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Summer Plans and Bakery Thoughts

Well hello there neighbors! It’s officially June and definitely feeling like summer here in the valley (106 over the weekend? Oh boy!). June subscriptions start this Thursday and are nearly sold out, but you can find the few straggling spots by scrolling down and clicking through to the Alchemy Bread website. If you don’t get in for a subscription, please don’t let that stop you from coming by, we tend to have increased foot traffic in the summer months, so we back more focaccia, baguettes and cookies to accommodate that.

This summer is going to look a little bit different here at Alchemy Bread. We typically open up on Saturdays with a market style bake during the summer months, but this year we won’t be open on the weekends, we’ll be focusing all our energies on our Thursday bakes! Please join us Thursdays from noon to six for all your bread provisions, and whatever delights out pastry assistant Madelyn is whipping up in the kitchen.

If you remember Thursdays of yore, there’s usually a thing we call friendship bake on Thursday evenings. We have picture books out on the picnic tables, kids hanging around in the hammock, I do a story time, and we take homegrown barter items for small breads. It’s a nice time and I look forward to seeing you over at our place.

I’m moving towards a more weekday focused schedule in the bakery these days, and leaving a door opened up for some interesting opportunities in the future; traveling, teaching and popping up at my other friends bakeries, restaurants, cafes and art spaces.

Strawberries, skateboards, and schools out for summer!

We’re closing out the school year here. It’s been a year of adjusting from a lifetime of homeschooling to public school (4th and 7th grade for my sons) and Junior College for my 17 year old (one more year of charter online homeschool for them, and 3rd year of co-enrolling in college courses). Frankly, I thought it would all be a lot harder. The kids have proven adaptable, and emotionally intelligent, which have been key in navigating new environs.

I’m both surprised and not surprised. They wake on time, make their breakfasts, pack their lunches, and after a scuffle about socks, are ready to go before I am, typically. I’m wrapped up in the bakery in those early morning hours, getting ovens to temp, feeding starters, scaling the mix and putting together dough while they take responsibility for themselves. As the year comes to a close, Gabe’s finishing with Straight A’s, Leo’s working well with others and being a great friend, and Sophie is out there engaging in the community and making art, reading books, watching films, and writing poetry like life depends on it, and of course it does. I’m proud of these humans.

It’s also been a year of rediscovering my few extra brain cells that I’m not spending in the deep and heavy work of teaching young folks how to read and do long division and interpret the world around us. I still do love to make time for a read aloud though. (Ocean Vuong with Sophie, The Outsiders with Gabe and Judy Blume with Leo)

Anyway, let’s finish soft and strong in our heads and hearts. Everything we hope to strive for, tabled for a summer of stretching out in the long days in the sun. I’ll leave you with this photo of Leo. Books falling out of his hands, clutching a skateboard, strawberry in the mouth. What else is there?

Midnight hotdogs and afternoon mangonada

This week leeks, and peas, cucumbers and asparagus are shooting up at the farmers market, along with early apricots and piles of berries and cherries. Spring is a lovely time to eat all the green things in abundance. The sycamore tree shading my house is leafing back out to protect us from the coming summer heat and the magnolia trees all down 12th street sigh open their voluminous heady blooms.

There seems to be a quickening and slowing at once, school kids slump towards the ends of the school year, dragging their feet to the finish line. Otherwise, the pace of social invites, summer plans and community activities pick up steam. The runaway train of late bedtimes, lost routines, and sticky hot summer evenings outdoors with our friends beckons us onward!

This past week reflected some of those leanings. Thursday night Sophie and I abandoned the bakery early to my assistant Madelyn’s discretion and took the train into San Francisco for a show at the Chapel. By the time Alchemy Bread closed for the night at home, we were leaning on a sticky bar in the Mission District, chewing on Luxardo cherries. The kids in a shirley temple and mine in an old fashioned. We were there to see Hurray for the Riff Raff, a band from New Orleans that I had first seen in 2009 on the porch of Thai restaurant in Davis. Their new album, some 15 years later, had just been called one of the best of the year by every major music publication. This Thursday night might be the last time to see them in a small venue. Sophie had been listening to them on my old iPod since infancy. It was a great show populated by a crowd of your average aging NPR listener, and one very cool homeschooled 17 year old out late on a “school night”. We ended the night as always with street hot dogs. Wrapped in bacon, charred on a dented sheet-pan placed over a propane burner on the sidewalk, onions melting down in the grease. The hotdog vendor called me and Sophie both “Princesa”. Ah yes, princess of oily midnight sausages on the moonlit walk to the last train home. Can’t think of anything I’d rather be.

The weekend included Porchfest, and we covered about 8 miles on foot from my house, to Penny University, down Magnolia Avenue and beyond. We bought lemonade and rice crispy treats from kids, wandered weaving through friends houses, clinking beers in the street with friends while a cover band plays 80’s classics to a street full of bicycles. We ate mango with chamoy and tajin while listening to grateful dead covers, ate ceviche tostadas and passed by a mariachi group. The weather was breezy, the music and food were great and our legs were a little sore.

Looking forward to more days in the sun, walks in the neighborhood, street food, music. I can’t wait to replace morning school drop off and afternoon pickup with morning bike rides and afternoons reading library books in my hammock!

Motherhood and Cherry Picking

We’re midway through May and in bakery news, the refrigerator is temporarily cooling which is a relief! June’s subscriptions are up on the site if you want to grab next months loaves ahead of time.

On the homefront, as a blended family with 2 moms, mothers day takes on an extra special holiday for my girlfriend Jill and I. We spent Saturday morning at Vanderhelm Farms with our combined 5 sons picking blueberries and cherries in the warm valley sun. Our boys can eat their weight in fruit every summer so it’s a great kickoff to the warmer months that we observe every year on mother’s day weekend, weaving through the varieties of berries and finding the ripest ones under a cloudless sky.

After working up a sweat, we all jumped in the pool to rinse off our salty bodies, dusty legs and stained fingers. I made a lemon and jasmine tea cake and worked up some duck egg pasta dough flecked through with thyme leaves. It’s our third year running of rolling out handmade pasta with the kids together on mother’s day, with my 13 year old Gabe taking an increasingly senior role, the youngest Noah putting all of his 4 year old verve into the cranking on the manual machine, while someone tries to keep him from accidentally heading into reverse and gumming up the works. Sparkling wine, pasta and cake luxuriating under macerated cherries are all very fine with tea and sentimental cards exchanged. We rest, content.

Sunday I spent time with my kids in our neighborhood doing what we like best. Getting coffee at Penny University and looking at a big book of Norman Rockwell paintings in the library. Singin’ in the Rain in beautiful nostalgic technicolor at the State Theatre with plenty of buttered popcorn and crispy icy coca cola. Reading Judy Blume aloud with Leo at home and laughing until we fall into an afternoon nap together. A run to the Asian Market for seaweed potato chips, canned boba teas, and instant ramens. A loop around the nearby goodwill to look at funny shirts (I bought one that says “stay trashy” with a raccoon on it).

Motherhood being a seemingly thankless and never-ending gig is possibly the most common refrain. I know how much it all takes and yet. I truly don’t feel unappreciated by my kids, who have been in this life with me. We’ve done life together, my labor never invisible to them. We’ve sweated side by side wrangling clothes in the hot laundromat, scrubbing and putting away dishes after having friends over, chopping vegetables and making pasta dough side by side, and walked all over to get where we need to go.

I definitely don’t feel unappreciated by my girlfriend who knows all too well the many hours that go into the job. These past 3 Mother’s day with two mom’s have been the best we’ve both ever had. Leaving behind the begrudging, lackluster and occasional ignoring we both experienced in the past. Now we end the holiday feeling nourished, appreciated, and celebrated in our own unique skills we each bring to parenting. I make her a latte, she makes me breakfast. I grill the asparagus while she blanches an artichoke.

Refrigeration, public transit and May Day

It’s May underway here and berries and cherries are ripening in the central valley. I threw those June subscriptions in the shop for you if you like to plan ahead and jump in there, you can go right ahead and scroll down to that shop button.

In bakery news, I currently have a fella named Joe rummaging around in the innards of my fridge to try to make it cold again. Last week I woke up on Thursday and the trusty metal box was sitting at a toasty warm 66 degrees (that’s not right!) and murdered a bunch of product (ouch). I definitely had a stressful and sweaty day trying salvage my hard work from circumstances outside my control.

After 11 years coping with the unpredictable ebb and flow that is a foodservice life, I guess I’ve developed a kind of wry “I’ll take what I can get” attitude. Although there’s always the initial sting that makes me want to cry like a little kid over a dropped ice cream cone for a second, I ultimately stood tall in my big girl boots, remade a ton of dough, sweated it out, and finished the day with commiseration and a beer over at Penny University. Good enough for me, and thank goodness for my friends.

Currently I’m reading The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck which is one of his more under appreciated novels. It’s sort of an anthology of vignettes of all the people who intersect with each other at a bus stop in the valley halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It’s kind of a perfect choice for me right now, who has been absolutely preoccupied in mind by public transportation. I never made it out of the valley to a big city, the best I could do was move to downtown Modesto where really old houses are cheap and my neighbors are a transmission shop, and electrical substation and a cremation service. For me, walkability was my main goal.

My oldest is turning 18 this year and spent most of her life walking and biking everywhere with me, and she has no desire to drive a car. Totally reasonable! A car is very expensive and can be dangerous. I showed her how to use her MJC student ID to ride the bus for free, and find routes going where she wants to go. Sophie got a job at the theatre, an easy walking distance from our house. I’ve been taking her on excursions on the BART around the bay area to show her how to get to concert venues, art museums, iconic book stores, and historic theatres.

I notice how commonly other adults ask my kid about driving. I don’t typically think of myself as someone who is particularly against the grain, until I talk to people who find my lack of concern with the teen driving rite of passage strange. I keep thinking back to when Sophie was 12 and we got to go to Paris together. As a lovers of baked goods and art, we were in heaven on earth there. Louvre and boulangerie not withstanding, I couldn’t stop remarking when I came back that my favourite thing in Paris wasn’t the mille-fueille, it was the Metro Stations. This May Day I want bread and roses, but also, beautiful public transit.

A Baker's Christmas List

Recently I have been getting frequent messages online with requests for good gift ideas for bakers. If you are gifting to an aspiring or hopeful baker, you may want to start them out with my book for beginners and it’s accompanying techniques video class and head over here to my basic materials and tools list. However for this list, I will assume that we are talking about what an established baker (aka me!) might love for Christmas.

!. A giant tub of Maldon Sea Salt Flakes! These are my favorite flaky sea salt for sprinkling on the top of focaccia, or on top of chocolate chip cookies just before baking. They have a unique shape that is beautiful and this tub might last a whole year! Affordable luxury.

This is one of my favorite chocolates the flavor is beautiful, I love the little bean shapes. They look great in a cookie, fit nicely into pain au chocolat, and are fun to eat directly out of the bag too. There’s also a 6 pound bag if you really like someone.

More salt? Yes! Grey salt has the nicest flavor, I don’t know if I represent all bakers in saying this, but I have an obsession with different kinds of salt. I love using this salt in my pastry doughs, I feel like I can really taste the difference.

Tea is an extremely important part of baking for me, it’s the perfect thing to do “in between” activities. I love loose leaf tea since it doesn’t make any waste. This chai is one of my favorites, especially with sugar and milk.

Vanilla bean paste is another one of those things that is a a bit pricey when considering buying it for yourself, but just the right price point for a special gift.

Buckwheat flour is one of my favorite specialty flours to work with. Buckwheat is beautiful for adding to brownies, chocolate chip cookies, tart pastry, and for making beautiful crepes. The gift of experimenting with new flour would be welcome to any baker.

Baker’s live their lives by timers, and I have used SO many different ones. I now know that I like a timer without batteries, with a mechanical twist to set (pushing a button 45 times to set a timer for 45 minutes? NO!) a loud alarm and a magnet so I can stick it on the oven/mixer/fridge etc. This timer meets my many demands! Merry Christmas!

Bakers tend to get up very early in the morning, and cozy socks are an essential part of staying motivated to get up and turn the oven on. Socks for Christmas may seem sad, but I absolutely love colorful, friendly, warm socks.

If you are new to baking you might not yet have noticed that Birkenstocks are kind of the unofficial footwear of bakers and homebakers alike. While I prefer my leather Birks for production work since they are easy to clean and extremely comfortable to work in, these shearling felt gems would be amazing for cozy home baking with my kids through the winter.

Well, that’s my baker’s Christmas wish list if I was buying a bunch of little things for myself! I hope you find something for someone you like or just for yourself! Have a happy holiday! I’m an Amazon Affilliate, so if you order items through my links, I receive a few cents commission for recommending things that I like at no extra charge to you.

Bonus Secret Item that I really want….

Alchemy Bread- Setting up a Cottage Bakery

I get a lot of questions from followers who are looking to make the transition from hobby weekend bread bakers to a small cottage food operation. ( A cottage food operation is a licensed small business that is allowed to be conducted from a home kitchen). I thought I would go over a few of my recommendations on how to setup a workspace for baking at home. Keep in mind that my workspace as it is now has been built one piece at a time over the past 6 years. I started out baking in my home oven with 2 dutch ovens, using my kitchen table as a work surface. I didn’t have many resources so I had to slowly save aside the small profits from my tiny business and save up for each item, many of the larger equipment purchases were only in the past 2 years after 4 years of making do with a lot less, just something to keep in mind if it seems overwhelming at first. That said, lets jump into it!

My workspace in my home kitchen at Alchemy Bread

My workspace in my home kitchen at Alchemy Bread

The absolute first purchase I would recommend is a work table that is the proper height for you to work on. I spent my whole first year working on a kitchen table before I had saved up enough to purchase a worktable. It makes a huge difference! Some bakers do work on stainless steel tables, but I very much prefer wood. I also chose this table because the bottom of the legs are slightly adjustable so I can set the height. There are a few different sizes so you can pick the one that fits your workspace, mine is 72 inches long. You can use the shelf in to store large (unopened) bags of flour there if space is at a premium.

Another question I get a lot is about flour storage. From the start of my cottage bakery I would buy my flour on a weekly basis, and only the amount that I needed for that week. Long term flour storage shouldn’t be necessary for a small operation. Even now with a very busy cottage operation, I go through about 150 pounds of flour a week. That’s only three 50 pound bags of flour (or six if you buy in 25 pound increments). If you have a small house like I do and space is at a premium, storing flour is best left to your restaurant supply store and not your kitchen! You do need to keep you flour stored at least 6 inches up from the floor. You can install the shelf under your table at this height. (You will notice as I’ve grown I’ve now added a second work table)

Unopened flour stored six inches from the floor in a table shelf. Also a great place to store a 5 year old.

Unopened flour stored six inches from the floor in a table shelf. Also a great place to store a 5 year old.

As you expand a product range and do more variety in your work you will need more storage space for small items ( chocolate chips, baking soda, vanilla, different varieties of grains and seeds) I have a small laundry room off of my kitchen, I got rid of my washer and dryer and sacrificed them for bakery storage. I do my wash at the laundromat so I could steal some more space for some shelving. Hopefully, you don’t have to do that! Here is the shelving that I use for my miscellaneous storage. Once again, there are assorted sizes to fit in a space, the shelves can be adjusted to different heights, and the plastic cambro tubs come in plenty of sizes and are stackable and should be used to hold nuts, seeds, and grains. I also use these tubs to hold my sourdough starter in. There are endless options for clear bins to keep small ingredients in. I keep things I will use together in the same bin, so I can just grab the whole bin out when I’m making cookies for example.

Bakery tools organized in bins in a shelf.

Bakery tools organized in bins in a shelf.

When you start out, you won’t likely have too many tools, but over time you will likely accrue a collection of tools and keeping them organized and separate from the rest of your kitchen implements is in your best interest. When time is of the essence, you don’t want to be rifling through a drawer full of nonsense searching for your pastry brush or your microplane. I have a simple wooden shelf from Ikea for this purpose, along with white plastic bins of varying sizes for all my tools. The one below is pretty similar. I prefer an attractive wood shelf in this case since it’s in my workspace.

Baskets of dough proofing, and pre-shaped dough bench resting in a speed rack.

Baskets of dough proofing, and pre-shaped dough bench resting in a speed rack.

After creating a workspace and storing your ingredients, you will likely encounter your next problem. There is not enough horizontal space in any home environment to shape dough on, proof dough on, and load bread into the oven on, and eventually you will run out of places to put things and your workflow will start to become a game of tetris. When this happens, it’s time to get a baker’s rack, also called a speed rack, or sometimes called a bun rack. This will help alleviate the traffic jam in a small workspace. I have a tall version as you can see above, but a half sized rack that slides under your work table is a good place to start if you also don’t have much floor space. These can hold all kinds of things like hot sheet pans of cookies that need to cool, or proofing boards full of resting dough.

Of course, there is much more to be done in setting up a tiny home bakery (permits! licenses! fridge space! oh my!) however, I hope this is a serviceable start to sorting out some of the nuts and bolts. If you are just getting started baking bread and haven’t got the basics well in hand yet, I would recommend working through my book Bread Baking for Beginners. If you need more hands on help, I have an online class that can walk you through the whole first chapter and get your started confidently. If you need more equipment advice in the realm of small wares (bench knives, pastry brushes, baking pans etc.) you can find advice on all that on my materials list. You can find me and all my homebakery antics over on instagram @alchemybread

Top 3 Tools for Beginning Bread Bakers

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One of the more common questions I get on social media from new bread bakers is about which tools are absolutely essential to get started. Here are my recommendations:

  1. A digital kitchen scale. We often say that baking is a science, accuracy, and precision are important! Using a scale is a great way to eliminate errors in the measuring process and ensure your baking comes out great every time. All professional bakers use a scale (you won’t see them adding together hundreds of “cups” of flour to make a large batch of dough!) You can certainly get a cheaper scale, but there are a few reasons I recommend this particular one: it holds up for a very long time, it weighs up to 8000 grams (when you scale up your baking you won’t have to buy a new scale if you start with this one) and it takes regular double a batteries. (many scales take an obscure watch or disc battery, which you aren’t likely to have on hand when your battery dies in the middle of a baking project). I’ve been weighing about 120 loaves a week on this scale for over 6 years and it’s holding up just fine, just keep water and flour our of your battery compartment and it will survive the test of time and be a great investment. Once you start weighing your ingredients, you won’t want to go back to measuring cups ever.

2. I highly recommend getting a thermometer. Remember how we were just talking about the importance of accuracy? (Were your eyes glazing over?) Bread dough performs it’s best within a particular temperature range. In an ideal scenario, our environments would always be a perfect 75-78 degrees, or as bakers call it “desired dough temperature”. Until we engineer a perfect world, we’ll have to use a thermometer and make adjustments to get the desired results. When I was a beginner baker I had put in a lot of practice and done a ton of reading, but it was when I got a thermometer and started tracking my temperatures that I finally saw truer consistency in my bread. An instant-read thermometer will end up being handy around your kitchen for plenty of other projects too, so it will be a wonderful investment and should last forever, especially since this one is waterproof (surprisingly important!)

Ok, are we still talking about nerdy things like accuracy, precision and consistency? Kind of! The last tool I would recommend for getting started with bread baking is a simple cast iron dutch oven. The issue with most home ovens (even new ones!) are that they struggle to deliver strong, consistent heat in all directions, and they don’t seal well so they can’t contain steam very well. Unfortunately these are exactly the things we need to make great bread! One way to get around this is to bake your loaf in a preheated dutch oven. Cast iron has excellent heat retention so it creates a perfect tiny oven for you loaf, and the lid seals tightly and retains the moisture and steam inside your loaf during the initial bake. This is a pretty affordable hack to make great bread, and a dutch oven is an all around all purpose kitchen tool. This Lodge model is the one I use, it’s nice a roomy for making large loaves, the handle is easy to grab (surprisingly important when things are really hot) and while enamel is very pretty, this cast iron is a great work horse.

With just these 3 tools, you will have a great start to your bread journey! Happy Baking!

Looking for more fun bread baking tools? Check out my exhaustive materials list

If you need more guidance you can check out my book Bread Baking for Beginners

More of a visual learner and want me to guide you through every recipe in the whole first chapter in my book? You can take my online video class

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