Hanna Pekarchuk: 'Natural-leaven bread is a political stance'
The author of three Kyiv bakeries explains why natural-leaven bread is more than a culinary fad.
Hanna Pekarchuk comes out to meet me at the Petrus baking workshop on Syrets at 4:30 a.m. — the most intense time of her working day. The team of six bakers prepares about 600 loaves of various kinds. 'Modern Ukrainian bread is a political stance,' Hanna says. 'Industrial bread factories feed the country as they fed the Soviet Union: cheaply, quickly, without respect for the product. Natural leaven is the return to the Ukrainian village tradition where bread had meaning.'
Pekarchuk did an internship at San Francisco's Tartine Bakery in 2018, then three months at Mirabelle, Copenhagen. She taught the Kyiv audience to distinguish bread types by flavour and structure, while before her almost everyone thought bread was just bread. By 2026 the team runs the Pekarska Shkola — a non-profit programme training 20 young bakers per year. Graduates work in Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, Dnipro. 'In ten years there will be a hundred small natural-leaven bakeries in Ukraine,' Hanna is confident. 'This is a systemic shift.'
