- So I'm adding some 80
degree water to this bowl using my phone out of habit, even though I recently bought calculators, old school calculators. So many times I've come in here, and balancing between
technology, wet hands, flour hands, and you never
quite know which way to go. Half of mixing is just
like staying clean, really. So I thought the calculators would help. And then over time just
got very used to phones, so I still find myself going to the phone. So I'm just going to subtract the amount that I'm weighing out here. So I'm getting to a certain total. You can see we're not
making one loaf of bread. I hope you can see that. A lot of people often
ask, or approach baking, I should say, from kind of the way that you approach a kitchen, a little bit of this,
a little bit of that. It doesn't work. You gotta get it right. You can't just change the water content by a little bit here or there. It will affect the final product. So yes, I'll weigh it to the gram. Now that our batch sizes are a lot bigger than they used to be, I give myself a little bit of forgiveness,
like maybe 50 grams out of this whole 35 liters
of water that's in here. So walking over to our
custom blend of flour. Made by a local mill here. We started with, oops. We started with white flour
when we first bought the bakery and bought it from a local store, like a national restaurant supplier. Thankful we don't do that anymore 'cause we can't buy more than one bag of flour at a time now
there in COVID days. A few years ago we were
amongst the first bakeries to use our new local stone mill. They have a fun story too
where they just took over an old brand, Hayden Flour Mills. It's a mill that used to exist in Tempe and compete on a national
scale with General Mills and some of the others, and over time it lost market share and
went out of business. The mill was gone for 12 years and then a new family bought the old name and started growing really old heritage grain wheat in Arizona, started milling it in kind
of a rudimentary fashion like we started making bread years ago. And over time they got better and better, invested in their mill. We ended up buying a
variety of grains from them and mixing them ourselves, spending a year or two
just trying to figure out what blends we like, doing
a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And then finally decided to
ask them to blend at the mill. So this flour I just dumped in
seems really easy and simple but it's actually six different
flours put together by us, formulated by us, and
then blended at the mill. So I'm going to throw this on. (mixer whirring) That's 120 loaves of bread. This first step is just mixing
flour and water together. You can see that from the first moment we're using every bit of resource we have. That flour is a centimeter from the top. And this mixer has a story too. This, along with a lot
of the things in here, lived a life before the life with us. This is some old Hobart that we found in a junkyard in California. We drove out especially for it, not knowing whether it worked or not. It certainly did not work. All the electrical boards were
fried, didn't work at all. But we got it at a really good price. And at the time we didn't have any money for mixers whatsoever. So we've been hand mixing everything. This is really just a
year and a few months ago, it was about a year and a half, we were hand mixing everything. Now this thing comes in. None of the buttons worked,
everything was burnt. And we went to our local
electrical supply store, found random switches and random buttons. We hijacked timer one with something completely different now. Now it's a bowl rotator
so I can stop the bowl. It has nothing to do with timing anymore. But we got the thing to move and spin, and it's been doing a good job every since because Hobarts are built to last. The engine's great. The little stuff fried, but
the little stuff can be fixed. And we probably saved ourself $30,000 versus a new machine. You would think that I would have all this memorized in my head, and the thing is I don't, even though I've made these over and over again. I do have that one memorized. But this one I had to look up. And it's because we're constantly tweaking recipes still to this day. You know, we'll change a little
bit of the water content, or we'll change the flour content. And when you make something
every day for years, some of those old formulas
are plastered to your brain. So I'm still going back to
old versions in my brain. I need to reference something
to see what I've done with it. Do I recommending sticking
your hand in a mixing bowl? No. (laughs) So I didn't mix that fully by any means. I'm still missing ingredients. This is a very simple bread. It's as simple as bread
gets, flour, water, and salt. There is sourdough starter, but I will explain why sourdough starter really is no more than flour and water. So you could say this is
a three ingredient bread. It's still missing the leaven
and it's still missing salt. Three ingredients because
a sourdough starter, which we have right here, is
just fed with flour and water. There's nothing else in here other than microbes, flour, and water. Just over a kilo of salt. Yeah, we're doing that kilo thing. If you want to go for just standard English measurements, go right ahead. But I don't like working
in eighths and 16s and 12s. It was mind-blowing
that one liter of water equaled one kilogram to water
to me, just mind-blowing. So I'm going to take
this sourdough starter which has already been measured out to the right amount that I need. We actually fed it to the
right size for this mix so that all I would have
to do in the morning is one of these numbers. So this was fed last night. I'm going to scrape the bowl. A lot of the people
that have worked for us here in the bakery over time
have come from kitchens. And people that work in kitchens don't like to do dishes as they go. Oftentimes they might have
had a dishwasher on staff. But in general that batching
is just what they do. Everything is a batch. When it comes to dough
and bowls, dry dough that's crusted on a bowl takes five times, or six times, or seven
times longer to clean. And there's other things
I want to do with my day. I've already gone through years of not having efficient processes
and not being organized, and as a result not having time for myself at the end of the day where
the bakery was basically from the time I woke to
the time I went to bed. And so making sure
there's not a huge amount to clean up at the end of the day is one of the ways that
I show care to myself. Starter's actually a little
bit old for my liking. I can see the texture
and consistency of it. For the sort of perfectionist in me, I just immediately feel like
there is a point of failure that needs to be improved
upon for next time. (mixer whirring) This mix is getting close to completion. You can see the hook is starting
to pull the dough with it and you're getting these nice long strands of dough that's smooth. That's actually the gluten development. Everybody, do you know that
gluten is just the protein that is created when you bind
flour and water together? Just to break it down from its kind of evil
connotation in the world. Gluten is actually a good thing for bread because it's a structure that
we need to make good bread. It's why wheat was
chosen to make bread with in the first place, because it had gluten, and that gluten provided structure that was superior to all the
other grasses that we found. Can we bake with other grasses? Yes. Are we learning how to make
gluten-free sourdough right now? I'm not going to talk
more about that, but yes. Do most people need gluten-free bread? No. Most people need real
bread that's been made over a longer period of
time to break down the wheat so it's not so hard for
our bodies to digest. That's enough from you. Every batch will have
some layer of imperfection that you know about,
whether your customers know about it or not. And the question is, what
kind of tolerance do you have for that little bit of imperfection? It's really important not
to get too egotistical about the whole process either, because good food is good food, even if it's a little bit less aesthetically pleasing on your bad days. So the question is, should I just toss 20 loaves of bread that
are slightly shorter, or slightly wider, or slightly taller than my ideal perfect loaf? Or should those loaves
of bread still get eaten and cherished for the good
whole grains that they are? I don't think that a
baker 200 or 300 years ago would have just chucked such
a nutrient-dense object out if it didn't turn out well. I think they would have found a use. In fact, they did. That was the poor man's bread. You didn't buy bread 200
years ago like you do today. In fact, the big loaves that
I've described to people before that were historically normal were not golden brown in color. In fact, they looked like
they were burnt to a crisp from the outside because
the loaves were so big that they took a long time
to bake in wood-fired ovens, which are not known for their
perfect consistency of heat. And so the resulting loaf was dark. People actually chiseled
away at the crust, removed the crust, and
just ate the insides, which is an interesting sidebar to justify those crust-less
experiences that your kids have, except that's not a crust
when it's sandwich bread, at least I don't think so. Crust have to actually
be crusty to be a crust. And if you don't like the
super crusty crust, I get it. Although the ones that we make on our artisan loaves are really nice. You know, texture's just
something that we don't seem to be exposed to all the time in food. So oftentimes as kids
we are given soft mush and then more soft mush as we get old. And then something that's
got a little texture is almost like a foreign entity. I promise you that if you
are one of those people that hasn't really incorporated
texture into your cooking that you might find a whole
new joy in experiencing texture once you get used to it and
know how to use it properly. So I'm scaling these out
to a particular weight. We have done other things
that allow me by myself, for instance, to make a
fair amount of breads. I got to be honest with you. We're not going to pay
the bills around here making 10 loaves of bread. And do the math. 10 loaves of bread, even
if I sell 'em for $7, by the time I pay for ingredients,
utilities, and all that, it's not really enough to make a living. And so one of the ways in
which we do make more bread, enough to make a living,
is we have some tools so that we don't need an
army to make 100 loaves. I'm scaling these to a level that my dough divider will take. So my dough divider will
handle batch sizes of 16. I'll drop it in a little later, and it's going to divide
16 loaves of bread for me in a matter of minutes. Whereas by hand it would take potentially 20 to 30 minutes to do
the same amount of work. Our bread loaves are 800 grams, which is roughly two pounds,
just shy of two pounds. And see how stretchy this dough
is coming out of the mixer? So I can reach under it. And so as I'm doing this I guess I'll talk a little bit about how
when you're pulling dough out of the mixer and trying to cut it, the key is to not grab it with your hands, but rather to pretty much
grab it with your wrist. So I'm gonna go underneath the dough and then pull up with my whole arm. And here you can see the
strength of the gluten. Then putting it in the bin is kind of like unpeeling it. It's not just like turn and go. The dough will stick to you. It's kind of like this weird
technique of unpeeling it. So when people first
start, they get discouraged 'cause they'll watch me
do this somewhat quickly. And within a moment
they're covered in dough, they can't get it off their hands, they can't grab it out of the mixer. They can't seem to do anything without just getting frustratingly messy. And that is the life of a mixer. We're a little bit
behind on folding dough. It's 10:30. I'd like to get to shaping
by noon at the latest. So we've got to get
three folds in right now, basically 10:30, 11:00, 11:30. And then by noon, this
dough should pretty much be where I want it for shaping. The whole point in folding
dough is to stretch it, strengthen those gluten strands, give the dough more structure so that it stands up
better as we shape it. So I'm going to pull the
dough up and stretch it to its max before it breaks. You don't want it to
break during this process. And I'm turning it and stretching
it in all three directions that I can sort of stretch it. And I'm done. Just see how stretchy this dough is. If you're baking and your
dough's not stretching like this, you should be asking yourself why, 'cause you don't have very well-developed dough at the point. And that's definitely a first good step to producing great bread, is
getting it well developed. If you're a cake maker, or a pie maker, or a biscuit maker, and this is foreign, it's like a mindset change from not developing gluten
to developing gluten. Notice I'm not being
particularly gentle either. So don't be afraid to kind of go after it when you stretch it. Just avoid tearing it. So I'm putting my hands in the side, trying to get underneath the dough. I'm again using, my entire base of my hand is almost like a shelf for the dough. I'm not gripping it so
much as I'm scooping it. Stretching and then dropping. So to break this process down even more, there's multiple ways to do this. I'm going to stretch this way and over. You can do a variation
which a lot of people around here like doing,
which is backwards. I'll show you. You can actually grab the dough
from the middle of the block and pull upward, and it's
going to pull the edge, and you can fold forwards over that edge. So a different way of achieving
essentially the same result. You're still stretching
and folding it onto itself. Between every fold I'm rotating the bin. So I'm getting it from both ends, and then I'm getting it sideways. That's pretty much all I can stretch it. You really only want to stretch to the point of no diminishing return. So after a certain amount of stretches the dough's going to get too tough and you're not really going to be able to stretch it without tearing it. The moment that you're tearing it, you are really defeating the whole purpose of stretching it in the first place. So you're breaking your strength. All right. So now to stay organized,
just going to make a little X. By the end all of these
bins will have three Xs to indicate they've
been folded three times. So the second fold is giving
more strength in the dough. In fact, once you get to the second fold you can really start to feel that the dough has more resistance when you're folding it. And that's a good thing. If it's stretching a
little harder than it was, that means that you're
successfully building strength. If it feels exactly like it did, there's a chance you might be folding too early in the process. Folding right out of the
mixer has less of an effect on strengthening than folding later in your bulk fermentation process. So this is the second of three
folds that we're going to do. Yeah, so it's, now this
dough on its third fold is really coming together. I mean, when I did the three folds, it's no longer separating at
all or kind of spreading out. It's really kind of holding
its spot right here in the bin. And it's sort of hard to see visually to the same extent that I can feel it, but I can just feel that it's ready. I'm actually going to leave these bins out and just stack them on this cart. As it goes further in
its fermentation process, with passing moments I get
a little bit more nervous. And it's mainly because I am using a piece of machinery to divide it. At home it's actually,
you don't have to worry as much to the minute. It's when you're working
with your hand you just have, remember no machine matches
up to a human in adaptability. So machines are better for set processes. And for one, the divider
starts to really perform worse if the dough has too
much gas built up in it. It'll start to cut the bread less evenly. And its entire purpose in life is to cut 16 loaves of bread evenly so that I don't have to
measure them out separately. Once that process sort of breaks down then it's completely worthless. So just because you have
machines that do a task doesn't necessarily always
mean you're in a better spot. My particular skill level dividing bread is maybe only off by 10% from
the speed of the machine. We have the dividers here
not really for my benefit, because if it was just me and Amanda we would probably just be
better off dividing by hand. We've done it so much that
we're pretty fast at it. But the divider allows us
to replicate the process with newer staff members
who haven't shaped 10,000, 20,000 loaves. And they can just jump on
and start dividing bread within the right parameters. We still have to do some hand dividing. And they're just learning
at a slightly slower pace on the hand dividing side. The big moment has arrived. It is now time to make loaves. So you got these bins of bread. I pulled this lid off
and it wasn't exploding, so that's good, even
though we're coming to this a little later than I'd like. We're still in good shape. So I'm going to take this
and empty it into the bin. At home you're not going to
have one of these dividers. I sure hope you don't have one of the these dividers
laying around your kitchen. So you just turn over however
much dough you're working with on whatever table surface
you're working on. You might only be making
one loaf at a time, and that's fine. So you'll just do the same
process, except times one. And you'll be done in a couple of minutes. I'll still be here making bread. I would say, if you make bread at home get yourself two Dutch ovens
and make a pair of loaves every time you make loaves. For one, you then have something
to share with someone else because I think part in
the joy of working so hard is letting someone else
tell you how good it was. And if you're anything like we were when we first started making bread, the loaves that we made for ourselves didn't really make it all that far in our house before they were gone. But the other benefit of
making more than one thing at a time is just a
little bit more practice. I mean, two loaves isn't
going to take you much longer than one, but it will give you exactly twice the amount of practice on shaping. It's still not very much. And so if you really, really
want to perfect making bread faster than say a year, which I think if you're baking at home
and you're making bread and you're making bread
with any kind of regularity, let's say twice a week, and
you're making two loaves at a time, I'd say give yourself a year before you start really
getting upset at yourself for making mistake after
mistake after mistake. Because every part requires practice. And the benefit that we
get in the bakery over you is we just get to practice
it hundreds of times at once. So there's really two ways
in which you can get good. You can bake a little bit more just to make the speed
happen a little faster, but understand that it's
going to take some time, and be patient with yourself, view it as a journey that you're on, not just the immediate result of this one loaf of bread you're making. But the other way is figure
out what local bakeries exist in your area and see
if they need some help. Chances are they might take you
on for free to do some work. We do this. And you can learn and practice. We've had people come stay here for a week and just practice making bread with us. So these things are already
divided at 800 grams each. They're in a nice form. They already got some
smooth surface to 'em. And so the normal way of doing
this without a bread divider is you will manually divide
on a scale to 800 grams. And from there it's probably going to be several pieces of dough that you're piecing together
to get to that 800 grams. As you manually divide
more and more and more you're going to get closer
to that ideal number every single time where
you can cut a loaf of bread basically at 800, almost
perfectly precise. That'll take some
practice in and of itself. But when you have multiple pieces of bread you've got to add a step,
and that's pre-shaping. So pre-shaping, just to
really quickly show you, is taking one of these loafs of bread. It can be way shaggier than this. It can be multiple pieces too. And you just take your bench knife, and we're going to round it to develop a nice smooth surface. And so my left hand, or non-dominant hand, the hand that doesn't have my bench knife, I'm completing the circle
of rounding, if you will. So I'm going around counterclockwise, pushing inward as I go,
and then catching it at the 10 o'clock position, and finishing the round with my hand. I go around a couple of times. And this is now a pre-shaped loaf. The thing about our
divider and our process is we figured out how
to get same final result without the pre-shaping. So we're not going to do that
for the rest of the bread. But this is what we used to do with every single loaf
before we used that. So I'm going to sprinkle
the tops with flour. These tops are actually the
outer crust of the loaf. When the divider's pushing the loaf up it's doing something similar to what we're doing when we pre-shape. It's creating some surface tension. And so then you have a nice
smooth surface to your crust, so when you do your forming it all comes together really nicely and you have a smooth
crust all around the loaf. So this part is literally the outside. Before I get going on
shaping, I'm going to go ahead and load my divider with round two. And that way as we run out
I can just get to dividing and we can have another
16 loaves ready to go in a matter of a few seconds. So now I'm shaping. There are so many different ways to shape. I don't know that my way is any better than anyone else's way. But the key is to get a nice
uniform loaf that holds up. So by holds up, meaning at
this stage it keeps its form. And so I'm going to
tighten it a little more. When I say tighten it, what I'm doing is I'm taking the heels of my hands, making as flat of a surface as I can with my thumbs that I can. And I'm pushing the loaf, pushing the dough underneath the loaf and creating more tension at the surface. And Amanda's doing the same over here. I would argue that she's a
stronger shaper than I am. She's just very good at
everything that she does. So now the loaf goes into rice flour so that it doesn't stick
to the form, the banneton. And then it goes into the
form with the seam side up, meaning the side that's going
to be the bottom of the loaf is actually facing up in the form 'cause it's going to be flipped
over onto the baking board. So here, this is the top of the loaf, I'm going to flip it. I'll stretch it into a triangle. I'm going to fold the top over. Then I have these funny ends and I'm going to use them to stitch. This is a shaping
technique called stitching where I'm taking these ends and basically creating layers. This last one I actually overlap. Then I stretch this into that middle hole. You don't really want any huge pockets of air in here as you go 'cause they might actually stay there, creating giant holes in your final loaf. So now I'm going to roll
and tighten as I roll. So this is called the tuck and roll. I'm tucking the dough under
the loaf and then rolling it. So now I'm just creating more tension. Working with this type of bread requires gentle dough handling. Not only do you not really want to disturb the gas that's been
built up in the loaves, but you don't want it to stick to you. They say bakers' hands are a thing once you're dealt with dough enough times it doesn't stick to you. It's just a practice thing, like when you're taking
dough out of the mixer you're sort of letting
it unpeel from your hand as you drop it into a
bin or a mixing bowl. And the same way here, you're
not trying to grab at it. You're still just trying
to scoop it lightly. I'm barely touching it as I handle it. My fingers are resting below it. But I'm not gripping it so much
so that I'm going to stick. And if I started to grip
it, I would too stick like some of you might be
doing at home as you try. And again, this is probably one of the more frustrating aspects of baking is just the dough sticking to your hands and not being able to
get this smooth result. Watching somebody else shape rapidly and get good result after good result, meanwhile you're at home wondering, "Will I ever interact
with dough this way?" And at least you're at home thinking that, and you probably have another
job that pays the bills. Imagine my life in the
beginning of all this when I was wondering if I would ever make a loaf of bread well
and not stick to myself, and I had to use this to make money. So there's always some silver lining. There's a nice thing
not having the pressure of your finances in your
ability to not stick to dough. So take a load off and just
relax your way through this and get a little bit better each time. Soon enough you'll be shaping like a pro. And if you join a bakery
for one or two weeks and volunteer your time, I promise you you'll come out the other end
much better at this process. Chances are you'll shape
more loaves in one day at a bakery than you'll shape in an entire year of baking
for yourself at home. So how do I know that my bread is ready to scale in the first place? It has to have risen. And then you have to start asking yourself some questions like, when do
I want to bake this bread? And how is it going to do its final rise, or the proofing stage? There's two main approaches. One is ambient and the other one is cold. The ambient method means
that once we form the loaves we'd probably wheel the
loaves into the oven room where it's a little
warmer than it is in here. The loaves would proof pretty rapidly, in less than two hours for sure. I would probably bake these closer to an hour and a half from
now to get a similar result. The trade-off is that
it's not very forgiving. You better nail that timing,
better get it just right. And don't expect to have
any fancy ornamental scoring on your loaves, because
trying to cut warm dough will not result in beautiful patterns. At best you'll get some
halfway decent markings that look like whatever you intended them to look in small resemblance form, like distant cousin of
what you actually wanted. So you can probably tell
that we don't do a whole lot of ambient baking, although
I respect the bakers that do. Their worlds are harder than mine where they're having to race the clock and race their sourdough starters or their yeast to the oven. And the fridge is much better for us, and I'd argue for most people, because you can throw
the dough in the fridge and so long as your fridge is working you can forget about it until tomorrow. I say so long as your fridge is working because try throwing huge quantities of warm dough into a fridge
and watch every fridge start to break really quickly. If you're wondering, watching
me use a dough divider, whether it's okay for an artisan bakery to use a piece of equipment
that speeds up the process, I just have a real
simple question for you. Do you want good bread
or do you want bad bread? Because I have too many
people buying bread from me to be able to race the
dough every day by hand. I'm fast, but I'm not that fast. And today is a light day,
so dividing all this by hand wouldn't be that big a deal. But there's days where we're
making three or four times this amount of bread in one day. And for that we just simply
need a little bit of assistance that a device like this provides. If you asked me two
years ago if I would ever have one of these in the bakery, I probably would have
given a really hard no. But at the time I didn't
even have a mixer. So the idea of having a dough divider was almost an unacceptable insult to me as I was hand mixing dough. I actually remember when
we first bought the oven, we were talking to the
person who sold the oven. It's like, "Yeah, so you're gonna want "to buy this, and this, and this." And I just remember thinking to myself, "No, I'm going to mix everything by hand. "I'm going to do everything
the slow old-fashioned way." and somewhere along the line
you start making decisions of, "How can I keep making the bread better, "objectively, but also sleeping?" So how do you know this is ready to scale? It's risen. Double is usually too much. So if your dough is twice
the size of when it started, using I'm looking for about a 50 to 60% increase in overall volume. So take the volume you started with and add half that volume. And so in your bin you should be watching as the level of the dough rises, and you should be getting an idea. It doesn't have to be a bin. It can be a mixing bowl. But you should get an idea
of when it hits that point where it's about 50% larger
than it was when you started. That's usually a good time to scale. If you're baking that day ambiently you might choose to
bring it a little further because you're going to the oven quicker, so you want to get further in
the process before dividing. It all really has a lot
to do with how you bake. But if you're going to go into the fridge, that 50% rule applies. So from here, these
guys are going to end up in the walk-in where they're
going to cool down overnight. They're going to keep
fermenting at a slower pace. They're going to be building
flavor in the fridge. Oftentimes the crust gets
this really cool effect in the fridge where it will end up getting these kind of crispy bubbles that form that only happen if you put
your dough in the fridge. For all those reasons and more, I'm a big advocate of that
cold proofing process. So as I go, I'm applying a
similar principle to this as I do when I do the stretch and folds. Every time that I pull on the dough I'm kind of trying to
stretch it to the max amount that it will go before it
breaks, and then fold it over. So you could think of shaping loaves as that last time that
you're going to stretch them and fold them, because in reality shaping is stretching and folding too. I'm stretching the dough right now. You can see that I can't
stretch it any further. It's going this far and
then it's bouncing back. So then when I stretch sideways I'm also getting to that breaking point. If I pull any further,
the dough will break. See, I can pull it a little further, and it is breaking there. I don't want that happening. Now we bake with pretty wet dough. Our dough is hydrated in the 80% range. And this is also sort of something that's an evolution in bread. If you go back into your family's history and find the closest
person in your lineage that baked bread and shared
a recipe with your family. Hopefully that's you, but
maybe it's your grandma or someone even further back. And maybe you'll find a recipe for bread that's in the 50s or 60%
range hydration wise. Those are stiff doughs. And so people talk about kneading bread. The way we knead bread is really
just that stretch and fold. It's a pretty gentle process. It's not too difficult
from a labor standpoint. But when you're dealing
with stiffer doughs, it's not that the bread is worse. It's different. It's more dry. And so most bakers don't like
that type of bread as much. But it's so stiff that it requires real kneading in order to develop. Our demand grew over the
last couple of months. And so we brought bakers
that used to work markets on Saturday into the bakery on Saturdays. I'm baking this on Monday. And this is two day old bread. It hasn't been baked yet, so
it's not two day old bread. But it's two day old fermenting bread. It's completely possible to extend your sourdough process
longer, up to three days even. But every time that you change the timing, the whole routine has
to change along with it. We've typically baked our bread
the day after we shape it. This bread is two days after we shaped it. And it's so that we can
have Sunday off, off. We'll do things like projects in the garden and that kind of thing. That's our off time. And really anything that sort of breathes a little bit of life back
into us that's not baking. We put a lot of effort into
what we do in the bakery. A lot of it's very precise. A lot of it's sort of mentally taxing. And even though we have a
lot of passion around it, you've got to find fuel for that passion. For me at least, I think this
is different for everybody, I like to be fueled with just new knowledge or new learning. So our latest kick is the garden. We're working on that. And that basically translates into, well, I'm working on the garden now and I'm going to learn something
cool from nature probably. And that's going to cause some changes or some inspiration in the bakery. And so in that way we
sort of recycle energy. 'Cause if the only think you're doing, the common thing out there that people say is if you're starting a business all you can really do
is work on the business. And to some extent that's true,
especially in the beginning. We wanted to build a garden years ago, but we're just kind of
getting after it now 'cause the last few years have
been all about the bakery. What I noticed in the past season though is that I really needed to
get some external stimulus in order to keep having
energy to do the same routines better, and better, and better over time. You know, the motivation
has changed over time. At the beginning it was good enough for me to know that people
would come on Saturday, even though we were working 24 hours, to just buy the stuff we baked. And that was the fuel that
kept us going and going. Now we know people are
going to come on Saturday. They come every Saturday,
I can't get 'em away. They just keep coming
back, which is great. But we need some other fuel in order to keep all
of these people happy. Because if we're not fed,
we don't have anything to give when feeding others,
quite literally with food. The issue with two days versus one is figuring out when to scale this bread so that it doesn't overproof,
even in the fridge. I'm touching it right now and it seems to still have a decent amount of spring, a decent amount of life to it. I'm hoping that it turns
out just a little bit better than last Monday where it had
seemingly a little less life. And then I couldn't
quite get the aesthetic. So the bread was delicious, but it didn't have kind of our iconic
artistic flair at the end because it didn't have enough
energy still in the loaf. If you look at this dough,
it's like a ball of energy. But it's a finite ball of energy. So the starter in here is fermented and we've tried to manage the temperature so that when it hits the
oven it still has a burst and let's the bread rise. If you catch it at the wrong time, the bread will rise but it
won't rise quite as far. It'll be a little flatter. And so then when I'm
trying to get that ear, that bakers ear which you can see in this bread that's been left over here, this ear, it won't happen. Some of the fancy designs
that we put in at the end, these are meant to be kind of the reflection of all
the work that we've put on the inside of the loaf
that you can't really see. So we spend a little time
with these guys before just popping them in the oven. So I've got them on boards. And if you were in just
about any other bakery, for the most part, bakers
that are working at volume at hundreds of loaves a day aren't going to do much more than just put a slash through
all these really quick. 30 seconds, in the oven, done, move on. I've got four ovens to load. By the time I load the fourth one it'll be back to number
one, and I can keep going. We add a layer here. So I'm going to spray all these down. And by no means am I the best
person at this job anymore. There was a time where I was. And on Mondays it's me,
because I need practice too. I can't just be doing business
administration all the time. I've got to get in here
and practice my craft. But I have hired somebody
who works this role and does a far better job. She's literally an artist. If she wasn't doing this I imagine she'd be doing some artwork. All these stencils, she's made over time. So I bought her some stencil paper and she's just been making
these cool stencils over time. So this is just a simple proof stencil. Always replace your razor blades. These things don't cost very much. I don't even know if one
razor blade costs a penny. We buy them by the thousand
pack for a few dollars. And after one round of baking
loaves, the blade does dull. So I'm just going to rotate this one. I can probably get one
more life out of it. This is called a Wire Monkey lame. You can look these guys
up online, Wire Monkey. They decided to get into the business of making a more
functional lame for bakers. This is the traditional lame
that you'll find on Amazon. What's annoying is that
once I get going with this, the razor blade's going to fall off in a few loaves. So it's not very practical. The design of those lames doesn't prevent the baker from using
the back of the blade. And the thing about these blades is if you catch the back of the blade it will actually tear up your score. You really only want to be using the front part of the blade. So this score opens up the
loaf, creates that ear. It allows the loaf to rise upward. What happens if you don't score is as the bread rises in the oven it will find the weak point in the loaf, which often is on the sides,
and burst out the weak point. So if you don't do this cut, you'll find that your loaves look like Ts
instead of like a nice oval. So I've got these done. I'm going to put them back
on the rack momentarily. Doesn't seem like where they would go, but we're going to load two
ovens at once instead of one. And the key to pretty much
all kitchen work is batching. So rather than loading one oven at a time, I'm batching this activity. By doing so I'm going to
just be a tad more efficient. You might be wondering
what this magic dust is that I'm putting on the boards. It's kind of cool because
it's actually the stuff that was not included in the flour that we got milled for us. So it's still that same
flour blend that we're using in our bread, but it's the
15% that's been sifted out. So it's mostly wheat bran. We use primarily a Type 85 flour. What that means is it's like 85% of the full wheat berry is intact. All parts of the wheat berry are there but the millers have sifted
out the biggest chunks of bran, that outer coating of the wheat berry. Now what does bran do in nature? It actually prevents the
germ of the wheat berry from germinating until the right season. So it acts as a moisture barrier so that moisture can't get in too quickly as that wheat has not
tumbled onto the ground and is turning into new seed
for the next crop of wheat. So eventually water does get in. But we're actually using
bran in the same exact way. It's in a powdered form now. But we're using it as a
barrier between the board and the wet dough that
we're putting on it, so we can slide the dough into the oven without it sticking to the board. The result of not using
bran is really ugly and I don't want to share it with you. We've been there, we've done that. A lot of people use cornmeal. And I don't know about you, but I just don't need
another use for corn. I think there's plenty of uses for corn. I'd rather stick with
wheat and not introduce some sort of corn into this wheat product. We're actually able to get
that bran as a byproduct from our mill 'cause they sift it out of the flour that they produce for us, and then they don't
know what to do with it. It's good for some animal food. But we can actually use it right here. So we just request that they make separate bags of bran for us. And as we need it, we use it. We end up using a lot of powdered forms of flour that help with moisture. Flour really does trap
moisture pretty well. It's why people dust their
dough on the tabletop so it doesn't get too wet and sticky. The rice flour that we're
using on top of these loaves has a similar overall function to that, except rice flour traps
moisture differently than wheat flour does. It doesn't dust off. So if I used regular flour here on top the stencil wouldn't really hold. So right after we remove it from the oven it would just kind of dust off. But for whatever reason, rice flour has more of a sticky effect. We also use rice flour on our bread forms. So rice flour is what's
preventing the dough from sticking to the bannetons when it's living in the bannetons. We could use bran for that as well. But we choose to use rice
flour because of its color so that we don't end up with
this weird layer of brown all around the loaf that people
then ask us what that is. Just the way that things are right now, we already once in a while get
questions from new customers. One person in particular bought
a multigrain loaf from us and stuck it in her freezer for a week. No problems there. She took it out a week
later and thawed the loaf. But I don't think she
regularly bought artisan bread. And she began to get concerned with things that she was observing on her bread that came directly out of the freezer. So she noticed that the
bread had a white top. And it was actually the rice flour that I was dusting on it the week before when I was baking it. But she had sort of
forgotten that that was there when she bought the loaf and was terrified that that might be mold
coming out of the freezer. And so I explained to her
that it was rice flour. And she was satisfied. But then she turned her
loaf over and she noticed that there was a coating
of almost a yellowish, brownish, orangish thing on the bottom. It's like, "Oh, that's the bran "and that's so that it doesn't
stick to the baking boards." But just another note to
the sort of artisan nature of our role in a bakery like this. You don't see the bran residue in an industrial baked product because it's typically baking in a baking pan, not directly on a stone. And further more, the
larger the bakery is, the more likely that the
oven that they're using, even if they're baking artisan loaves, has something called a loader. It's this big conveyor-type thing that protrudes from the
oven, you put loaves on it, and then you just slide
it in and slide it out. No bran needed. And so the larger the bakery
is that you bake from, the less likely you're going to see any kind of a moisture residue, moisture barrier residue
at the bottom of your loaf. This functional score's
going to give us a nice ear. The ear's going to match the
shape of the curve that I cut. So you can manipulate how your ear looks based on how you score. Some bakers score at a slightly
different set of angles. So each oven load is 12 loaves. When we first bought the bakery we had this pizza oven that
didn't have steam injection. It wasn't as wide as this one so you could fit two boards, not one. So it could fit eight loaves at a time. Since it wasn't a bread
oven it also wasn't sealed. So as you were baking, oh, and the thermostats were busted. And the wiring was all messed up and crazy over the course of however
many 20 years of its life, people tinkering with it. So the effect on us was that we could bake eight
loaves in an entire hour. And the entire time we
had to stand at the oven. So you're probably doing
something similar at home to what we were doing
with our original oven. You can either put a
pan of water in the oven that will evaporate. I personally prefer that method now that I know a little more. But I didn't know that in the beginning. And so we took a weed sprayer that you would find at Home Depot, sanitize it, clean it all
out, filled it with water, and we would spray that
water into the hot oven to generate steam and then hope that it didn't all evaporate out of the all the pores in the oven. We definitely got ashy looking loaves. So you can look at this
loaf and see all the shine kind of in that crust layer. And it's sort of present in each one, a little bit of a sheen on top. Without steam you end up getting something that's sort of dull and ashy. There's no shine to it. Final round, I've released the steam. These are little dampers that, they're like a little valve
at the back of the oven that lets air either
get trapped in the oven when it's closed or flow freely out to the hood when it's open. I've released that air,
which releases the steam that was trapped in that oven chamber. And without the steam now the crust can develop and gain more color. When the steams there it
sort of protects the crust from actually browning too quickly while also providing that
deep color to your loaf. Without the steam you
get this kind of ashy, almost gross looking brown. And with the steam you
get this gradient shine that starts from a light
brown and goes all the way to the darkest acceptable
shade of brown before burnt. Pretty happy with those. I would say that overall
we did a lot better on the two day proof
this week than last week. We got nice ears on most of these. And you can tell just by the shape of the loaf that the
fermentation was solid. The loaf is kind of even
and it's just a risen form of the shape that we tried to give it when putting them together. If a loaf is too tall or too flat, a lot of people confuse
when they're first starting that oh, they get a really
nice ear, really sharp ear, really tall loaf, but
oftentimes the middle is really, really tall
and it contracts the sides so you get a really uneven rise. And that's actually a sign
of it being underproofed. I like the timing of this
one a little bit better. And the funny thing is that
the loaves are slightly darker. So to you, this may be
burnt, I don't know. Everybody's got a different
perception of color. And I sort of wonder how much this sort of mimics our
whitewashing in society in general. We just seem to think
that lighter is better. But when it comes to bread, I disagree. And I really like to push the boundaries of even our customers that are accustomed to a really, really
light brown doughy bread. I don't get it. Because if I let the whole loaf look like this really light portion here, then when I go to poke
it, there's no crust. It's not there. And I'm not really going for that. So there are a lot of people that want their loaf that color. And I guess for them it's probably best to stick with the sandwich bread until you figure out the
intention of this artisan bread. Remember that this is
essentially like the child of that bread that we
bought 100 years ago, that really, really large month-long loaf that came in black because it
baked so long to get to done. This is the modern version of that. And so it's not going to be too light. This is the light part of my oven. And here's what I mean. I can't send this out into the world. You might look at it and like it. But see how that's just
really spongy still. That's not a crust. If you don't like it, well, fortunately there's a lot of
bread out there in the world. We're just trying to make it
the way we like it really. And we hope to share what
we like with the world and hope that enough people like it too.
10 minutes in, and I find this fascinating! It’s incredible to see bread production at this level, and hilarious to see the starter batch size for this recipe was about 16 qt! Thank you for the post.
Your friend spoke non-stop with such interesting information. A really enjoyable guy to listen to!
Love it! Trulky fascinating to see a bakery from the inside.
As a European it's hilarious how fascinated he is that 1 Kg of Water equal exactly 1 L and how convenient that is haha.
Really enjoyed that video, just subscribed and looking forward to more videos from him.
Here, take all the upvotes. This video was insanely interesting. Thanks so much!
Hell yea. Thank you for this. I live in Phoenix and am going to get some loaves. Would be interested in seeing if they’re open to have me come in and watch the process firsthand as well. Thanks again.
Great video! Watched the whole thing, didn't even think to look at how long it was.
This is a great video. Inspiring dude. Thanks
Have had Proof Bread from the farmers market here in downtown Phoenix, we love it! such good quality at a great price!