Aida Yanez Siller

Location: Mexico

Profession: Home Baker

About

After my brother’s MS diagnosis, our whole family’s diet has changed over the years. I began understanding and respecting my health and my body as a mode of living too. Not only that, cooking from scratch from natural ingredients became so much fun and logical, second-nature, creative… an essential part of my every day. I’m an architect, but my favourite hobby is to read about medicine, nutrition, recipes, and bio-hacking is a subject that fascinates me.

I love baking 'alternative' flour breads for my family and friends. I love surprising them with flavors they could've never imaged they could discover from certain ingredients and to bring my breads, desserts and treats to dinners for them to try. What I love most about baking is using ingredients from scratch, all natural and never package/store/ready-bought.

How I use BALM Protocol

In my vision, I seek to take the knowledge I will acquire from the course and create a professional project which is inclusive and celebrates the collectives of female Mexican cooks and other practitioners. Mexican ancestral cooking has always been all about community. I wish to recreate this and teach it to the modern women of Mexico too. As a certified doula and prenatal yoga teacher, I am surrounded by women at a stage in their life where they are more conscious about their own health than ever. The point at which I meet and help these women is precisely when they reawaken into their body’s potential to create life and to regenerate itself. I see myself sharing with them how to also become self-sufficient in their diet while they are pregnant and breastfeeding, and empower them to do that from then on. Making their own bread is an option, but what if I were also able to cater for them (and everyone) indulgent craving and sweet-tooth-satisfying products that are also healthy and nutrient-dense for this stage in their life and that of their young families.

I would love to understand sourdough and breadmaking so much that I am able to experiment and incorporate these types of techniques and my country’s [Mexico] own ancestral ingredients into modern breadmaking. I have also spoken so much about Mexican pan de dulce because what I imagine is pushing to rescue these techniques to create a new balance between Mexican traditional pastry and health.What if my brother were able to eat those pastries he dreams about; what if ANYONE for that matter? And what if our beautiful, colorful bread didn’t have to make us so sick with all its sugar and whatnot?