Our Vision

My parents are the heart of Kaslo Sourdough: for over twenty years, they have worked together to build our successful business, and in this short article, I provide an overview of where they come from, and how their life experiences shaped their story.

My dad, Silvio, grew up in a small Bavarian town at the foot of the Alps in Germany in the sixties. Growing up in this culturally rich environment, which reaches back to the Roman Empire and Germanic tribes of more than two thousand years ago, left its imprint on him. This  region of Germany has much history in different cuisines, customs, art, and people, and growing up there never left him. As my dad has admitted: “My background and upbringing were most influential and the driving motivation for me to study the sourdough phenomena and creating the Kaslo Sourdough Bakery.” Recently, this has also translated into his inventing the first sourdough pasta.

The opportunity to start the bakery came several years after immigrating to Canada. My dad and my grandparents moved to Kaslo in 1979: a beautiful village nestled between the Selkirk and Purcell mountains. Compared to his hometown in the Alps, it was quite similar, but with a lot more freedom and abundant wildlife, natural wonders and seemingly endless landmass. On a visit back to Germany he fell in love with my mom, and she joined him here in the mid-80’s. Together, they started a family, and my dad was able to follow his passion for naturally fermented foods. In 1991 he baked his first sourdough bread in an outdoor brick oven in the village of Kaslo. For two summers he baked fresh sourdough bread daily. His days started at 3:00am with making the dough and lighting the fire in the outdoor oven. By 10:00am, he had two batches baked and out of the oven: about 70 loaves.

The dough was mixed, divided and kneaded by hand. Each individual loaf was deposited into the oven with an oven peel (long-handled flat bread shovel), and also taken out with it once they were baked. He was disciplined and learned more about sourdough bread every step of the way. The sourdough culture he created back this is still the one we use today.

Sourdough Starter

Over those two summers, his customer base grew and before long Silvio had numerous requests to make his bread available year long. Since he was using an outdoor oven, it restricted him to being able to bake from the beginning of April to the end of September. At that time, my siblings and I were already born, and he and my mom needed a way to make a stable income, so the shift to the bakery seemed the way to go. After discussion and planning with my mom, my dad converted his woodworking shop into what became the start of the year-round Kaslo Sourdough Bakery (KSB).

With the support of my mom, my dad devoted his life to studying natural fermented foods , especially anything and everything to do with sourdough. Fluent in two languages enabled him to study literature from both the Americas and Germany. Over the years, he has written numerous articles for the sourdough bakery website about many different things he has learned (www.microsour.com).

At first his research focused on the quality of the bread, but as his studies progressed he realized the health implications of baking with a sourdough culture. There are a number of unique, positive effects on the digestive system from sourdough breads, and this became apparent from the bakery’s customer’s very quickly:  people with wheat allergies or sensitivities to wheat were able to eat KSB bread and this furthered my dad’s interest into the health aspects of sourdough. The emergence of gluten intolerance is a continual source of concern for my dad, given the importance of wheat for human civilization.

My dad wrote two articles addressing these concerns; if you are interested, you can read “The Gluten Demon” and “Fatal Flaw“.