Hello,
I’m sure most of you know who I am but for those of you who only recently started following my journey I want to tell you a bit about myself and why I chose to start this newsletter and how both free and paid contents of it will work.
My name is Ailine and I grew up in a small village next to Berlin close to a lake that was literally the border to Berlin. At the time there was a wall in front of that lake and in front of that wall there were soldiers making sure we stay at our part of the land, the so called GDR, German Democratic Republic commonly known as East Germany.
Most of my childhood and primary school I was literally living behind a wall. Sounds horrible right? Well, to be honest, it never really felt like that when I was little. I saw the wall, but I never really felt behind it. It was always just there and my life was happening next to it. The soldiers were funny guys for the most part and we even ended up playing soccer with them. I could tell endless stories about my life back then and they will mostly be positive ones. The most important part of it all, the part that brings me where I am today is the way food supply worked in those times.
Back then you couldn’t just go into a supermarket and buy however much you want and have a big selection on brands and convenience products. You could buy essentials and for those you often needed stamps so you only buy as much as your family is allowed to. For every product there was one brand and in general there was not much. This lead to people growing and making their own foods and often bartering with others that have other talents. It was a community based on craft and farming and there wasn’t anything I was missing. I learned farming all kinds of vegetables and animals from my father and grandfather and how to prep and cook it from my grandmother. We had it all, 3 kinds of potatoes, asparagus, freshly smoked eel from the canal behind our house and every German vegetable you could think of. I grew up in a culture where everything was made and build with your own hands. My father and grandfather worked as carpenters with their own shop and literally build our whole house including almost all furniture in it. There was always something creative going on and if I wasn’t watching them work in the garden I was in the carpentry or laying on the floor of my grandmother’s sewing room having her mark my shape on a piece of paper. If we weren’t home I was outdoors exploring every inch of forest and fields around our house or the more distant countryside foraging for mushrooms or going to the lakes. I had the best of times and I learned SO MUCH. Not only from my family, but everyone around me. We even had gardening and other crafts in school and the school was a place of community with gatherings every week where people share food and learnings.
Fast forward to the early 2000s and my 20ies. The wall has been gone for over 10 years and from the life we lived back then almost nothing is left. Supermarkets are everywhere and capitalism has fully taken over the East. None of my family or neighbours are growing food anymore and my grandfather sold his carpentry as cheap furniture shops took the last work he had. I’m mostly out partying as the new school system I was dropped into didn’t care much about me and nature anymore and I spend my days trying to find my place in this new plastic world full of possibilities that my parents always wanted to have and I’m still coping to appreciate or see the sense of.
It was in 2004 when I started studying photography when I found myself again and finally something that felt comfortable. I had been working creatively for most of my life and always enjoyed everything visual. I was also a nerd and spend hours coding and building computers with my dad. So with digital photography and photoshop on the horizon I felt drawn to it as it was a combination of craft and science in a way. It was through photography and my urge to show the beauty out there that I found my way back to food. Documenting craft and people and remembering my growing up had me come home and start cooking and spend hours on markets finding produce and getting inspired by it. I even started a food blog and managed to gain a lot of followers very quickly and even won a prize for it. Overwhelmed by it and the time it took off being a photographer I quit the blog after only 3 years and never really looked back. I was still cooking a lot for friends or just myself, I just didn’t want to post about it anymore. I was also never really good at baking and most cakes or breads I made then were ok at best and sourdough was something I knew existed but I neither knew how to make it nor did I have any knowledge about flour, fermentation and gluten. I made a successful ‘No Knead Bread’ once that was very popular in the food blogging world at the time, but that was it.
In 2014 I booked a photo job in Cape Town and the following 3 years I would spend my German winters down there and work as a photographer. In 2017 I made it more permanent and got a lease for a flat and started doing the 50/50 Berlin/Cape Town. It was clear then that Cape Town is my new home and every time I leave I miss it until I come back and instantly feel home. I had lost my connection to Berlin long before I found Cape Town but it was that magical place that really made me aware of it and feel love for a place again. I had a lot of moments where I cried happy tears in the plane when I landed touched by the realisation that this is my home now and it’s 10000km away from that wall that I grew up next to. Since then I’ve been dreaming of making it my forever home, but because of my work as a photographer it was never really possible to stay there all year and the ‘swallow’ life seemed the only way to go about it.
In March 2020 the world came to a hold and life as we knew it changed for everyone. At the time I was in Cape Town and they had one of the hardest lockdowns in the world. You were not allowed to do anything but shop for groceries. There was no online shopping, no non food shopping, no alcohol, no cigarettes and no walking anywhere but in your own home. A friend of mine was living with me for a couple weeks to kill time together, but he decided to take one of the repatriation flights back home and I think it was the day he left that I started Ingrid, my sourdough starter. My grandmothers name seemed only appropriate and she leavened her first bread on April 23rd, 2020. I didn’t even have a scale when I made the dough and used actual cups probably the first (and last) time ever. It wasn’t perfect, but to me it was the best bread I ever made.
From that day I’d spend every breathing moment studying sourdough. I watched probably thousands of videos on youtube, went through hundreds of posts on hundreds of feeds on instagram and tried to get every little piece of knowledge someone had already put out there into my brain. I started a new dough pretty much every day, sometimes two times a day. I was obsessed at the time and I needed it. It gave me purpose and a schedule and because I was secretly sharing the bread with friends and neighbours it was also allowing me to get some social time in. It also brought me back to my childhood and all those hours in the kitchen of my grandmother who made yeast buns for me every week and she always made them with so little yeast that it took forever for them to proof, but they were soooo delicious and I just loved watching her work with dough. I was back behind a wall again that gave me time and space to create and remember what is important to me. With the success on instagram and TikTok and people learning about my bread locally a new career was born and I quickly grew a network of people online and offline that I learned from and got a chance to work with and for.
Instagram gave me a community and connected me to all of you. When I started my feed I really just wanted to vent and share my learnings and mostly collect them for myself. Instagram has always been a diary for me. Good and bad. I’m not good at keeping things in and the moment something happens that excites me, bothers me or inspires me I feel the need to share it. And so I did. I sometimes can’t believe that it’s hundreds of thousands of people out there now that watch me bake and are interested in what I have to say. But you do. I enjoy spending hours of creating content and replying to comments and messages happy for everyone that made their first bread through my help.
This brings us to this newsletter and me finally starting a paid subscription. After 3 years of sharing pretty much everything I know for free and not making any money off it even though I often work 6-8 hours a day on creating content and answering to people’s questions something needed to change. I can’t keep this up anymore without a possibility to earn money with it. Work as a photographer has been slow and even though there are plans ahead to work as a baker I still want to be able to share my learnings and preferably do it with a roof over my head. :)
So this is how it’s gonna work. Every week I’ll post an article about a topic that I felt was popping up more than others. It will be knowledge about flours, where to buy them, how to test them, how to build gluten with them (or not) and dive deeper into the process of making sourdough. I’ll also share weekly recipes. These educational things will be behind a paywall. There will however always be additional notes and personal learnings that I will share with you for free so don’t be shy to subscribe in however way you can.
Thank you and talk to you soon!
Yours Ailine. <3
Well done! So excited for this new chapter!
Such a lovely story!!