Pide Kamakura micro sourdough bakery

My father moved from Turkey to the Netherlands, where he delivered bread and worked as a baker. He worked such long hours that he sometimes slept at the bakery. He did all of this to give our family a more comfortable life, before he could even speak Dutch.

A few years later he opened his own bakery in Amsterdam. We lived in The Hague, and each evening he called to ask what we wanted. From the background, I always shouted, “Pide!”

It was the bread on our table every morning: big, soft and, if I had my way, covered with extra sesame. The six of us tore pieces from every side and ate it with butter and eggs, sucuk, honey, cheese and olives.

Pide was more than bread. It was how my father cared for us and brought us together.

Years later, I opened a bakery of my own, in a country where I do not speak the language, inside a former police box in Kamakura.

Now I understand the work behind the bread, and the joy my father felt when we finished it so quickly. I feel it too when someone returns the next day, or even later that afternoon, to say they could not stop eating a loaf.

That is why this bakery is called Pide.