Good morning! As mentioned last week, let’s dive into our sourdough process. This newsletter is longer than usual, so feel free scroll down to the menu…we all know that’s the important part. 

In short, we use a three-day process for both our breads and our English muffins. We do this to enhance both the flavor and digestibility of our baked goods. If our breads are flour, water, and salt, time is the silent ingredient. 

Your baked goods begin two days before you pick them up. The sourdough starter gets fed more frequently, and flour is milled. We mill the day before making bread dough to ensure the most flavorful and nutritious flour possible. Milling our own flour also allows more variety: spelt, einkorn, etc but also Rouge de Bordeaux, Turkey Red, etc. Yes, it would be easier to buy all our flour milled, but we've decided it's worth the extra effort to mill our own.

The day before you pick up your baked goods, the doughs are made. While we use a mixer for the initial mix, we do all of our stretch-and-folds and shaping the loaves by hand. The shaped loaves are placed in bannetons (rattan baskets that help the loaves keep their shape) and fermented in the fridge overnight. This adds a depth of flavor to the bread and allows us to bake the morning you pick up.

Day Three is Bake Day, and Bake Days are the best days. 😀 Ovens are heated, loaves are pulled from the fridge and scored (cuts are made in the dough to allow it to expand, to allow the baker some creativity, and to discern one bread variety from another), and bread is baked. The loaves cool for a couple of hours, get bagged and labeled (and some of them are sliced), and await your arrival for pickup.

A variety of factors can impact how long the dough (fermentation) takes: room temperature, dough temperature, humidity, dough hydration, the seasonal changes, etc. Even though we know our sourdough starter and our bread doughs fairly well, every Day Two is a new experience with all of these variables. That’s the tricky part: we not only have to evaluate where the dough is at when we shape it but also what it’s going to do overnight in the fridge.

That’s not a complaint. I honestly think we’d get bored if we didn’t have these variables to contend with. Nothing is so satisfying as pulling a loaf of bread out of the oven and seeing that we nailed the whole three-day process. (And, it’s a good life lesson when we miss the mark to remember that we get to try again next week.) One thing is certain: we are always trying to learn from those experiences and to make the best bread we possibly can.

Whew! Thanks for staying to the end of this newsletter. I hope it’s been informative. We’re always available for questions, but we know it can be tricky to ask things if it’s a busy day. We look forward to seeing you on an upcoming Saturday!

- Ashley & Paul

Bread
Apricot Cherry Sourdough Bread
Baguette
Einkorn Sourdough Bread
Parmesan Peppercorn Sourdough Bread
Spelt Sourdough Bread

Cookies
Brown Butter Dark Chocolate Chip Cookie
Brownie Cookie
Oatmeal Raisin Cookie
Spiced Molasses Cookie

Specialty Flours
Einkorn Wheat Flour
Kamut® Wheat Flour
Ryman Rye Flour
Spelt Wheat Flour
Turkey Red Wheat Flour

Rolls & Muffins
Spelt English Muffins
Thaw-and-Bake Hot Rolls

Mixes
Cinnamon & Oat Pancake Mix
Einkorn Pancake Mix