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King Arthur Flour Baker Shares Knowledge And Inspiration in the Dominican Republic

 

January 30, 2006 – Norwich, Vt. – The King Arthur Flour Company of Norwich shared its knowledge and good flours in the

Dominican Republic earlier this month, sending baker Amber Eisler to help teach locals to bake in the clay ovens built for them by Upper Valley volunteers last year. The ovens are hoped to provide a means for home cooking as well as generating income for a largely impoverished community.

“You do little things and the combination of little tiny improvements will eventually make the world a better place,” Eisler said about her trip. Eisler, 25, of Bethel, Vt., has been a baker at King Arthur Flour for about two years, and jumped at the opportunity to pursue two of her passions – working with wood-fired ovens and teaching – while representing her company in service to others.

“It’s so in line with our mission to inspire and educate bakers worldwide,” said Baking Education Center Manager Susan Miller. “There aren’t many opportunities to help people around the world with baking and this just has such an impact on these people’s lives … There’s just nothing bad about the project, really.”

Eisler joined a group of about 10 Vermont and New Hampshire volunteers, including local high school students and accompanied by oven builder Dorise Kowaleski of Ackworth, N.H., for the January 15-22, 2006, trip to Cotui, Dominican Republic. The trip

organizers had contacted King Arthur Flour hoping to recruit a baker for the trip, and Eisler volunteered, bringing eight suitcases

full of King Arthur flour, as well as other basic ingredients, a sourdough starter and some donated containers and hand tools.

Eisler said she and other volunteers showed locals how to bake pizza and breads, but they also placed emphasis on more

traditional baked goods and indigenous ingredients. “The people weren’t going to get behind the idea of the oven unless they

could cook the foods they’d normally eat,” she said, adding that they used fresh, native corn and coconuts to make

cornmeal-and-coconut cake and coconut macaroons.

Eisler said she’d love to travel to the Dominican Republic again in the future “to encourage and promote the use of the clay ovens

to their full potential as an asset to the entire community.” But the project is bigger than that, she said, bringing diverse people together in a fundamental way: “After baking and eating together, somehow the cultural and language differences didn’t seem to matter.”

“I hope we’ll be participating at some level each year,” Miller said.

Founded in 1790, the King Arthur Flour Company has devoted more than two centuries to ensuring the quality of its products and the value of its service. Employee-owned since 1996 in Norwich, Vermont, King Arthur Flour’s fundamental mission is to be an education/product resource for, and inspiration to, bakers worldwide.