DIY – Town Bakes

Bread, glorious bread! Doesn’t it make you want to sing and exalt and throw a gluten-full party as we delve further into bread baking experiments? Think about this: whole wheat-sourdough-cinnamon raisin bread with a decadent cream cheese topping. Or cinnamon raisin bread with cinnamon sugar sprinkled on top, or a smear of peanut butter.

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Who doesn’t love these things? A hallmark of childhood is the cinnamon-sugar toast my mom used to make for us when we were sick, and finally ready to eat real foods again. So this bread is nostalgic, it’s hearty, it’s dense, and offers hints of fall and winter, when we want everything to be cinnamon and nutmeg and warm apple pie or a mug of hot cider. Yes, yes, please.

I’m continuing Josey Baker Bread experiments and am having such FUN, which, I think was his intent (I dig it). Bread baking has always had an air of the scary — like there was too much science involved or epic room for error. But really, the only tools you need are patience and a willingness to be attentive to the dough; to notice the subtleties during each phase and think about what modifications you’d make next time.

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Young bread, ready for stretching and shaping

The patience part is good practice for me, since I’m the kind of person who discovers a recipe that looks amazing and has to bake it RIGHT NOW right now right now. And I usually can’t think of much else until I do.

Most of his recipes involve rounds of stretching and kneading across half-hour intervals, so it’s stretch-knead-wait a half-hour a total of four times before getting to the bulk-rise phase of the recipe.

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I still need practice in shaping my loaves. These two turned out especially dense, with the bread baked in the loaf pan not even filling the pan entirely. It’s a lesson to me to spend more time stretching during the shaping phase, for a more evenly sized loaf.

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Mr. Baker calls for Thompson raisins, though I used a mix of flame and Thompson, sea salt, cinnamon, and whole wheat flour. His recipe calls for a very small amount of sourdough starter, and I added approx. a teaspoon more than recommended since I wanted this to be a noticeably sour loaf.

Next up in gluten tales, diving into an everything loaf coated with poppyseed and sesame.

Food is so basic. It’s everything. Transformative, meaningful, and malleable. A means of caring for each other and ourselves. An art and a necessity — and rich with possibility. Each year as I continue to research and experiment and learn more about food and cooking and baking, I only grow more inspired. More bold. My quest for trying new ingredients and recipes: it can’t be quenched. For a while now, I’ve wanted to learn more about canning and preserving. I’ve flipped through books and done some reading on the internet, whole-heartedly gobbled my good friend Erin’s homemade strawberry and raspberry preserves, and, finally, last weekend yielded my first-ever canning class at 18 Reasons in San Francisco. The class was a very awesome Christmas gift from this fellow I know (and love), and it did not disappoint.

18 Reasons is a community space dedicated entirely to workshops and cooking classes that cover a range of topics — from gardening to canning, knife skills to tasting seminars, they feature movie nights, community dinners, and more. And, in the words of 18 Reasons, their food programming is designed to “inspire action and foster collaboration toward creating a just and sustainable food system.”

The class was FUN, cured my worries about sterilizing jars, and the three hours absolutely flew by as we chopped, stirred, and simmered. Our team left with eight jars of Meyer Lemon Ginger Marmalade, three bottles of Blood Orange Vanilla syrup, and sachets of loose-leaf tea: a mix of dehydrated bergamot and blood orange, lavender, and vanilla.

I’m already eager to take another class come spring; our instructor noted that there will be another canning feature with strawberries and possibly cherries (yum!). The class fee is an incredible value considering the gorgeous fruit that was used and what we left with: marmalade, syrup, recipes and tea to take home, and during class we were treated to snacks (including the most luscious date I’ve ever had in my whole life) and an orange sorbet made with leftover satsuma mandarin juice.

Next on my to-do list: researching a similar community space in Oakland, or, heck, if it doesn’t exist — creating one with some friends.

Credit and huge thanks to Andrea Sprockett for sharing her photos with me!