Marquette Baking Company

Sorry for the additional post.  I just wanted to let you know that there won’t be many sourdoughs available Thanksgiving morning.  A combination of the new sign, and the holidays brought a lot more people into the bakery today.  That’s generally a good thing, but the supply of sourdoughs I had intended to last through tomorrow morning took a hard hit.  The Seed and Kalamata Olive were gone when I left this afternoon, and there were only a few Cranberry Pecan, Poilanes and Semolinas still on the shelf.  We will have Baguettes, Fougasse, Sun Breads, Cracked Wheat, Natural rye and Ciabatta loaves coming out of the oven tomorrow morning in addition to all the dinner rolls.  Fresh pastries too.  Hours are 7:30am – 1pm.

Have a happy thanksgiving!

Peter

The bakery sign finally went up along Baraga yesterday.  It’s been a work in progress for weeks now with an amazing number of problems along the way.  There are still some additions to do to it, but I’m happy with what we have for now.

We made some dinner rolls yesterday, just to  work out the bugs before Thanksgiving.  We gave away a few of them, but customers also bought quite a few.  We are going to make some more today, the rye ones, and see how that goes.  That could be problematic since the rye dough is so delicate.  We may have to make those entirely by hand.

I know I promised a posting Monday and it’s now Wednesday.  Sorry.  Things are a bit more time consuming this week.  I just wanted to let you know what breads we will have out today and tomorrow.

This morning we will have Seed and Poilane along with croissants, cinnamon rolls and the other pastries out when we open at 7:30.  By 9:30 we will have Baguette, Fougasse and Natural Rye.  French Rolls and Rye Rolls should be out by 10:00.  Ciabatta by 10:30.  And Semolina, Kalamata Olive, Cranberry Pecan, and more Poilane before lunch.

Thanksgiving morning we will have whatever is left from Wednesdays Sourdoughs (Semolina, Poilane, Kalamata Olive and Cranberry Pecan) croissants, cinnamon rolls, etc. out when we open.  Baguette, Fougasse, Cracked Wheat and Natural Rye will be out by 9:30.  The rolls should be out by 10:00, and Ciabatta by 10:30.  We are closing at 1pm.

I hope that everyone has a great Thanksgiving!   We will be closed Friday and back on Saturday with our Normal Saturday hours — 7:30am – 4pm.

Thanks for making our bakery part of your life.

Peter

Thanksgiving is coming up next week, and that means dinner rolls!  We will have a few options for you to choose from on Thursday morning:

Ciabatta Rolls:  They are irregular and crusty with a large size holes in the crumb in a smaller dinner roll size.
French Rolls:  These are crusty and chewy with medium size holes in the crumb.
Cracked Wheat Rolls:  These have a softer crust and and more tender crumb with smaller size holes.

In addition we will have our Sun Breads, and Epi Baguettes available so you can pull them apart to make rolls at the dinner table.

We will try to make enough rolls and breads, but if you want to be sure to get what you want, please sign up in advance at the bakery or send an email.  Let us know by Tuesday afternoon so we can put get the preferments going and plan a bake schedule.

We will still take orders for Thanksgiving center pieces through Saturday.  Please let us know if you are interested.

Holiday Hours:
Thurday, Thanksgiving Day 7:30am – 1:00pm
Friday (11/28):  Closed
Saturday (11/29):  7:30am – 4pm
Sunday (11/30):  Closed
Monday (12/1):  Closed
Tuesday (12/2): 7:30am – 6:00pm (normal hours)

I will make another posting Monday to let you know the exact bake schedule for next week.  That way you will know when you can get your favorite breads.

Have a good weekend!  And if you are traveling, take care.

Peter

In my opinion, it’s hard to top a well made croissant, Danish or other pastry made from a laminated dough.  I love the delicate flaky texture, the buttery flavor and the beauty that the layers of butter and dough create.  I don’t know who first invented the technique, but it became popular in Vienna and was later adopted by the French.  I’ve been wanting to start working with laminated dough at the bakery, but until last week, the piece of equipment I need to make them wasn’t running.  It was an eBay find like most of the equipment I have, and it is old has issues.  And it needed a lot of cleaning.

We had some extra time yesterday, so we put together some croissant dough and today I laminated it with a pound of good butter from the coop.  Things went ok, but not great — the dough got warm, the cuts were ragged and I mistakenly put in more laminations than ideal.  But I did manage to put out a couple pans of little croissants.  I don’t expect them to be world class, but they should be quite tasty.  We’ll be baking them off tomorrow morning and if they not embarrassing, we’ll have them for sale.

Another new item to look for tomorrow morning is a garlic semolina bread.   It has some olive oil in the dough so it will be softer than most of the breads we bake.

Please come by and visit tomorrow.

Peter

Every step in the process of getting this bakery up and running is dramatically different.  Looking back at it, it was simple when I was just baking for the farmers market — Bake a lot of bread.  Sleep while it cools.  Sell it at the farmers market.  Sleep again after the market.  Then we started serving a few wholesale accounts midweek too, but that was more of the same, just two times a week.  Then we opened the shop two days a week for retail sales, so someone needed to be around during the retail hours.  The baking could still be done in batches with time to regroup and plan for the next one.  Every step makes what we were doing before seem simple, but stepping ahead is pretty overwhelming.

Now  We have a couple days under our belts with the new bakery hours — 7:30am – 6pm Tues-Fri and 7:30am-4pm Saturday, and there is no longer any time to regroup and plan.  Because almost everything we bake requires some sort of preferment or sourdough, things need to be prepped and set in motion 24 or more hours in advance of when it needs to come out of the oven.  As a result, we are always planning 2 days in advance, and the planning needs to be done while baking is happening.  There are no “off” days anymore and it is exhausting, but I’m sure we’ll get used to it quickly.  We’ve gotten used to all the other changes.

The long and short of it, things might be a little rough for a while, but we’ll get better and more consistent soon.

Thank you for all your support and nice comments.

Peter