Bread is the mechanism. Connection is the product.
Bread Together makes naturally fermented sourdough by hand, over 36 hours, with organic ingredients and no shortcuts — and uses that process as a reason to bring people together in St. Augustine.
One pot, one table
Dinner most nights was one pot of sauce that had simmered all day, bread to soak it up, whatever vegetables were around, and everyone eating from the same pot. Nobody needed a reason to gather. Food already was the reason.
The nonna and the gnocchi
There was a nonna nearby who made gnocchi by hand from potatoes she had just boiled, moving so fast and sure that a kid could stand and watch, mesmerized, without understanding how her hands never got burned. She noticed him watching once and handed him one.
The doughnut
Misshapen, a little different every time because it was shaped by hand, lowered into oil, finished in sugar, and handed over wrapped in newspaper. Ed spent years afterward trying to find that doughnut again and never could, so eventually he made it himself. That is where Bread Together’s doughnuts come from. Not a menu idea. A memory he could not let go of.
That is the whole reason for the classes. Strangers walk in. By the time the bread comes out of the oven, and everyone breaks it together, they are not strangers anymore.
Ed Sheridan · St. Augustine, Florida
242 Shamrock Rd · (904) 556-7466