Roots and Rising

Baking entered his life almost by accident. “I started baking King Cakes,” he said. “Selling them during the parades of Mardi Gras.” He was 18 or 19 at the time. “That was kind of my transition from cook to baker,” he said. “It was unique to bake fresh bread—fresh iconic bread—because people are used to getting it from the supermarket.”

He earned his accounting degree and worked as a CPA, but baking never stopped. “Every single day I was just going home from work and baking,” he said. “I didn’t have social media. I was just doing it for myself.” In those early years he became obsessed with technique. “I was perfecting croissants and perfecting baguettes,” he said. “That’s what I would do every single day.”

By 2016, Ford had reached a breaking point with accounting. “I was kind of fed up with being an accountant,” he said. “I quit, and I moved to Miami.” There, a friend encouraged him to start a bakery. “He was like, ‘Yo, move here, open a bakery or something.’ And I was like, bet.” Miami became his laboratory. “I started making sourdough like crazy,” he said. “It turned into that obsession.”

At the time, Zach the Baker was one of the few names in town. “He was really the only game in town,” Ford said. “I was really inspired by his work.” Ford began popping up at coffee shops and farmers markets and doing small wholesale runs. He also began documenting his process online. “I started blogging about my bread—my pan de coco, coconut breads, Caribbean Latin American breads with sourdough—and that took off,” he said.

That blog, Artisan Bryan, became the foundation for everything that followed. “It turned into the media career,” he said. “The reason I didn’t open a bakery in Miami is because the media career just kind of skyrocketed.”

He had already spent years in kitchens honing his craft. “I worked at a lot of bakeries along the way,” he said. “I worked at bagel shops. I worked at a Sullivan Street Bakery [wholesale outpost] that opened up down there… I learned a lot at that bakery, a lot about dough mixing and shaping.” He also served as head baker for Toscana Divino, an Italian restaurant group with a pizzeria, refining his technical knowledge.