It’s only one more week before we finally open the doors on the bakery! October 11th is the opening day, and also the day of fall neighborhood festival that will be held just outside our doors in the Childrens Museum Courtyard. We are madly finishing the trim in the retail area and building the display shelves and sales counter. Just today it went from, “This is insane. We’ll just have to set up the farmers market stand inside a half completed room.” to “Not only could we pull this off, but this is beautiful!”
I’m still not sure if we are actually going to hop right into regular business hour 5 days a week, or have a period of being open limited days and hours. There are still a lot of kinks to work out and there won’t be any time to work on them if we’re baking all the time. Stay tuned. I should have a plan next week.
For today, I dropped back a little on the the number of types of bread we’re bringing to the market. Last season I was content to have 9 different types each week, but this year we’ve been baking 13 or more. That’s a lot of extra work when there is so much to do to get the bakery open. This week is the first time that I can remember NOT baking Walnut-Raisin or some other version of nut/fruit bread. I also didn’t bake the Mild Rye. But we did do most of the rest. Here’s the list:
Baguette
Fougasse
Tordu (Twist Bread)
Vollkornbrot (100% Whole Rye)
Semolina Bread
Pain Poilane
Kalamata Olive Levain
3 Seed Sourdough
Ciabatta
Cracked Wheat
Apple Harvest
Chocolate Chip – Walnut Cookies
Toasted Oatmeal Cookies
Oh, I should mention that we’ve been struggling with the ciabatta lately. It’s been good, but it hasn’t have the volume it should have. Last night we finally got it right and I”m very happy with how it turned out. The problem was a scheduling thing where the oven was full when the ciabatta was ready to go in. By the time the oven opened up, the bread was starting to deflate so they came out flat. Baking is not a simple.
Hope to see you at the market. It should be a cool but lovely fall day!
Peter