“I love baking bread. It’s a challenge. It’s fun!” Gary Gardner, proud owner of Artisan Brick Oven in LaGrange, is all smiles. He should be. After 25 years of sea time in the merchant marine, Gary has found something he truly loves. Baking about 350 loaves a week, he is a small part of the minirevolution taking place as Americans become more concerned about where their food comes from.

Go into any specialty food store or farmers market and chances are you will find at least one purveyor of home-baked bread. Most started in their own kitchen ovens and grew from there. Gardner’s bread is baked in a self-built brick oven that weighs in excess of 5 tons. The oven is housed in a charming, rustic addition to his house that he also constructed himself.

When pressed about the origins of the oven, Gardner admits that he bought a book with plans in it and “went by the book to a point.” After that, he says, “the Lord helped me.” In business for only six months, Artisan Brick Oven is delivering close to 20 types of bread, including a sourdough, to eight stores and hopes to add more soon. Gardner hopes to add a difficult whole-wheat sourdough to his repertoire. Unlike most small bakeries, Artisan Brick Oven has 10 chairs around a long table for in-house Saturday pizza feasts. The brick oven can bake a large pizza at 730 F in five to seven minutes.

Donna Mionis of Levant has six children and “always baked bread.” She started as a preteenager, using the oven of her parents’ wood-fired cookstove. When her husband’s employer was being sold, they thought it was time for a change for both of them. They expected it would take a year for him to “ease out” of his old job and join her in the new enterprise. It took only 41/2 months. Now Mionis’ business, known as Donna’s Daily Bread, is baking about 1,000 loaves a week, which are sold in specialty shops, two restaurants and at farmers markets in the area.

The bread is baked at home in two commercial convection ovens now housed in what was formerly a “mother-in-law apartment.” Daily Bread now produces about 30 different breads from one basic recipe. Instead of sugar, organic evaporated cane juice is used as a sweetener. Mionis doesn’t “mess with sourdough.” Pointing out that the starter needs to be refrigerated between uses, she says that “running four refrigerators between the family and the business is enough.”

Bread is ubiquitous. Most of us take it for granted. Our grandmothers or great-grandmothers may have baked it every day. Then came the overwhelmingly popular store-bought bread. It was usually white and beaten full of air. It was the new thing. For the overburdened woman in the 1930s kitchen, it was a way to save time.

As people read more about tainted food, including E. coli-ridden hamburger, bad spinach or adulterated pet food, many are more concerned about the origins of ingredients. There’s no doubt that recent headlines have given a boost to both the organic community and homegrown food products in general.

Where growing wheat is concerned, who knew there was precedent in the state of Maine? In the early years of the 19th century, before the Erie Canal opened in 1825, Maine was considered the country’s breadbasket for its grain production. The opening of the 340-mile-long canal made Western grain cheaper than local grain and shifted the preponderance of production to the West.

Unfortunately, when considering something as basic as flour, there isn’t enough organic wheat produced to allow its use by the truly big bread producers in the country. For the uninitiated, organic products are more expensive because they are more labor-intensive. You can’t just plow up a field, throw on some chemical fertilizer and chemical weed control and plant wheat. Matt Williams of Aurora Mills in Linneus knows all too well.

Retired from the Cooperative Extension Service, Williams is growing nearly 100 acres of organic grains including wheat and oats. Maintaining organic certification may entail plowing a field twice, using twice as much seed as a conventional planting, cultivating a field with the tractor and finger weeder and, of course, using no chemical fertilizer or weed control. In spite of the difficulties, he is working hard to encourage a thriving organic grain-growing industry in Maine.

Williams has been stone-grinding his own grain for the past five or six years on a mill with 20-inch stones. He has built grain storage on his farm. “If you are going to have an industry, you have to be able to store your product,” he says. To be viable, you need two years’ supply of grain in storage. Of his storage, Williams added, “From my work in Extension, I knew infrastructure was a problem. There was nobody else to do it, so I stepped in.”

He is working on introducing a hard bread wheat, a winter wheat “that tastes so much better than spring wheat.” Much of Williams’ current production goes to Borealis Breads with bakeries in Waldoboro, Wells and Portland. His oats go to Grandy Oats, a granola maker in Brownfield.

Not all organic flour milled in Maine comes from local grain. With only about 150 acres of organic wheat grown in Maine, millers and purveyors of organic flour and other grain products must look elsewhere.

That is exactly what Allen Ginsberg of Fiddler’s Green Farm in Belfast has done. Using Canadian grain, which Ginsberg claims is subject to higher organic certification standards than grain from the U.S., Fiddler’s Green stone-grinds three varieties of wheat flour as well as cornmeal and several other grain flours.

He adds that Aroostook grain is “getting better every year, but so much is beyond the growers’ control,” such as pests and weather. All of Fiddler’s Green flour is milled to order, giving the consumer the freshest product, an important consideration for the serious bread baker.

The serious baker is not using one of those bread machines that everyone had to have a few years ago and still may be taking up space on a kitchen counter. We are talking about the person who is willing to start the bread the day before baking with a yeast-flour-water preferment. We may be identifying someone who has replaced the bread machine with a home flour mill that doesn’t occupy any more counter space. You can get a hand-cranked one at Johnny’s Selected Seeds for around $60 or a nifty electric mill for $200 and up.

The serious baker, or someone who fantasizes about becoming one, is someone who would like to attend the Kneading Conference in Skowhegan on Friday and Saturday, Aug. 3-4. There are lectures and workshops on those days, preconference field sessions on Thursday, and a tour, discussion and postconference sourdough bread baking demonstration at the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association farm in Unity on Sunday morning.

Lecturers include Jim Amaral of Borealis Breads speaking about bringing Maine wheat back into food production. Pat Manley will teach about designing and building wood-fired bread and pizza ovens. On Saturday, Matt Williams will discuss milling Maine-grown grains.

Friday night’s keynote speaker is Stephen Lanzalotta, author of “The Diet Code,” master woodworker, painter, musician and baker.

Workshops will cover a wide variety of topics at sites around central Maine. The following is only a sampling. Dusty Dowse will talk Thursday about heat management of wood-fired ovens and baking in multiple batches at his farm in Cambridge. On Friday, he will lead a workshop on pizza baking at the same spot.

Michael Romanyshyn of the Temple Stream Puppet Theater will doff his acting hat on Thursday morning and lead a session in Temple during which he shows how to build an oven from 400 bricks in a half-hour. He will build it and then bake in it. For the unbelieving, he says he has done it before.

Also on Friday in Skowhegan, Jim Amaral will lead a workshop discussing baking bread with different varieties of wheat. Tim Gosnell, production manager at Standard Baking Co. in Portland, will lead a workshop that covers baking whole-wheat sourdough bread.

For information about the Kneading Conference, call Heart of Maine RC&D at 947-6622, ext. 5, or go to www.heartofmaine.org and click on the appropriate icon. There is a charge of $300 for the entire conference, but the serious baker will know that this is a small price to pay for a lifetime learning experience as well as the chance to meet some really fascinating people. Besides, maybe you can pay for part of the tuition by putting that old bread machine that has been gathering dust on the counter in a yard sale.