Mother-daughter duo recreate a frozen Han Solo — entirely out of bread

A mother and daughter in Benicia, Calif., have cooked up a life-size sculpture of Star Wars hero Han Solo — and it’s made entirely out of bread.

The 1.8-metre-tall creation, which Catherine Pervan and her daughter Hannalee named “Pan Solo,” depicts a classic scene from the 1980 film The Empire Strikes Back. Darth Vader had just trapped Harrison Ford’s character in carbonite, and the lovable space scoundrel’s face and hands were contorted in agony.

The breaded Han Solo now stands outside the Pervan family bakery, One House Bakery, frozen once again, in another place and time. It’s the mother-daughter duo’s entry into a local scarecrow contest to see which shop on their street is the best at deterring birds.

But among humans, the reaction to Pan Solo is “just crazy,” says the mother.

“People are going up and touching him and poking at him and sniffing him and trying to figure out what he’s made out of,” Catherine Pervan, 64, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “It’s just been remarkable how curious and interested people are.”

Pan Solo was born into this universe about a month ago, when Pervan roughly traced the shape of her daughter onto a piece of plywood.

“She’s six feet tall, and apparently they’re the same height,” she said. 

They then used “dead dough” — which is a mixture of flour, water and sugar without any commercial leavening or yeast — to mould the shape of the character.

“Bake it for four or five hours ’til it’s literally rock hard, and then start layering and layering and layering upon that because [the bread,] it’s time-consuming, and it’s got a mind of its own,” Pervan said.

“It’s very organic and it’ll crack or it’ll get too big or too small, or come out with weird bubbles.”

The Pervan bakery has a deck oven with ample space across four shelves, which the mother and daughter used to create Pan Solo, piece by piece.

“Sometimes … you pull it out of the oven and you look at what you thought was going to be, like, say, a wrist or an ankle or a leg … and it doesn’t look like anything like that. It’s a tree branch at this point, and you’re like, ‘Hmm, it’s not what I put in the oven, but OK, I’ll try and work with it,'” Pervan said with a laugh. 

Hannalee Pervan, 37, is the head baker and she painstakingly chiseled Harrison Ford’s face into the bread using a store-bought Han Solo mask as a reference point.

“The whole image really is so iconic that we didn’t want to get the face wrong,” the elder Pervan said. “That was the trickiest part because, I mean, I could have just done my husband’s face…. He’s a handsome guy and all, but everyone would look at it and go, ‘Oh man, that’s not Harrison Ford.'”

Asked whether that means she thinks Ford is more handsome than her husband, Pervan said the actor has “got pretty luscious lips.”

Some much-kneaded quality time

For Catherine, her daughter is her boss at work. When they both go home, where they live together, she says she’s in charge because she’s the mom. But the time they spent together creating Pan Solo was something special.

“[It] gives us the opportunity to just hang out and, you know, put some music on and be creative and silly,” she said.

She estimated that they spent about 100 hours over the last month making Pan Solo.

“I told her the other day, ‘This is my favourite time of the day … when we can just do this together.'”