The mobile bakery is on the road!

The Bake for Ukraine mobile bakery has been in Mykolaiv on a mission to bake and deliver bread into Kherson. Thanks to the help of amazing partners, we made it happen.

It was a co-ordinated effort by four different NGOs which finally saw the Bake for Ukraine mobile bakery getting on the road to Mykolaiv and baking bread for Kherson. A huge amount of planning had been involved, mostly about logistics and security: we didn’t want to put the bakery in a place which would be too great a risk. In the end we decided on the church in Mykolaiv which I had recently visited along with Bake for Ukraine project manager Sasha Baron. They had a large yard outside which had plenty of space, along with a water supply - and the pastor was incredibly welcoming to the idea of us parking the bakery there. Vlad Malashchenko from Good Bread in Kyiv had agreed to come with a couple of volunteer bakers, his longtime colleague Yuri and American volunteer Andrew Loftesnes, to make the bread on board. An Odesa based charity, Plich-o-Plich, which means ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ would take care of the logistics, flour and more volunteers to distribute the bread to Kherson and Mykolaiv villages. And our amazing friend from Berlin, Karsten Fuhrken, was providing the lorry to tow it. 

This initial four day trip was intended to test out the bakery and see what worked and what didn’t, so that we could put it right for the next time and make sure it would be deployed in the most effective way. 

At first it looked like a case of ‘whatever can go wrong, will go wrong’. The dough mixer which had been working perfectly happily for months, suddenly decided to break down. We had already bought another mixer, so that was hastily installed, and the mobile bakery set off from Odesa a few hours later than planned. It was a slow journey, even with the new brake system, and then at around 9 at night, somewhere on the road to Mykolaiv, Sasha suddenly texted a photo of one of the wheels, which had completely broken. He and the lorry driver set about fitting a new one, but by the time they had finished it was too late to drive onto Mykolaiv before the curfew, so they had to spend the night on the road and get going again in the morning.

The flour has arrived!

A great cheer went up in the church back yard as the lorry rounded the corner, mobile bakery in tow. The guys found a flat bit of land where they could park it, and the Good Bread team put their van alongside, so that there would be an extra space to divide up and proof the dough and cool the bread once it had been baked. As we started cleaning up a hundred racks of baking tins which had kindly been donated by Gails Bakery in London, there were some ominous sounds from the on board generator. For some reason the new mixer kept cutting the power after about 40 seconds, and it wouldn’t keep working without a lot of faffing about turning it on and off again every time. Eventually Sasha managed to find an electrician who turned up with a toolbox and fixed it, very kindly refusing to take any payment. It was all looking up, until suddenly the big metal dough hook snapped in half. Nobody had expected that. Luckily the toolbox man turned up again with a soldering kit, and fixed it back together again. Nobody can accuse Ukrainians of giving up without a fight! 

After some adjustments to the oven temperatures, the bread was finally coming out properly, new batches of dough on the go, loaves pulled out of the ovens and left to cool down on racks. Vlad had decided to add a mix of caramelised onion and seeds to the dough and it all smelled amazing as we worked on, late into the night. By around 9pm there was enough bread to fill two vans, with plans to make the same again the following day. 

Andrew busy making bread

The next morning, with Andrew and Yuri in charge of the next batches of bread, Vlad and a couple of volunteers from Kharkiv who regularly help Good Bread deliver to front line communities, packed the boxes of loaves into two vans and set off towards Kherson. The plan was to take half of it to a place called Chornobaivka, and the rest to Antonivka, which lies just two kilometers across the Dnipro from Russian occupied positions. Several hundred people still live there and not many aid convoys now manage to reach it: it has got so risky that the place is now off limits to foreigners, but Vlad was determined to bring them fresh bread. 

Not far from Kherson city itself, the small town of Chornobaivka has become something of a byword for Russian defeat, after Ukrainians fought off repeated attempts by the occupiers to storm the local airfield.  In the town centre, past a bomb shelter which the LBWS street artists had painted with their trademark cats and the slogan ‘Good Evening, we are from Chornobaivka’, was a boarded up cultural centre, which had been turned into a hub for aid. A lady from the local administration met the team to open up, stacking boxes of bread and some cakes for children inside. So far, so straightforward, although getting into Antonivka was more difficult. The volunteers had met up with a local man who used his house to collect humanitarian aid and redistribute it to residents, and once past the blockpost they didn’t linger, quickly unloading the bread and pausing just long enough for volunteer driver Dima, who always has a smile on his face and seems unfazed by anything, to record a short video for social media to confirm the delivery. On the way back Vlad typed the co-ordinates for Mykolaiv into his sat nav and put his foot down, speeding back as fast as possible. 

Unloading in Chornobaivka

Back in Mykolaiv, work on the mobile bakery was going much more smoothly, with enough bread to fill another couple of vans from Plich-o-Plich, who would distribute it to some villages the following day. After the initial problems with the dough mixer, once it was fixed the next batches were vastly improved: the bread looked fluffy and soft with a golden crust. It had been dark for a couple of hours by the time Yuri pulled the last batch out of the ovens, and Andrew and I waited for it to cool down so that we could pack it into the Good Bread boxes. The test run was finally done, and we piled into Vlad’s car and managed to find a sports bar which was open late and serving food, including an excellent borsch. 

We are incredibly grateful to everyone who helped to make this happen. Maria, Sasha and Lena from Bake for Ukraine who led the initiative and all the essential advice we got from local Kherson friends. To Vlad, Yuri and Andrew for working so hard on board, turning out hundreds of loaves of bread. To Karsten, Alla and her fantastic team at Plich-o-Plich for the financial support, the lorry and essential logistics. To Dima and all the drivers who courageously took the bread into Kherson. And pastor Viktor at the Mykolaiv church for graciously allowing us to stay. We are always thankful to our generous donors, including The Legacy of War Foundation and Postcode Ukraine - and all our supporters who make and buy Ukrainian palyanytsya bread and share the Bake for Ukraine story. Over the summer we plan to put the mobile bakery back in Mykolaiv and deliver fresh bread to Kherson on a regular basis. And there are plans to expand to other regions too, if we get the funds. 

There are times when it all seems too daunting a challenge. Terrible, impossibly distressing things happen in Ukraine every day. But in that spirit of never giving up, the least we can do is show up and keep trying. A meal is not a meal without bread on the table, and we will do our best to help provide it to the people who need it most.