It's a wet and wild morning, and I'm grateful I won't have to bike far with a loaded trailer or set up a tent outside in defiance of the weather. Inside the Market Depot it's cozy and bright, even on the grayest days. This is a good day to spend indoors with a pot of soup simmering on the stove and the weather beating at the windows. Even better if you take a long walk or two in the rain for contrast so that when you step back into your warm home and out of your boots and foul weather gear you feel a bubbling of gratitude, with perhaps just a fizz of smug satisfaction, to have it so good. For you at the market today I have a smorgasbord of rye: Mountain, Smoky Vollkornbrot, and a Normandy-inspired loaf made with hard cider. Also on the table: Red & White, gingerbread, apple cake (with a touch of rye), scones, malted chocolate chip, bittersweet, and brown butter shortbread cookies, and a new batch of granola for all who missed it last week.
Time to suit up and ride out into this fine morning. See you soon. Sophie The gluten is back! After weeks of struggling with disastrously weak flour, I learned that I'd been working with wheat from a western Washington farm. We're now back on track with hard red wheat from Williams Hudson Bay Farm in Walla Walla, and oh, the extensiblity! The elasticity! It feels so good! We are now, officially, in the best baking season, the months when food traditions give us a smorgasbord of holiday treats, and the cold fuels our hunger for butter and flour. This is the last day to place your Thanksgiving order online or in person at the market. I'm selling Seriously Gingerbread and Caramel & Kabocha Pie by the slice today; if you can't decide which you want, come try both! Also on today's market menu: Red & White, Roasted Pumpkin, Mountain Rye, and Smoky Vollkornbrot. Also French Apple Cake, Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies, Brown Butter Shortbread, and Sourdough Buckwheat Scones. The usual.
Dear Bread Eaters: It's time to SIGN UP for your winter bread subscription! This is a Community Supported Bread program rather like a farm CSA, but instead of vegetables you get a loaf of bread every week for ten weeks. You can pick up your bread downtown or in Fairhaven, every Wednesdays, January 18 - March 22. Exact pickup locations TBD. There are three share types:
So, sign up! Tell your friends and coworkers to sign up. Share the CSB with your social media networks. And, please, send me your promotional tips and insights, if you have any, because you know I have yet to master the art of hustling, and I need a critical mass of subscribers to make this work. In summary: What: 10 week bread subscription When: Jan 18 - March 22 Where: pick up every Wednesday downtown or in Fairhaven (specific pickup sites TBD) Why: So you can eat wonderful, organic, whole grain, sourdough bread during the dark winter months, and to support your favorite local baker. Thank you! Your enthusiasm and support keep my crazy dreams of wild fermentation alive. Sophie p.s. It's not too late to order your pies and rosemary rolls for Thanksgiving! I practiced all my favorite forms of escapism--eating, reading, and work--this week to an almost manic degree. Tuesday night through Wednesday morning I stress ate most of a loaf of bread and half a stick of butter. It stopped being fun around the fourth slice, but I plowed on as I dragged myself from one news site to the next.
Then I went to bed with a book, only emerging to make trips to the library. I reread, for the tenth or hundredth time, three childhood favorites, justifying my escape into their dog-eared pages with a virtuous stack of library books (untouched) on sustainable business and economics. When I finally emerged from my cocoon of girl warriors and tangled sheets, glassy-eyed and anxious, I tripped headlong into work. As a result, I have for you a THANSKGIVING ORDER FORM, due by next Saturday (you can also pick one up at the market), and a new online store where you can purchase a WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION. Though telling you all about my crazy, and how unprepared I am to deal with my election-induced fear/grief/rage, probably isn't the best sales pitch for either. But seriously, I have a truly delicious Thanksgiving lineup (Caramel & Kabocha Pie? How could you say no?), and I think the CSB (community supported bakery!) subscription model could be the perfect way to get you bread outside of the Farmers Market. If there's enough excitement around the winter subscription, I might add a fall and spring subscription as well to bring you midweek bread. For now, however, you'll have to make due with the bike load of baked goods I have waiting for you at the Farmers Market: Red & White, Wild & Seedy, Mountain Rye, and Smoky Vollkornbrot, along with cookies, Sourdough Buckwheat Scones, French Apple Cake, and the most serious gingerbread you've ever tasted. See you soon! Sophie This was a week of near disasters. I mix my bread doughs very wet, which gives me better crumb and keeping quality, but leaves little room for error. The smart thing to do, especially when working with potentially inconsistent flours from small farms and a small mill, is to hold back a portion of the water in the initial mix and add it in later after seeing how the dough comes together. That way, if the flour has changed for any reason--harvest conditions, starch damage, milling consistency--you're not caught out with a bowl of dough soup. It's much easier to add in water than it is to add flour.
But I've gotten lazy. The flour has been consistent all year, and so I add all the water at the beginning, knowing that even the wettest dough will come together over the hours of fermentation and folding*. And then this Tuesday, the doughs didn't come together. I waited, and folded, and waited some more, and still the dough sat there, slack and unresponsive. It turns out that, unbeknownst to me, this has been an exceptionally bad year for the Washington wheat harvest, and I was working with my first bags of 2016 grain. There are ways to compensate, somewhat, for weak flour: mixing stiffer/drier dough, baking loaves in pans rather than freestanding on the hearth, perhaps slowing fermentation to give the gluten more time to develop. I will be trying all of them in the coming weeks. I've tried a few of them already for today's bread. If I do my job well, you may not even notice the difference. Coming to market this week, along with the Red & White, will be Oat & Honey, Smoky Vollkornbrot, and Mountain Rye bread. Also the usual small pastries, French Apple Cake, one last celebratory round of Election Cake (have you mailed in your ballot yet? Do it!), and the first Seriously Gingerbread of the season. Instead of my usual stout, this week's gingerbread is made with a smoky porter. Delicious! I'll be inside the pavilion from now until the end of the year, right across from the info booth. See you soon! Sophie *Stretching and folding dough is the gentle, low-tech alternative to thrashing it around in a mixer, or breaking your back trying to emulate a mixer by hand kneading. All three are ways to develop dough strength. |
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