Bread-making venture rises in Lewes

As Diane Batchik saws a slice of bread from the freshly baked round loaf resting on a herringbone cutting board, an aroma rises and wafts through her Lewes home.

“This is the bread that started this whole nonsense,” she said.

The loaf that Batchik – a self-described bread geek – refers to is an overnight white recipe created by American chef Ken Forkish. 

What a name for a baker, she smiles as she points to the loaf’s hard crust structure and the crumb’s irregular holes. When making it years ago, her son called it “the bubble bread” because of the air pockets that form during fermentation, and the name stuck.

Most Americans are intimidated at the thought of bread-making, Batchik said, but they shouldn’t be. In fact, humans began baking bread thousands of years ago. Fresh, warm bread is comforting and filling. Almost every culture around the world has some permutation of bread, Batchik said; it is a fundamental food.

Batchik, who once operated a catering company and is now a part-owner of Rehoboth Ale House, has always enjoyed feeding people.

“I look to other things, but bread is such a basic,” she said. “I’ve baked bread for 35 years, and the more I learn, the more I’m fascinated by the chemistry of it.”

Such as how gluten strands form and different protein levels in flour can affect what you’re making, she said. It’s a right brain/left brain activity, in which Batchik can enjoy the science of reacting ingredients and the artistry of creating something tactile.

“It’s nice to be able to touch something you make,” she said. “It’s a weird hobby, but this is one hobby you can actually eat. And, after stressful work stuff, it can be liberating to beat the crap out of dough.”

A former national security professional with the Department of Defense, and CEO and co-founder of a cyber intelligence company, Batchik is now a consultant who sits on multiple corporate and philanthropic boards in the greater D.C. area. 

In 2020, Batchik baked a lot of bread in her Columbia, Md., home as part of a grassroots undertaking to provide food to hungry Howard County residents who lost support during the pandemic. 

By the end of 2021, she found herself in a rut after baking many personal favorites, like the bubble bread, for others. So, she made a unique New Year’s resolution for 2022.

“I gave myself the insane task of making a new bread recipe each week for a year,” she said.

Italian and French loaves, hearty German ryes and dark Lithuanian breads emerged from her ovens, as well as Ukrainian breads, especially at the beginning of Russia's invasion. She tried Finnish, Mexican and Brazilian recipes, breadsticks, ciabatta and pizza, which Batchik considers to be warm bread with cheese.

By the end of 2022, Batchick had made 55 new breads. With more on the to-do list, she’s continued the task into 2023. By mid-June, she’s tackled 26 new recipes so far, well on track to meet her goal again. 

Some breads take just two hours to make, start to finish, while others need four days. Batchik experiments with different grains and buys flour from small, heirloom mills. She orders yeast from King Arthur Baking Company in Vermont, where she has also taken artisanal bread-making classes.

“It is a mecca,” she says of the enterprise founded as Henry Wood & Company in 1790.

To celebrate a milestone birthday this summer, Batchik will spend a few weeks at the San Francisco Baking Institute, where she will take professional-level courses in crafting free-shaped breads without using pans.

As chance would have it, Batchik’s Lewes home originated in 1860 as the Jones Brothers Flour and Grist Mill. In the 1920s, it became a brush factory.

The building was later chopped into multiple apartments, and in 1998, new owners took the structure down to its studs in a years-long renovation that transformed it into a single-family home for the first time.

A couple owners later, she and her husband bought it in 2012 and completed some renovations, including an updated indoor kitchen and an outdoor kitchen with a pizza oven.

“Kitchens are important,” she smiled.

Batchik spends about half her time in Lewes, where she enjoys the beach and walking to nearby restaurants.

“Lewes is a lovely town with lovely people,” she said. “You can get everything you need at Lloyd's. If Lloyd’s doesn’t have it, you really don’t need it.” 

When asked which is her favorite bread, Batchik paused, then said, “That’s like asking who’s your favorite child. I like them all. I like all breads. I love a good, dark Eastern European bread. I love working with dark rye – the darker, the better.”

Or, perhaps, a light ciabatta sliced for sandwiches. “There’s nothing as lovely as that.”

Maybe a Middle Eastern seared bread with herbs, she pondered. “Those are pretty darn spectacular.” 

Batchik prefers savory to sweet, and typically steers away from soft, squishy breads. But for a friend with cancer, she made an airy Filipino bread called pandesal; it was the only thing she ate for days.

“She ate two in one sitting,” Batchik said. “That was the right bread at that moment for her. That was wonderful. That was a wonderful moment.”