Nothing was added to bread.

The short answer

When did you last ask how long your bread took?

Almost nobody asks. We ask about calories, about sugar, about protein. Nobody asks about time — and time decides more than any of them.

Sven Mostegl has stood at a baking table since he was eight years old. Almost forty years, with interruptions. Almost twenty-three of them in the desert. He came to Dubai in 2003 as a civil engineer and project manager, and he kept baking at night.

In 2014 he opened Bakers Kitchen with his wife Heike. Today it is three locations trading, a fourth in development, and around thirty-five people on the payroll. Alongside it he develops recipes and processes for other people's bakeries and factories, trains their teams, works with national grain programmes in this region, and writes.

One thing runs through all of it. Flour, water, rock salt, a living culture. And time — up to forty-eight hours of it.

The road here

A machine is not the enemy. A shortcut is.

He was eight when he first stood at the bench. Bäckerei und Konditorei Bernd Mostegl, near Hannover — his father's bakery and pastry shop. Two trades under one roof, and a boy who saw both before he could read.

His father knew both worlds, industry and the old craft, and he handed his son one sentence that still carries everything: the two do not exclude each other. A machine is not an enemy. A shortcut is.

Nine years old

The horse was fed by the gram. The rider was not.

At nine he got on a horse. It lasted until his early twenties: endurance rides, thirty to a hundred and fifty kilometres, across Germany. And there he saw something that never let him go. The riders knew everything about what their horses were fed. Then they sat down and ate whatever was going.

The animal that had to run the distance was nourished. The human who had to deliver the same performance was merely fed.

Sport and nutrition shaped him early. In the 1980s he did further training in sports and nutrition and ran his own gym near Hannover for many years. In the early two-thousands life got in the way — the strongest motive he has ever had. After that he thought about food not only more carefully but more completely, and began to rethink bread from the ground up.

The method

Two hours or forty-eight. Same grain, different food.

A fast process is fast because fermentation is compressed into a couple of hours. The work that time used to do is then handed to additives and technical enzymes. The loaf looks the same. It smells the same. It is not the same thing.

Full fermentation does the opposite. It gives the dough back the time it needs and lets the living culture open up the grain before anyone eats it. This is a difference between two processes, not between two kinds of producer: a craft bakery can cut the time, and a production line can give it.

In front of him stand the jars: flour, water, rock salt, a living culture, and date-yeast water made from local Dubai dates. What stays out is anything meant to replace time or to fake quality. And yeast itself is not the problem; the quantity used to replace time is.

The evidence

What the research shows — and where the evidence stops.

He is a baker, not a physician, and this page keeps that line.

The work

Five things he is engaged for. He does all five himself.

The record · Emirate of Sharjah

Wheat grows in the desert at Mleiha. He proves what it becomes.

No greenhouse, no irrigation fairytale. Open field, over fifty degrees in summer, no chemicals, no pesticides, no artificial fertiliser.

Saba Sanabel — Seven Spikes — is a national food-security programme launched in 2020 under the directives of His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Ruler of Sharjah. This achievement belongs to the Emirates. Not to him.

His part is a craftsman's part: baking and fermentation trials contributed over several years. He does not grow the wheat. He shows what the wheat can do.

Figures: Sharjah24, 15 January 2024 (protein, hectares); BÄKO-Magazin cover story „Mehl aus der Wüste", April 2025 (varieties, temperature, water).

Partners and stages

Where he has worked, and with whom.

Published author

Two books. One on the loaf, one on the whole table.

A third is in progress. It is taking a long time again. That is the method, not a delay.

For press and organisers

One rule before you write.

Please use exactly these terms: Author · Speaker · Consultant (line 1) and Professional Baker · Fermentation & Microbiome Expert (line 2). His name is simply Sven Mostegl.

Contact

One bench.

He is the baker who sells bread and teaches the craft — and who works with bakeries and industry on recipe, process and equipment.