Jürgen Krauss

Jürgen was born and grew up in a village near Freiburg in the Black Forest. During his childhood he enjoyed playing with the plentiful tools that were around – his grandpas were miners, and his father is a master locksmith. At 12 years old he managed to make a noise on his father’s trombone, and he has been playing ever since, in the town band, in specialist ensembles for renaissance music, and more recently in a community big band. His love of baking started as soon as he could stand, helping his mother when she made Linzer Torte or the many varieties of biscuits for Christmas. His love of science also started early, he sporadically read a children’s encyclopaedia he had been given for Christmas, dipping in and out at random when he had the leisure. Later he also had a chemistry set, and Physics seemed to come to him naturally at school. After Abitur and military service, he studied Physics in Freiburg. He re-oriented and for a while split his time between early music gigs and kitchen fitting, before settling into IT and computer programming around 1999. His musical development brought me in contact with The Feldenkrais Method (body work), which he studied, and he graduated as a practitioner in 2002. The Feldenkrais Method brought him to a course in Lewes, where he met his wife, and he moved to Brighton soon after, where he lives with his wife and son. Jürgen works as a database administrator and analyst programmer for a job agency. Apart from baking and music Jürgen enjoys outdoor activities (hiking, running, swimming), engineering, architecture, and anything that tickles his interest. Jürgen started making bread in earnest from about 2010, when he was longing for German style bread, and it is his strongest baking skill. Making bread has taught him to work systematically and with precision, and he used this successfully in the Great British Bake Off. He also applied his sense for flavour combinations, architecture, and engineering to create his memorable bakes.