When I was visiting Portugal and Lisbon in 2024, I visited a very small bakery with a coffee shop where they also served breakfast. I had a lovely chat with the owner, who told me that they were baking sourdough and told me a bit about their products.

I don’t remember exactly how I found out that she was from Poland, but somehow I asked her if she might know the Transiting guys. They were my hosts in Copenhagen, where I also had a pop-up.

Evelyn, which was the name of the lady, told me that of course she knew Jan and Monika. So we had a lovely conversation. I had a cardamom bun and some sourdough bread, and when I was leaving Portugal, I thought that maybe one day I was going to have a pop-up in this cute little bakery.

Two years passed, my pop-up mission became clearer, and it got a name: Sourdough Without Borders.

Early this year, I contacted Monka Cafe, which is the name of the place on Instagram, with a question: could I bring Sourdough Without Borders to their place in Lisbon and organize a charity bake for Bake for Ukraine on August 24th, Ukrainian Independence Day?

To my happiness, I quickly received an approval from Evelyn’s partner Arthur, who was in charge of baking at Monka, and so we started planning the pop-up.

The program was pretty similar to what we did during my previous pop-ups. I baked the most famous Ukrainian bread, called Palyanytsya, and also sourdough rolls with cherry and poppy seed filling.

It’s always fascinating to see how recipes can be applied in different baking setups. For example, it was the first time I had a chance to bake Palyanytsya in Rofco ovens, because we mostly bake it in bigger deck ovens. But Rofco worked just fine, and it was a pleasure to be introduced to this beautiful oven that is so popular within the microbaking community.

The day of the pop-up was beautiful and also rainy. All the technical parts went smoothly enough, and so on August 24th at 9:30, we offered 100 pieces of sourdough bread and pastries to the customers of Monka Cafe.

It was a lovely day with lots of nice chats with guests from Portugal, the United States, Canada, France and, of course, Ukraine. I also met some guests of Bloom Bakery who are now living in Portugal, so we had a lovely chat and exchanged some news.

We managed to sell all our products and raised €460 for Bake for Ukraine, which means that our team of baking heroes in the Mykolaiv region will be able to bake 460 loaves of free bread for people in need.

I’m so grateful to Evelyn and Arthur, and to all the guests who supported this fundraising. And many thanks to my friend and collaborator Jana Balažova, who came with me and supported me during the day of preparation and on the day of the pop-up.

The next stop of Sourdough Without Borders is already planned, and it’s going to be something very exciting and absolutely extraordinary.

Stay tuned. I’ll post the poster later this month.