A Derry baker creates art through bread
By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com
Cheryl Holbert is more than a baker and more than an artist. She creates works of art — mostly landscapes and scenes from nature — from brightly colored bread dough. The result is almost better than a painting or a sculpture, which would have the disadvantage of not making a good sandwich.
Holbert said she started baking professionally in 2014. Before that, she worked as a reporter.
“I worked for museums,” she remembered. “I was a tapestry artist. I ran a program at the Currier Museum for a while, weaving and all of that. I always loved bread; I grew up in a family that loved bread. It was my grandmother who was really the baker. I started baking bread, honestly, because after I moved away from my family in New Jersey I was homesick so I just started baking it at home.”
At the same time, she was also exploring her Jewish roots.
“I was discovering my heritage,” she said, “some roots I wasn’t familiar with and the two just dovetailed where I started baking and being very interested in the bread that my grandmother had made from her Eastern European culture — challah bread [a traditional braided Jewish egg bread]. And I ended up starting a small business, from my home, a homestead food operation, where I started baking bread for the farmers markets. I got a license so I could do it wholesale. And I started baking.”
This, Holbert said, is where her weaving background came in.
“During Covid,” she said, “everyone, including me, started a sourdough starter. Sourdough people started braiding and doing challah braiding. There were a lot of platforms at the time reaching out and looking for bakers with experience making braided beads. I started a relationship with King Arthur, contracting with them as a guest teacher. I began teaching a lot virtually.”
A series of family health emergencies kept Holbert tethered to her home, and creative baking gave her an outlet for her talent, and to support her family.
Holbert uses local and organic ingredients to make her breadscapes.
“I color the bread with food ingredients,” she said, “actual food ingredients. So in my spectrum of the reds to pinks, I use pureed beets. And then I might add beet root powder to make a little more red than a magenta. Yellow is definitely turmeric. I might add olive oil in the dough for that because that’s going to affect what kind of yellow that’s going to be. I love very highly saturated earth colors. I love saturation. I love contrast. And for me, because bread is going to put kind of a brownish hue on everything, I want to get as much color as possible, and this is the route I need to take to get that.”
Holbert usually tints her doughs before baking a breadscape, she said. “The colors will retain, if not brighten, the interior. When it’s on the exterior, you have to do some things to retain as much color as possible because it’s going to turn brown, but you can do certain things to control that a little bit. And then I have painted more on the surface design with [ingredients] like chocolate powder or espresso to create designs. You have to be intentional about what you think, where it’s going to land in the final piece.”
“It really has to do with the years of really having a passion about and developing a growing and evolving understanding of how all the natural elements work,” she said. “For me, that creates the art I want with this.”
Nomad Bakery
Cheryl Holbert’s bread is available weekly at Benedikt Dairy (97 Shirley Hill Road, Goffstown, 801-7056, benediktdairy.com), on the menu at The Grind Cafe (5 W. Broadway, Derry, 260-2411, facebook.com/thegrindnh), on selected dates at the Derry Homegrown Farm & Artisan Market (1 W. Broadway, Derry, 479-5918, derryhomegrown.org) on Wednesdays, June through September. She also accepts commissions through her Facebook page, facebook.com/NomadBakery.
