Tara Jensen hosts a monthly pizza night, and every time she’s sure that no one will come, and every time, nearly 100 people show up, finding their way to the town of Marshall, North Carolina, then heading six miles northwest on Route 70 along the French Broad River, winding around the knoll called Walnut, and stopping at the dirt driveway leading to her compound, which consists of an algae-covered pond, a shack in the woods, a brick oven, and two pitched-roof houses, one of which is a bakery that goes by the name of Smoke Signals. People out here are getting by on their passions—but just barely. There are still women in this area who make lace and sing ballads. Fiddle players, weavers, herbalists.
Some of the people who arrive for pizza night live nearby and just walk over the hill to Jensen’s house. Many come from Asheville, 16 miles south. Others drive three or four hours from Georgia or Tennessee. They’re here for the pizza, blackened from the wood-fired oven, misshapen from the slow fermentation of the dough. They’re also here for the sense of community: people sprawled on picnic blankets around an outdoor hearth, drinking six-packs and watching the sun go down. But mostly they’re here for Jensen, a 33-year-old guru for an era in which naturally leavened bread has become something of a religion. To aspiring bakers and established chefs and food geeks and fawning journalists, she represents an elusive ideal: the young breadmaker who structures her life around the rhythms of a wood-burning oven, not the demands of a high-volume production facility. At a moment when “artisanal” has gone the way of cliché, Jensen actually embodies it. Her dedication shows in each bread and pie, which she patterns with intricate handmade stencils and cutout shapes.
Unlike at most other bakeries, gallery-worthy sweets are not Jensen’s goal; they’re the medium. Her aspirations are deeper and, well, a little more abstract. The bakery is a way for her to grow as a person. To share stories. To connect. Through breadmaking, she believes, people can learn to trust their intuition, to accept themselves for who they are. Baking is not the essential truth about Jensen. She’s just here, having an experience.
Jensen wakes up at 5:30 a.m., when the November sky is still black. She makes her way to the kitchen, puts on a kettle for coffee, and reads her horoscopes for the day. Then she replies to the e-mails that have come in during the night. These are her office hours, her primary way of talking with people. Strangers seeking her advice. Amateur bakers who want to make pies with her. Fans who think that Smoke Signals is a regular bakery, with regular hours, where you can drop by and pick up a loaf of sourdough to take home for dinner. Being present in your life is the topic of most of her replies. People build up this mystique around making bread at home, and Jensen gives them a starting point. People are scared to make pie crust, and Jensen tells them to just do it. Don’t be stuck in your mind. She needs to hear that too.
Jensen finishes her e-mails and posts a photo, as she does every morning, to the 90,000 people who follow her Instagram account, @bakerhands. This one is of a table of pies from a recent baking workshop that she led. She knows that a lot of what’s on Instagram is painstakingly curated, but it’s her nature to use it with sincerity—to use it to connect. Some people show a product removed from its context; she wants to show the handprint of the person who made it. On the Internet, she tries to be exactly who she is, and who she is is vulnerable. Several months ago she went through a bad breakup, and since then, there’s been a lot about heartbreak on her feed. A tree changing color: What is love if not a beautiful waste of time well spent? A buttermilk dessert: To make this cake. Fall in love. Let it destroy you. Go in to find your strength. Surrender. Prepare to love again.
But sometimes she has to wonder at the phenomenon of Instagram. Really, what is this? She can post about an upcoming bread workshop and it will sell out that day. She’s part of this world, even though she’s out here in the mountains. It’s how the producer of a documentary called The Grain Divide found her, and then he brought bread god Chad Robertson from San Francisco’s Tartine Bakery out to visit. Holy s**t!
As Jensen gained a following, there have been people who have tried to capitalize on her visibility. She’s received offers to write a cookbook, but none of them felt right. She wants her book to contain stuff about, like, the moon. About astrology and poetry. And people said, Okay, that’s great, but do you have any recipes?
Earlier this week, a restaurateur invited Jensen to see a space in Asheville. That’s not the kind of growth she’s interested in. She doesn’t want to have a retail bakery, with a German-made steam-injection deck oven and perfect white subway tile. She loves her oven—even though it doesn’t lock in as much steam, and so her loaves come out looking all matte and rustic. She wants to have a small farm, where she can grow the vegetables for her pizza nights. She wants to have a school, where bakers of all levels can come together.
That’s why she’s focusing on her workshops, all-day sessions that she holds every other weekend. Each has four to six slots, and they always sell out. The workshops are modeled on her daily practice, which means they include baking and art. Pies in the morning, stamping gift wrap in the afternoon. Forming bread dough, then carving stencils and making patterns with flour. She shares her principles: Observe the process closely. Walk away when something isn’t working. Don’t become attached to the outcome. This weekend, there are people coming from Alabama, Colorado, South Carolina, and New York. A typical mix.
She started Smoke Signals nearly four years ago with $500. She pays all her bills, but she also runs everything on a shoestring and lives humbly. She doesn’t want a closet full of shoes. She’s willing to make sacrifices so that the business can live.
Today is Tuesday: the start of the baking cycle. Jensen walks down the cobblestone path from the side door of her house to the building next door, which is her bakery. It’s a single, plain room—low ceilings, fluorescent lighting—most of which is taken up by two stainless-steel workstations. Before the owner of the property, Jennifer Lapidus, turned this space into a bakery, it used to be a living room. A temperamental walk-in refrigerator divides the kitchen workspace from the front nook that Jensen calls her studio, where she keeps her journals, her art supplies, and her radio.
She turns on NPR; it makes her feel more connected to the outside world. She dips her fingertips into a bowl of water, gauging its temperature, then combines it with flour—a mix from two local mills—and the starter. She squishes it all together until it forms a wet, lumpy blob of bread dough, then divides it among three bins: one for her base sourdough, one for sunflower loaves, and a third for pepper-and-herb. Over that final bin, she pours a stream of olive oil, then dusts the surface with black pepper and the leaves of oregano, thyme, and sage from her garden. She folds the dough into and over itself, incorporating the herbs until they’re just faint specks. The dough is stiff and dense and gets stuck under her fingernails. Jensen measured the flour, water, and starter on a scale, but everything else, she eyeballs. She can only follow the rules to a certain extent.
Jensen has been baking since she was a kid, spending her days with her mom in the kitchen of a house at the end of a dirt road in rural Maine. As a teen, she dreamed of going to art school in New York. She ended up taking classes in feminist theory closer to home at the College of the Atlantic instead, where she developed as an artist, exhibiting Yoko Ono–inspired installations. One day during college, she walked into a bakery in Bar Harbor called Morning Glory, and there were all these punk-rock women wearing black, listening to Patti Smith and mixing dough for scones—whatever she had to do to get into that, she would do it.
She fell into a group of anarchists and moved with them to Montpelier, Vermont, to open a bookstore, where she gave lectures on gender and capitalism. To pay her bills, she started working at Red Hen Baking Co. in nearby Middlesex. That was back in 2003, when people would still bring their CD binders into work. They would bake to dance music on Friday nights. She liked making baguettes, but mostly she was drawn to the sense of family among the bakers. She could connect with people by talking about food.
At some point Jensen started to grow apart from the anarcho-feminist cohort, and she became disillusioned with the art world. At her shows, the conversations weren’t really about what was on the walls. But in baking, there was something real. When you put a piece of bread in someone’s mouth, they have this visceral reaction beyond their control.
She bounced around for a couple years before moving to Asheville and landing her next baking job, at Farm and Sparrow, which occupied the space that is now Smoke Signals. She worked there for three and a half years, learning how to laminate croissant dough, use buckwheat flour in cookies, roll tart crusts. In 2009, Farm and Sparrow moved out; three years later, Jensen decided to lease the space. She moved into the little house and turned the bakery into Smoke Signals. Whenever she enters a new stage of her life, she starts a blank journal. Writing down her goals makes her accountable to them. On one page of the journal that she started in the early days of Smoke Signals, she wrote: Long-term goal: Use my business for social justice, community organizing, and individual empowerment.
Life-Cycle of a Loaf
Jensen began baking bread and pies in the property’s wood-fired oven and selling them at the Asheville City Market every week. She became known for her bread: the intensely nutty flavor from the fresh Carolina Ground flour; the sticky-moist yet featherlight interior; the thick, substantial crust that shatters as you bite into it. But after a year and a half, she knew in her gut that she didn’t want to dedicate her life to increasing production. She had more to offer than commodified products. She wanted to teach. She wanted to host pizza nights. She wanted to use bread as a vehicle—not an end in itself.
Back in the kitchen, Jensen prepares her baskets, lining each with a pale gray cloth to keep the wet dough from seeping out. The three mounds of dough are no longer so tense and firm. After sitting in the cool room for four hours, they’ve slowly inflated with air bubbles, creeping up the sides of the bins and doming at the top. Jensen dusts the cloths with cornmeal and flour. She divides each blob of dough into smaller blobs, folds and pats and rolls and squeezes each one until it looks like a giant empanada, then sets it in a basket, where it will rest overnight. She reaches for the next blob, folds in one side, then the next, pats it into a cylinder, rolls it up, pinches the edges, transfers it to a basket. Then the next. Over and over. Forty-eight times more. Every week the bread will be different, because the weather’s different, or her mood is different. When people come to bake with Jensen for the day, they glimpse her lifestyle. But to really learn? That’s in their hands. It’s about repetition.
By the time the loaves bake the next day, the oven will be on a slow descent from its peak temperature of 800 degrees, and the heat trapped inside the bricks will shape the shaggy lumps into crackly, crusted loaves. Fifty total. This will be her production for the week. She’ll tuck each still-warm loaf into a hand-stamped bag, pack them into the back of her Subaru, and drive around Madison County, delivering them to an outdoor-gear outfitter in Hot Springs and two stores in Marshall. When she arrives at each stop, there won’t be Cronut-esque lines awaiting her loaves. There will just be a couple feet of empty shelf space among dream catchers or Clif Bars or packs of gum, where she’ll set down a dozen or so of the brown-paper bags. She’s not interested in selling her bread anywhere else. She lives here. She’s part of a history of people who have made bread in this oven, on this knoll, in this town.
Around midday, Jensen covers the bread dough, puts on another kettle, and starts the fire. First with shards of slab wood—by-products from a local sawmill—
which she busts up into kindling, snapping the six-foot lengths across her knee. She arranges the wood in the center of the oven, which was built in 1998 by Alan Scott, the Australian blacksmith who became a legend in the world of wood-fired bread and pizza. Scott saw brick ovens as a way of bringing neighbors in rural areas together—building the ovens was like a barn-raising. He constructed this one for Lapidus, the owner of the Smoke Signals property, who had the idea to convert one of the houses into a bakery. Jensen thinks of herself more as a steward of the oven than the controller of it.
She lights a crumpled piece of newsprint tucked among the wood, and the kindling takes hold. She listens to the sticks pop as the flame catches. The fire should roll from the floor of the oven, along the walls, then back in on itself. The clean walls should turn black, and then burn themselves clean again. The oven is very much a living thing. The flames wrap under and around the logs as the wood breaks down into glowing orange-red embers. The chimney sputters until the oven reaches 250 degrees, and then there is no more smoke, just a different texture in the air above the oven: wavy and pulsating. By the time Jensen wakes up, the oven will be nearly 800 degrees and just a bed of coals will be left. She likes these evenings, when the fire burns and the dough rests. She sleeps differently then.
How a Pie Gets Made
With the oven temperature climbing, Jensen goes back inside the bakery to make pie. In a small tabletop mill, two granite stones crush a few handfuls of soft winter wheat berries. She runs her fingers through the golden flour. Its flavor is just different. More present. The body recognizes this as food. Jensen separates out some of the larger pieces through a tiny sifter, tap-tap-tapping it against her palm like a tambourine as the fine powder drifts into the bowl below. She cubes the butter and smears each tiny square between her fingers as she adds it to the flour. It’s her way of keeping it alive.
Jensen has no interest in the myth of the tortured creative person. The lone genius. The baker who’s going mad. That does a disservice to the hard work that creativity requires. In a craft as ancient and elemental as breadmaking, there are only going to be so many innovations. The stencils that she uses to decorate her breads and pies? They’ve been around for ages; you had to be able to identify your bread in a communal oven. Freshly milled grains? Not a new idea. When people make pie designs that look like hers? Oh, she thinks that’s nice. That just means they’re interested in being creative too. They’ll find their own voices one day.
After the pie dough has rested, Jensen cuts it in half, revealing a million tiny sheets of butter layered into the amber mass. With a thin rolling pin, she coaxes it into a smooth, sprawling circle, pressing down on it with the full weight of her body—yellow tank and Levi’s, brown bangs that graze her eyelids, arms tattooed in graphic symbols, each of which marks some kind of overcoming.
She cores and slices Granny Smiths and Jonagolds and Pink Ladies from a nearby farm, squeezes the juice of a few lemons over the apples, and shakes in some ground ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, sugar, and vanilla extract—none of which she measures. She inverts pie tins onto the thin sheet of dough and traces imperfect circles around them. The dough lifts easily off the surface, and Jensen tucks it into each dish, trimming the edges with kitchen shears. With both hands, she scoops up the apples, piling them high in the dough-lined tins. She tops each mound of apples with another round of dough, crimps and folds and pinches it into place, and brushes it with a wash of beaten eggs and cream.
She gathers up the scraps of pie dough, scrunches them together, and then rolls them out into a level canvas on the steel work surface. Without pausing to plan or sketch, she begins rolling a pizza cutter through the dough, drawing lines and arcs that soon become shapes: simple and elliptic like bay leaves, another that looks like feathers, or maybe a sea creature. With a fork, she gives each shape its own texture: pressing the tines one way and then the next to crosshatch, using the base of the fork to create indentations, drawing the prongs along the dough in a swirl, making dots with the tips. One after the next. Each one the same, each one totally different. Tomorrow she’ll sell the three pies to the Laurel River Store in Marshall for $15 each. It’s not a profit-making venture; it’s part of her practice. She’s bringing something to an area that doesn’t have it. She’s the town baker.
When the pies are baked, she posts again to Instagram. Then, as she does most nights, she walks across the street to her neighbor’s, a woman in her 50s who fosters dogs, and they watch the sun go down from the porch. Before Jensen goes to sleep, she sets her alarm to check on the fire—once at midnight, then 2 a.m.—even though she knows she’ll wake up a few minutes before it buzzes each time. She’ll walk out to the oven in the moonlight in her pajamas, add a log or two to the fire, and make her way back to bed.
That’s it for today. Tomorrow Jensen will wake up at 5:30 a.m., put on a kettle, return her e-mails, and walk over to the bakery. She’ll check on the baskets of dough in the walk-in, then step outside to look at the fire. The oven will read 782 degrees, as it should. She’ll rake out the coals, mop the inside clean, and replace the oven door. Then she’ll wait.