Birch Creek Bakery
"My favorite is the organic whole grain stone milled sourdough bread, a densely packed bread, weighing nearly 2 pounds, twice as heavy as most loaves."
Birch Creek Bakery, owned by Sasha and Mike Symon, first appeared at the Oxford Farmers Market on a dark and cold January morning in 2024, when only the most intrepid of shoppers and vendors were there. Sasha and Mike have quickly become fixtures at the market, offering artisan bread and pastries. I buy a loaf from them every week.
Sasha and Mike were a “Miami merger” three decades ago. When Mike returned to Oxford from Miami’s Luxembourg campus, he was invited to a party by another student returning from Luxembourg. Also in attendance at the party was the roommate of Mike’s friend, Sasha.
The Symons live in Loveland, where they both hold full-time jobs, and they hadn’t been back to Oxford since graduation. After they took up baking artisan bread and pastries, they started coming every week to the Oxford Farmers Market.
I once asked Sasha how she got started with time-consuming artisan baking. I expected a standard response, such as “I watched my mother bake.” I was surprised when her response was “Rwanda” – a response that clearly needed more elaboration.
Rwanda had been the site of one of history’s most notorious genocide episodes. In a country of less than 7 million inhabitants, between 500,000 and 662,000 perished, and between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped in a period of only 100 days in 1994.
A decade ago, Sasha and Mike decided to take a holiday in Rwanda, a country only one-fourth the size of Ohio, but filled with breathtaking landscapes, including 12,000-foot-high mountains and pristine lakes.
The Symons were aware of Rwanda’s tragic history and they thought that healing would have occurred after 20 years. However, they found it difficult to enjoy the breathtaking scenery because the people they encountered were still traumatized by that part of the country’s history, so they returned home earlier than planned.
Back in the United States, they decided to spend the remainder of their time off work doing something completely different, so they signed up for baking lessons at King Arthur Baking School in Norwich, Vermont.
My favorite is the organic whole grain stone milled sourdough bread, a densely packed bread, weighing nearly 2 pounds, twice as heavy as most loaves. The Symons call it “professor” bread. They also bake “student” bread. Their labels reflect what they say are the preferences of two sets of regular shoppers in our university-dominated town.
Sasha and Mike use certified organic flour from Janie’s Mill in Ashkum, Illinois, where the kernels of wheat are ground into flour on a 3-foot diameter wheel-shaped millstone. This ancient method of milling wheat grinds the whole wheat kernel, whereas modern industrial rollers typically strip away the nutrient-rich outer bran and germ, leaving only the interior endosperm.
Mike has started baking as well. His organic wholewheat bagels are dense and chewy, unlike the “airy” options one often endures with bagels.
During the summer, only Mike comes to Oxford, while Sasha goes to the Montgomery Farmers Market. Montgomery is a busier market, but Sasha likes Oxford better. At Montgomery, most people simply look, whereas Oxford shoppers actually buy bread and converse.
I asked Sasha why she does so much labor-intensive baking after a week of work and then drives to the Oxford Farmers Market early every Saturday morning instead of sleeping in.
Her response: “It’s cool being here in Oxford. I work from home and see no other humans all week (unless you count my husband).” They typically pull an all-nighter on Friday, which I guess also connects them to their days as Miami students.
James Rubenstein is president of the Board of Directors for the Oxford Free Press and professor emeritus of geography at Miami University.
