A self-taught baker makes beautiful loaves of bread that are practically works of art

"Everyone can dip in and make their bread pretty and have it as part of their life on a regular basis," she said. "For me, it just started with how fun it is to create something pretty, but it's this pretty thing that can also be torn apart and eaten and create nourishment for people. You've got this canvas and you just kind of rip into it, which is cool."

"It's really more of an everyday art," she added. "Not in a gallery, but in your kitchen."

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If you can't obtain a lame at the moment, there are ways to get creative with a coffee stirrer or a shish kebab skewer.

"You need to be able to slide a double-edged razor or something flat and long, and you can use just that to score," she said. "All you need is a razor blade, and maybe a pair of scissors."

Page said there are also plenty of great resources online for beginning sourdough (she recommends Foolproof Baking, Alchemy Bread, Northwest Sourdough, or The Clever Carrot).

"And if you're starting straight out of the gate with sourdough, take it easy," she said. "And cut yourself some slack."

"Starting with commercial yeast is best, that's what I did," she said. "Simple no-knead recipes help you get a sense of the stages of bread-making — that idea of a first rise and bulk fermentation and a second rise."

"You're finding something on your bucket list that's doable at home," she said. "It's not just learning one recipe and finally making that soup you wanted to make, it's a skill."

"And if you're baking at home for your family, you're wanting to do something that can nourish them. Bread is something that you would buy normally that you want to learn how to make, so I think that's part of it."

"It's going to be really interesting to see what happens in the wake of this and as we come through this together as a society," she said.

"Do we end up with a whole new generation of bread bakers? That would really be something."

"It's different from bringing a plate of brownies," she said. "Most people aren't bringing fresh bread, so it's something kind of unique to offer your friends and family that feels really nourishing."

"If someone's having a really hard month at work I'm always like, 'You're getting a bread.'"

"I like bringing bread to students, and they're one of the most appreciative bunches. I always make jokes that they're a pack of ravenous wolves. I turn around and it's just crumbs," she said. "They help me experiment and give me feedback."

"Baking for the community is really fun too," Page added. "We used to bring it down to our local brewery. I give them some bread, we get some beer. Trading fermentation for fermentation."

"With sourdough, you have to be near it and waiting, you have to be watching that dough," she said. "Early on, I'd check on my dough in the middle of the night. It will kind of take over your mind because it just becomes this cool thing that you created with your own hands."

"For so long, bread has been the core of the meal for so many cultures and people," she added. "If you have good bread, you pretty much have what you need."

But for Page, baking bread is about far more than posting pretty pictures on social media. It's meditative.

"The process of baking bread is a way for me to decompress," she said. "I'm a very early riser, I almost exclusively do it in the morning when no one else is awake and it's just me. It has become part of my morning ritual."

Page said she would be "very hesitant to lose" the part of bread-making that is "decompressing" for her.

"I've actually never been artistic at all," she said. "I've been quite clumsy at art in my past. My sister is very good at visual art, she's very good at drawing, but I've never been very good at those things.

"It was strange to find something artistic that I felt I was good at."

"It's literally just this is the flour I have, this is the ingredients I have, I'm going to calculate what I can do in my head and I just do it," she said. "I'm not imprecise, I'm not just throwing flour into a bowl, I use a scale. I just don't keep as good a track of what I do."

"It's part of what I like about it, it's kind of riffing," Page added. "The improvisation is something I value about it."

"It's a simple implement with a double-edged razor on the end, which is extremely sharp and I have to be very, very careful with it," Page said. "That is really the tool for any kind of cut on the loaf."

"I also use very sharp kitchen scissors a lot. There's a lot you can do with bread and scissors."

"The truth is, I don't always know where they're coming from when I first start," she said. "A part of what you're figuring out when you're scoring is if your design will bloom well in the oven, or if it will rip apart and not look as pretty. You have to think about it ahead of time, ideally, but a lot of the time I don't go in with a whole lot of plans."

Page said that she looked at books of designs early on to "get the sense of the mechanics," but quickly began riffing on the classic French scoring techniques that she was seeing in the pages.

Now, she often draws inspiration from "the whimsical expressions of what you might see in nature," covering her loaves in gorgeous patterns of leaves and flowers, or creating entire gardens on the crust.

"I don't remember exactly when I started doing the designs, but it was fairly early on," she said. "It was no more than a year in that I began getting interested in what they look like, and not just what they taste like."

"I would find myself doodling the scoring designs on anything. On my planner, on bills, on notebooks. Where I should've been taking notes at faculty meetings, I'd have designs."

Everything changed when, about six months into her baking journey, Page made her own sourdough starter — the fermented yeast dough that allows the sourdough to rise.

"You can be into baking bread, but once you actually make your own starter that you create from scratch and use over and over for the rest of your life, that's when it hits," she said. "Because you're creating this out of nothing, it becomes part of every loaf you make. My starter has microbes that no one else's does. There's people who have starters from the mid-19th century. It's crazy to think that you could keep passing it down and giving it to people."

"Once I made my own starter and figured out how to bake with it, that's when I didn't look back."

Inside the oven was a handwritten version of the no-knead bread recipe by Jim Lahey, the owner of the legendary Sullivan Street Bakery in New York City. The recipe had been shared by The New York Times food writer Mark Bittman in 2006, and quickly took the home-baking world by storm.

Page, who teaches history at a high school in Raleigh, North Carolina, would soon follow.

"That was my first taste of general bread baking, and that was using commercial yeast," she told Insider.