Racks of freshly baked bread splay before your eye. The options seem endless; honey whole wheat, Kansas crunch, cinnamon chip, French walnut, sourdough rye, and ciabatta. These breads are among the variety of options at two of Lawrence’s local bread makers, Great Harvest Bread Co. and WheatFields Bakery. Try some hand crafted bread from one of these locally owned bakeries and experience a creation of labor and love.

Great Harvest produces tender loaves of a variety of breads. Bob and Jo Ann Garrett have operated Great Harvest Bread Co., 807 Vermont St. for nine years in Lawrence. In the quaint bakery, Bob Garrett explains that they grind their own wheat flour and do not use eggs or oil, which makes their bread-creating process unique.

Great Harvest makes their whole-wheat bread using 100 percent whole-wheat flour. The Food and Drug Administration requires bread that uses the term “whole-wheat” to contain at least 51 percent whole-wheat flour. By using 100 percent whole-wheat flour, Great Harvest’s bread has a high nutritional content, making it a healthier option than other breads. The most popular bread, honey whole wheat, has 0 grams of fat in a slice. Also, the high fiber content in this bread (3 grams per slice) will fill you up faster and help you eat less. Great Harvest’s bread is a healthier option when compared to Pepperidge Farms’ 100 percent Stone Ground Whole Wheat, which has 1 gram of fat and 2 grams of fiber per slice.

Great Harvest’s breads include a decadent cinnamon chip and simple honey whole wheat. Stop in 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday or 7 a.m.to 5 p.m. on Saturday and a baker will cut you a warm chunk of your choice from a selection of freshly baked breads.

Each bakery has its own unique bread-making process. While Great Harvest grinds their own flour, WheatFields gets its organic flour from a mill in Marienthal, Kansas. WheatFields baker Mikey Humphrey says the majority of the town’s population — about 130 — work at the mill.

Similar to Great Harvest, WheatFields, 904 Vermont St., also uses simple ingredients; flour, filtered water, natural leavening and sea salt. WheatFields bread is baked on a 25-metric ton, round, rotating slab of concrete in their wood-fired brick oven, tucked in the southwest corner, just next to the bakery. Humphrey says WheatFields is “as true to the form as it gets” as an Artisan bakery. An Artisan bakery means the bread is made with the simplest of ingredients, without yeast and is baked in a wood-fired oven. The Artisan baker is highly skilled in creating bread throughout the entire process, from mixing the dough, to forming the loaves, to baking the bread itself.

Garrett and Humphrey both have a love for baking, which is evident in how they describe their job and working at 4 a.m. Garrett says his work gives him immediate feedback and describes working with the dough early in the morning as “tactile and sensual.”

At WheatFields, Humphrey beams as he pulls out of the oven a wooden board holding seven loaves of sourdough rye. “Making bread is artistic; it gives you a freedom of creativity,” Humphrey says. He smiles at the 8-foot tall rack of breads he has made throughout the morning and says “Just look at the breads, they’re beautiful.”

Contact writer at: bflorman@kansan.com