- 10 kilos of water 10.8 I should say. This mix is gonna be different than the rest of the ones
that I've done so far in that there won't be that first part where we just do flour and water. That's called an autolyse. When we just did the flour and water and let it sit for a little
while before we added the rest, we're releasing enzymes and
actually strengthening the dough for ourselves later. I just caught myself in a habit moment. This used to be our fridge two months ago, and I went in here for eggs,
and it's 78 degrees in there. I don't think that they're there. You know, it's Monday when our ingredients get really low and we better get to the
store otherwise tomorrow there will not be enough
ingredients for us to do our job. So I've got all my wet ingredients going into the bowl first. I personally prefer this. When you're hand mixing, you
can do dry first if you prefer. I still do wet first and it's only because if you ever do graduate to
a mixer from hand mixing, you'll find that it's really really hard to incorporate the flour well, if it's going into the bottom of the bowl, it's likely gonna clump up on the sides. And you're going to get
shattered dough of dough clumps. I had a new guy who's on
the mixer about a month ago, do this in an experiment
to see if he could shave a few minutes off the process in some way. And he called me over and he's like, I don't know what I did. But this dough is really clumpy and it was in this big mixers
like 88 sandwich loves, and I sat there for an hour manually working out all the clumps, the dough. So water first, you'll thank me later for following that advice. This is a different blend of
flour that we use in our bread. This is the same blend of flour that we're using in the
sandwich bread dough and in our pastries. I now have just sugar
and salt to deal with. These are English muffins
that I'm making now. These guys work on a
slightly different process. We ferment them cold in the fridge and so basically this dough
is gonna have enough mass to wear, it's gonna be warm
when it goes in the fridge but it's gonna cool down and sort of ferment a little bit slower then we do our other stuff. We really won't readdress
the stuff that I'm mixing now until tomorrow again. The reason we don't do that
autolyse, in English muffins, is it's a stiffer dough. So by stiffer I mean it's
got less water in it. And the less water your dough has, the less beneficial that autolyse is. You end up just with a mess of clumps when you try to just
combine flour and water with not enough water, and so that stretchiness that
you get from a long autolyse and artisan breads goes
away with a stiffer dough. But stiffer doughs have their place typically buns croissants. They all have stiffer doughs
for for different reasons. So when I don't autolyse something, it means I can just put
everything together. I'm gonna start with my wet ingredients which are already in the mixer. And then I'm moving to my dry ingredients. So now I'm adding sugar. I'm making 360 English muffins here. So yes, this looks like
a lot of sugar going in but now you gotta divide it into 360 to actually have the real content. So here we're gonna go
1600 grams divided by 360. Each English muffin has
four grams of sugar. We don't really bake very sweet. When we do, we see the same
response that the whole world sees to sugar. Just a lot of people rushing
to get their hands on sugar. But we actually prefer the balance. There's something really
nice about sourdough and that it's acidic. When you add the sourdough to
something like a croissant, and you throw in a
little bit of sweetness, you can really play with
flavor in a way that, that yeast in croissant can never do. So you have that complexity
and richness in flavor. The whole grains do that as well. So white flour is incredibly boring. It's bland, it really
doesn't have any taste. There's not a whole lot of variation between one white flour to the other. It just tastes like starch. But once you get in the whole
grains, the flavors change. There's a reason why we use in our breads, like six different flours. And it has nothing to do with Oh, we just wanna use six different flours and everything to do with flavor. One of the flowers we're using
in our brand is called durum. We don't use very much of it. It's actually typically
used in pasta making but it's got a really rich flavor. It grows very well here in Arizona, which gives us a whole
lot of reason to use it. And because it's a whole grain durum, it's just got tons of flavor. Along with the white snore that we use. There's a nuttiness, there's all kinds of complex layers of flavor in the bread that you won't see in white bread. You won't see in industrial
whole grain bread either. And that just goes back to milling. So I didn't add everything. If I added everything,
my mixer would overflow. In this initial stage. I gotta let these
ingredients combine a little. I also haven't added
butter to this dough yet 'cause again, I'm gonna
add it at the very end. I had measured out the sugar and salt and then I had actually
combined it in this flower bag with the remainder of the flour. And I do that so that the sugar doesn't interact with
the water all on its own in big clumps 'cause again, even white sugar has a
tendency to clump together if not sifted. So if you've ever wondered
why your recipes call for sifting sugar, this is why, so that it goes into the mixer smooth and you get a nice smooth dough at the end instead of a dough that is smooth in parts and then sugar clumpy in others. Still need to add butter to this mix. It takes two soft butters, actually takes 850 grams of butter. This is one pound which is
450 grams times two is 900. So right here I am adding
an extra 50 grams of butter to your 360 English muffins, forgive me. This mix is looking great now, I'm gonna let it rest for a minute. I don't really like to
take stuff out of the bowl right after it's done mixing. I like to wait five to 10 minutes. In that time the dough relaxes and is far easier to work with. When it's just done
mixing that those proteins that are binding the dough
together, are just really tough. So when you go to try
to pull some and cut it, it resists and so you
can't get as much dough. So we're looking for 14,400 per bin. I need three bins. If you don't use a scale at home and if you're still
baking with tablespoons and teaspoons and cups. Even if you wanna stay on
pounds and ounces, that's fine. But one area that I wouldn't compromise is I would not do volumetric measurement over weight based measurement. Unless you just truly
don't like free time. Using a scale doesn't take
a whole lot to get used to. You just have to find a scale
that's the right capacity for what you're trying to do. These scales that we use
are high capacity scales so they can take more weight. The smaller scales that we have
around here, like that one. It only goes up to like 20 pounds or so. So it's not as well suited
for bigger batches of dough but quite perfect for at home. You can find that scale on Amazon and have it delivered in a couple of days. It's not really all that expensive either. But you'll love working with a scale once you get used to it. You don't have to take out
all those measuring devices which individually have to be washed. You can just go from one
ingredient to the next and you can get much more precision through weight based measurement. Even something like a cup of flour. You don't really know how
compressed that flour is. So it's always a question of, do I do a cup of flour
really hard compressed? Do I do a cup of flour that's got a mound? Do I flatten the top of the Cup? How much flour is it really? Weight takes all of that
guesswork out of the picture. You end up getting the same
exact amount of flour each time, by the same exact amount
of water each time. Weight is a pretty true way
of dealing with ingredients and highly recommended. I don't really know of any
bakers, not a single one, that at any kind of a professional level that are baking with
volumetric measurements. Those are 14 four and in theory I mixed
enough for three 14 fours. So we'll see how close I got. Ouch 12,100 so in that
whole batch of dough somewhere I'm missing 2000 of something, making me wonder is
something missing entirely? One of the issues of working on your own. Is if you're not careful,
you'll forget little details. For instance, I'm making
360 English muffins. My recipe card is a 120 recipe card. And when it came to butter,
for whatever reason, I just looked at the recipe card and took the 120 measurement
for butter, not the 360. So I should have multiplied
my recipe card by three and I didn't. If you do the math on that, that equates to roughly 1800
grams of butter that's missing and that's how short I was
on that last block of dough. So I know that if I now add the butter, sub optimally Of course at this point, it's fine butter is
actually the one ingredient that I can get away with this on. Just because the way in which
butter is added to dough, so I'm not really gonna
run into much trouble other than having to reclaim my mixer and I am a little worried at this point 'cause the dough has risen as to whether it's going
to stay in the bowl. It's already also very well developed. So I gotta be careful
I'm not gonna put this dough on high speed. Just gonna try to get what
it needs in and move along. I don't need to bring
this mixer into high speed at all to incorporate it well. I just need enough time for it to do so. What's gonna happen to this
really well developed dough as I add butter to it, is it will actually start to come undone, and then kind of come back together. So you can already see that
the dough is starting to separate in places where
it was one big mass. I suppose just another important note is, did you notice that I did check. So I mean, it would have
been easy enough to just scale that into a bin not weigh it since it was the third bin, just put it in the fridge and move on. No one would have known until finally the English muffins
come out drier than normal, different texture than normal with one third of the butter content as they normally have per muffin. Another way that that the
weight based scaling helps is I know how much total
weight I need in the bin and if it's not adding up, then I can backtrack and figure out well what did I do wrong and still adjust and that's kind of what I
mean by baking is not easy to adjust to, when you make a mistake, you really have to almost set
yourself up with these checks. And so, one of the easy checks
is just simply have a scale and make sure everything
adds up mathematically. If you don't like math, you're gonna get a lot
of practice when baking. We will for sure get the
English muffins rolled out. So the ones that are in
that mixer are for tomorrow. They're gonna go and live
in the fridge for a day. Once they're ready to come out, they're gonna be literally
ready to pop out of their bins. So they've fermented to that level. So we're gonna make some
English muffins now. For this I need a
heavily flowered surface. We're gonna roll out 360
English muffins on this table, space is gonna be three bins. So I'm drawing a line in the flour, gonna measure out what I know to be the right length on my ruler
that I can barely read anymore. So there's that block and continue the line over there. To the best of my ability, I just try to just do
one process at a time to the point that that
process is completed and then I move on to the
next, so in this case, it's turning all the bins out
before I do anything else. Now that I have all the bins turned out, I'll clean all three of
these bins the same time. This product is kind of unique
in the way that it's handled. We don't really handle
anything else in this bakery, in a similar way with
heavy with the flour. It's kind of two schools
of baking, oftentimes. One school of baking says, I'm
gonna use flour on my table to keep things sort of sticking. Another School of baking says I'm gonna use water on my table to keep things from sticking. When I first bought the bakery, everything was the flour method. And it sort of ended to a
lot of flour on the floors all the time. A lot more cleanup, and
dryer dough in general. The English muffins though,
have stayed on that old method 'cause we think that
they're best this way. They're not really designed
for any other method. So I'm gonna stretch it across the table. And I'm gonna try to get to those lines. And I'm gonna do so
while keeping the dough as level as possible. So I end up with
uniforming English muffins. With this French rolling
pin, this kind of flat pin, I can actually put body weight force into it and it's one of the reasons
why I prefer this style rolling pin to the ones
that have the rolly handles. Those have their place and I think most people prefer them. But I also think most
people don't use them daily. It's easier to get the the
right amount of pressure when you can leverage
all your body weight, instead of just your wrist. This is probably the
process that's least changed over the years. And I think it's because no one really makes English
muffins this way that I know of. Square in form for one,
and sourdough for two and also just generally
this very unique formula, that's not necessarily even close to a lot of English muffin formulas. I can kind of correct the sides for my corners. And once I bump the sides up to straight for whatever reason it's a little easier to observe any variance across this block. I know it's fine this way 'cause the table actually
has a split in the middle. And that's 25 I only need 24 but this is the way that
you can get in trouble. So I'm currently right on the money, 21 I don't really like that, I
like to have a little buffer 'cause if my measurements
off on cutting these by a few millimeters, then I'll end up losing
a whole row of them. So I like to be a little bit over. Some of the way in which I'm handling this is because I've done this before and so if you're ever
trying to roll out dough evenly across the table, just
know that like anything else, I mean, it might just be
rolling dough out on the table, but it's still a physical action that requires a degree of skill,
that gets better over time so if you're trying this,
and it's not working out the way that it seems to
be working out for me, just know that I've had
plenty of those moments where it also didn't work out. It's called a BC cleter or at
least that's what we call it. Basically, I'm gonna open this up to a width where every opening
is exactly three inches. I'm gonna close it. And then I can trace my dough and get all the lines that I
need to cut these guys out. So squares are now emerging, that will be our English muffins. Now I'm taking semolina, which is just another
form of wheat, it's durum that's been milled coarsely, and I'm spreading it on the sheet ends. When we first did this,
I used the BC cleter to mark the lines of the English muffins and I could apply more
pressure with it and cut, although the issue with this is I'm trying to create a
product that's square and if I put a lot of
pressure with those rollers, I'm gonna end up pulling
the dough along with me. And so I won't get squares, I'll lose some of this uniformity. So by tracing it and then
going through the bench knife, I'm actually taking the
back of my bench knife and sliding forward and so my only interaction
with a dough is a cut, slide cut, slide cut slide. For the most part, it
stays still and in place and the integrity of the squares is kept. If you make round English muffins, then every single English muffin has a little waist attached to it. And then somewhere along the
way, it just became our thing. We actually have roll dividers, so our roll divider could
produce 36 rolls perfectly round really quickly, so it probably
would make more sense to make these rounds but this
is just the way we do it and this is probably the way
that we'll continue doing it. 'Cause again, this product in particular is just not standard in any way. So at home, you're probably not
making a whole tables worth. It really doesn't matter. Don't be intimidated by the amount of dough that
I have on the table, just know that you might have more time
in between each task. You don't have to run around like a nut all around the bakery going from one task to the other. I mean, there's nothing stopping
you in your home kitchen from sipping on a nice
glass of wine while you bake or just in general, relaxing. A lot of people that bake at home will, watch something in the background. They'll take their bowl as they're mixing their
dough in the morning and just sit in front
of the TV for a moment and wind down as they're mixing by hand and to be honest, who do we follow? As a bakery, we have a lot of
people in the general public that are looking to us and trying to get tips
and tricks of what to do. But we also have to gain inspiration from people within the craft and it's not always other bakeries. In fact, people sitting in their home, working on one thing at a
time, can get insanely creative and come up with things
that we wouldn't think of just because those things
aren't necessarily by default, as efficient as we need
them to be in here, but often we are taking
ideas from a home baker and reworking them and trying
to apply them at scale. And so as a home Baker, just know that just because I'm working
on an entire table of bread and you might see me go from
product to product to product, and you might not see me, nervous at all. You might see me just comfortable, because I've done it a million times. It certainly has no bearing
on you being successful and you have to overcome
that initial anxiety whenever you do something new. Even if you've baked a fair amount before, consider this, at home if
you bake one loaf a week, you're only practicing at
a level of one loaf a week. So be forgiving enough with
yourself to understand that you're only practicing at
a level of one loaf a week, you're going to be
uncomfortable for a little while before it becomes routine. And if you only bake one loaf a week, I would encourage you to
think about making more and giving away to your
neighbors or your friends, giving them away at
whatever state they're in. 'Cause I guarantee you'll
find encouraging words from the people around you. And if you think that we weren't there, you're really joking or you're
just trying to mask over that anxiety in a different
way because we were there but we already owned
this place being there. And it was pretty stressful to be honest. We bought a bakery. We had never really baked before. We just knew we wanted to do this. I don't know how to explain why we knew we wanted to do this, but there was just a gut feeling that it was the right thing to do and I'm thankful that I took
that gut feeling to heart that first year when we were
making these English muffins or we were making different versions of the products that we make today, I had no idea why things were happening the
way they were happening. I had no idea why one day, I would seemingly do the same things as I did the day before and I would get completely
different results. I didn't know all the
little places to look all the little variables to scan, and you won't know that either at home until you learn
and by learn I mean until you do enough and fail enough to figure out why you're
failing in a particular area and what's interesting is
it might be nothing like what you thought it was,
that was causing the air. I'll tell a story about how we came to finally
produce a sourdough croissant that looked the way that I wanted it to. If you've ever looked on
the inside of a croissant, it's supposed to have this
beautiful honeycomb pattern. It literally looks like a
honeycomb structure on the inside. It's open, its airy, it's flaky. You can see all the layers. It's really like a work of
art when done perfectly. And it took well over a
year for the first honeycomb that I ever produced. So the first year of
making croissants was, in some ways, failure after failure after
failure after failure, at least in my eyes. The great news though, was that no one else seemed to
mind the way that I did. We were making a lot of these things. I mean, I remember making these croissants that didn't have a honeycomb pattern. I remember selling like 100 at the Downtown Phoenix market on a Saturday during the peak season. I remember coming back to
the bakery just perplexed as to why it is that
everybody was so obsessed over these croissants didn't even have this honeycomb pattern on the inside. But it turns out that not
everyone eating your bread looks at it the same
critical way that you do. And perhaps the person that's used to going and buying Wonder Bread, is going to still appreciate that less than perfect in your eyes, croissant, or bread or whatever else
it is that you're doing while you're still anxious and intimidated about the process. So if you try this at home, you're probably gonna be
working on half size sheet trays and so, a good one tray
batch would be 12 of them. If you try them at home, you might actually do
these on a griddle top and flip them on a griddle top to bake them more traditionally because your home oven will not really produce the same result. So the typical English muffin. The way that it's baked is
they'll prove from this point and then you'll take these things and you'll put them on a griddle. And you'll bake them for a
few minutes on each side. I would start at a really hot temperature, probably medium high on the griddle and I would try them for, I would bake the first side
until you can take them and flip them and they're
solid enough to flip. So right now if I try to flip them, they're doughey obviously, they're raw. But as they bake for five to 10 minutes, they'll get solid enough to flip and that's how you know
it's the right time to flip. Right now the way that we're
baking is we only flip them once on each side but more
traditionally English muffins, are flipped multiple times,
like one, two, three. So one side gets heat two times while the other side gets heat once. So in other words that first side that's going to get heat
twice, you don't want to cook it all the way to
the point that it's black, you wanna leave room for a flip. And the benefit is you're
going to get a nice, consistent ring like you
expect on an English muffin. The reason you flip three
times is this block of dough, when it's in the oven like this, it will color on the bottom
but the top will rise and it will rise so that when you flip it, only a circle is actually
interacting with the heat, leaving a circular imprint
on the square which is neat. On a regular English muffin, that's circle you're just
going to get a circular bake. So anyhow, that's why
you flip English muffins three times in the oven so that both sides end up with that circle. We've sort of traded one side circle. That's the bottom for us. And that's mainly because
again we're always managing, five, six processes at a
time and so we decided that having a square baking imprint
at the bottom was acceptable in not having to babysit
a whole nother round of flipping in the oven. I woke up this morning. The first thing I did when
I got in the bakery at 4:30 in the morning was turn on the ovens, remove these from the fridge. These were cut out yesterday, ready to go, humidified in the fridge
and now they're proofing and ready to bake. So while I was planting
a tree this morning, these things were getting
ready to go in the oven. And we'll do that now. We have control in this oven
over top heat and bottom heat. So the top heat is
basically just ambient warm from a baking perspective
and all the heat's really coming from the bottom
stone right now in the oven. We're gonna flip these halfway through to mimic kinda what you would normally do with English muffins on a griddle. Our English muffins are
square, they're sourdough. Their texture is slightly different than a regular English muffin. They're really awesome
for burgers and buns, that kind of thing. But why do we name them an English muffin if they're not a
traditional English muffin? I asked this very question to
the original owner of proof when he came and visited
this past December. That's one of the only
products really haven't changed since I bought the bakery a few years ago. He's like well, "I named them an English muffin because that's what I wanted
people to do with them." So they're called English muffins so that our customers who buy them have an idea of what to do with them. Basically anything you
do with English muffin you do with this, making it
an English muffin, I guess. After that 15 minute interval the English muffins need to be flipped with every minute that
they're in there right now. They are getting more
color on that bottom. And if this takes me too long, I might end up flipping burnt muffins. Always use timers. I know some of you think that
you have timers in your brain. I'm one of those people that just think oh, no problem, I'll get back to it. Wow, Loading. Let's do that. Let's burn some baskets today. I've had a couple crew members
over time, mostly guys. I don't know why, us men and our egos, refusal to use timers. And there is a truth that
you can only remember a few things at a time. I have four processes
going actively right now. I've got two processes going passively. And if I don't keep track
of them, I'm gonna get lost. It's like right now a big risk factor is those English muffins I had reset the timer and if I walk away 'cause I get distracted right
now, they're sure to burn. So right now all I'm saying in my brain is get to English muffins,
get English muffins. So the point that I'm
grabbing loaves in their forms and sticking forms in the oven, almost. One of the perils of being a baker. No one makes good oven mitts. Can somebody please
find me good oven mitts? Every oven mitt we've ever
bought ends up breaking down to the heat, and you get these holes and then we don't replace
them for weeks or months from this time because oven mitts aren't our
biggest priority around here. Will somebody please design an oven mitt that doesn't do that? I'll be forever grateful. So I see some variance
in these muffins today. They were shaped on Saturday. And we're training some
newer crew members today or at this time. This is very much a handmade process. We roll a big batch of
dough out on the table and what makes them all the same size is consistent thickness on the table, but that's produced by hand. So this one right here, I'm not gonna sell because it's about half the size of the ones that are kind of spec as that individual practices more and more they're gonna figure out
how to roll dough out more consistently so
that all these muffins more or less have the same size. It's hard for people that
are attracted to baking to understand this because oftentimes people that are attracted to baking tend to be hard on themselves by nature, tend to want things to
go in a particular way and the thing about baking is that it never works out that way. Dough is not all that easy to work with and when you're starting,
you really need to be gracious with yourself. Mainly so that you keep baking. If you're a little too hard on yourself, you'll probably give up before you ever achieve
that consistent muffin. And so as a result, also if you're running a bakery, it's not really reasonable to expect that a new person is going
to do everything right. But that doesn't mean that we should settle
for such a simple model that all we're doing is making
sandwich loaves in a factory. This bakery requires a lot of skill in a lot of different areas
for people to work in. And it takes months to learn. So every time we bring somebody new on, they're going through that learning curve, but along the way, a lot of them are like, shocked that they wanna
stay in a bakery role. A lot of them stumbled in
here when they lost a job or were in between jobs to
help out a community baker and then people ended up staying instead of going back to
their corporate world, that they often came from. So I'm flipping these . Yes, this is hot. And you may wanna use a
spatula if you try these. But if you bake them enough
times, for whatever reason, the burning heat just won't
bother your fingers anymore. Oh see caught those like a minute late. That little darkness in color, I hope that my customers who get those which are still, in my
opinion, acceptable, will be gracious enough to understand that the oven has different hotspots. So I'm gonna take this tray that was a little bit darker in general, and I'm gonna put it on
the light side of the oven. How do I know it's the
light side of the oven? 'Cause I use it every day. Your oven might not be on the
right hand side like this, as far as the lights pop. I'm taking the lightest tray
and putting it in the hot spot. And I'm gonna set another
timer here for a few minutes. So I've got 14 minutes here, I've got eight minutes here. I've got 16 minutes here. It's time to get out of this space because we have other
things we need to do. (mixer mixing) That's not from you. This is where time starts to take over. I'm hoping we didn't
go too far with these, looks like we might have. I didn't even hear that
timer from the other room. So you can see that I went
over, just based on the color I like the, fortunately, it's not all of them and they're still within spec. So hopefully our customers
will still accept these. They're not burns. They're just a little bit more golden than I like for an English muffin. And they're starting to edge closer to bun than English muffin but
still within reason. Here's where they're supposed
to be at this second deck. Also a little toasty on the bottom, sadly. So I guess that means that we need for when I'm in here by myself some sort of a loud alarm
that's louder than this oven's timer for me to actually
hear when the mixer is on. That timer was eight minutes and I noticed up here this
timer didn't actually engage, so I turned on a 20
minute timer and I didn't make sure that the lights were
blinking before I walked away so I might have hit it twice by accident. Not quite sure. But now I'm completely
in the wild wild west of trying to determine how long
these loads been baking for. I know those were going eight minutes and I know that I did not come
here when the timer went off because the mixer's noise was too loud. So, based on these, I would say these are
at least five minutes over where I wanted them to be. So let's say that puts us at 13. Let's be a little bit
conservative and say 15. I'm gonna throw four more
minutes on this steam round before we release the steam for the lows. My English muffin disappointment
is already waning, with some incremental
success that's making me feel marginally better about
my burnt English muffins. And I shouldn't say burnt, they're just burnt by my standard. It's like that level that some people notice some people won't. But I'll definitely notice.
Love this kind of video. Thanks for sharing. Tell your friend Jon we love his passion.
Such an awesome video. Jon very much seems like the kind of guy who knows exactly what he's talking about, doesn't bullshit, but is also very supportive. I love the part where he talks about how his newest recruit didn't cut his batch correctly, because while most would be mad at the financial loss, Jon treats failure like a natural part of success - no big deal. That's really cool.
I clicked this video and thought "yeah right 40 minutes I ain't watching that." 40 minutes later I am glad I did.
Awesome looking bread. Big garage =)
Small world- I recognized his hat. I'm a member of Agritopia CSA, and his bread is included in my weekly share. It's good stuff! I've been buying his bread and croissants for years now.
Is your friend single, and also into dudes?
That’s what I would call a 360 no scones. Pro gamer move right there.
I love this kind of content. His talk about failure being key to learning was great. Very inspirational stuff outside of baking.
The thing about bread is that if you're going make some you may as well make a lot.