of bread baking books and step by step try to create an understanding of how to handle the dough in the right way in order to get tasty and fluffy loaves.

For sure at first I made lots of mistakes and couldn't understand what went wrong, that's why I decided to start an Instagram blog @patbread_atx as my baking journal, to organize somehow all the information I got and to share some tricks and tips with other home bakers who also were in search of their perfect bread.

I was inspired by photos of beautiful open crumbs of artisan breads on the Instagram and wanted to get the same beautiful loaves. So I started baking a lot, sometimes dancing of joy, sometimes crying and throwing everything away. But I'm still in love with this beautiful process of working with dough, all the techniques, I can watch people working with flour, dough for hours. Maybe for someone it's silly, but for me all the steps starting from beautiful bubbly sourdough starters and then dough mixing, laminations, shaping, scoring and etc - I find all these steps looking really sexy and beautiful. It's something unique for me - this magical transformation of grain - water - salt into beautiful and tasty loaves of bread.

I really appreciate that you are here on my website and hope that I can be helpful to you with my recipes and baking tips or maybe will inspire you to bake your first loaf of bread.