Povestea mea · My story
From a wood-fired stove in Transilvania to a kitchen counter in Humble, Texas.
I’ve been shaping bread by hand since I was eight years old. The kitchen has changed twice now — the rest hasn’t.
I grew up in a small village outside Brașov, in a house where the kitchen ran on a wood-fired stove and bread came out of the oven twice a week. My grandmother — bunica — was the household’s baker. She measured flour by the handful and could tell, from across the room, when a dough was ready by the way the light caught its surface.
By the time I was eight, I could shape a country loaf without help. By twelve, I was the one rising at dawn on Saturdays to feed the starter. The recipe was never written down. It didn’t need to be — bunica taught with her hands, and I learned the same way.
“Pâinea cere răbdare,” spunea bunica.
“Bread is patience,” my grandmother used to say. “You cannot rush it. You can only meet it where it is.”
I moved to the United States in my late twenties, and a few years later we settled in Humble, just north of Houston. The kitchen was smaller than the one I grew up in. The stove was electric. The flour was different — softer, whiter, not quite what my hands remembered. For a long time, the bread came out wrong.
It took me a year of weekends to relearn what my hands already knew. I tracked down harder flours, kept a sourdough starter in a jar on the counter, and started baking again — first for my own family, then for friends who came by for coffee, then for the friends-of-friends who heard about the cinnamon bread and the sourdough.
Casa Maria — “Maria’s house” — is what neighbors started calling it, half as a joke, when the requests for bread outgrew my ability to keep track on a sticky note. I bake twice a month from my own kitchen here in Humble, the same way bunica did: a long ferment and an unhurried hand.
I don’t make hundreds of loaves. I make the right number. If you order one, it’s yours. I’ll have it ready on the bake day, wrapped in linen, still warm, waiting at my front door for you to swing by on your way home.
That’s the whole story. The rest is in the bread.
— Maria
Vrei o pâine? · Want to try a loaf?