The day before the market

Thank you.

The market was great! The only reason I didn't sell out was because I made a little too much -- this was my first ever of our monthly winter markets, and I didn't know what to expect.

Thank you. You are very kind but no, I'm not a professional baker, for a whole bunch of reasons. I am just a pragmatic well-organized home baker who somewhat accidentally ended up doing this craziness. In summer I did it once a week! ;)

No special kind at all. My old electric household oven (don't even know the brand, it came with our rental farm) was moved to the garage and gets used only when I need to bake anything over 60 loaves. In the kitchen I have another old electric household oven but this one is slightly better -- a 10 year old convection KitchenAid that we bought on Craigslist for $150. I do bake in two pans, 10-12 loaves per batch, rotating pans regularly and monkeying with temperature.

The worst part for me is NOT not having a commercial oven. Not having a commercial mixer is what's really hard. For now all my breads are mixed by hand, with my 21 year old son and my husband being my live Hobarts while I weigh all the ingredients.

Well, thank you, it did. This is the only reason I continue doing this: the fact that my customers seem to really appreciate my work, in spite of there being two other bread bakers at the market.

Jeff,

I start my doughs the night before, on Thursday, usually in 7 or 8 five-gallon buckets. I do NOT have a commercial mixer yet, so my 21-year old son comes to help me mix the dough. I do the first couple of S&Fs on all of my doughs late at night, before I go to bed. On Friday, I get up early and do the last S&F on all the doughs. For the next 10-12 hours I divide, shape, proof and bake. When I have over 60 loaves, I bake in two household ovens (one in the kitchen and one in the garage), but they are both old and crappy (the better of the two being a 10 year old convection electric Kitchenaid that I bought on Craigslist for $150). I bake 12-loaf batches (6 loaves per tray), rotating my trays regularly.

It takes me about 9-10 hours to divide, proof and bake all of this bread. Late at night, before I go to bed and when the loaves have cooled off completely, I package them in bags and pack them in totes for the market.

I've tried a few different schedules but settled on this one for now as it seems to be the most efficient -- my bread comes out good and doesn't seem to suffer too much from having been baked a few hours before the market while I don't end up too terribly sleep-deprived and overworked.

Thank you for your kind words and for the link. I really enjoyed reading it: Kathy's thoughts re community very much resonate with my feelings.

I've been a customer at the Cuyahoga Valley Countryside Conservancy farmers' market for three years before I, somewhat accidentally, became a vendor. And, I feel, it is my small way of paying back for all the kindness and hard work that our local producers put into making great locally-grown and locally-produced food available to us.

I use all organic flours (locally grown and milled, when possible) and other local organic ingredients which, as much as I can, I get from the local farmers. Without a doubt becoming a part of the local foods community was the best and the biggest thing that happened to me this year. And I'm deeply honored that my customers choose to buy my bread when they have so many choices. That is what keeps me going and what makes me want to keep learning and getting better.

Thank you! I guess I'll have to figure out some way to mail my breads -- many of my friends all over the world would like to have some. ;)

I usually take to the market anywhere from 4 to 7 kinds of bread. I always bring my Russian Corainder-Rye (the dark bread in the picture), Caramelized Shallot-Thyme (front left in the picture) and Calamata Olive-Cracked Black Pepper (front right) breads, these seem to be everyone's favorites. Depending on what produce is available, I make other breads filled with dried or roasted veggies, herbs and spices, such as roasted sweet potato white (it is actually a beautiful golden color), sun-dried tomato-basil or roasted garlic-sweet and hot pepper loafs. For the Thanksgiving market I made savory cranberry bread with dried cranberries, raw chopped onions and a blend of herbs traditionally used at Thanksgiving (in the picture that's the one in the right back corner). I baked 24 loaves of this bread and sold every one of them.

Most of my breads cost $5 per 1-pound (a touch under 0.5 kilo), and my customers seem to be willing to pay this price to get good quality organic locally-made bread. 

Mantana, thank you so much, I'm truly honored.

No, my breads unfortunately are not sourdough -- and I know that on TFL making yeasted doughs is considered cheating. ;) I was just getting ready to start experimenting with sourdough when I got into this baking-for-the-market pickle and had to quickly figure out how to scale my modest home baking to an almost commercial operation. So I never got around to learning to make sourdough and now I seem to never have the time, the courage and the energy all at the same time to start experimenting.

My breads are yeasted but I use very little yeast and long fermentation (15-18 hours). No kneading, just S&F. The results are predictable and good but I'm still looking for ways to improve my crumb.

Hopefully, I will eventually work up the courage to try starting my sourdough.

Nika

Yulika,

Believe it or not, I am a city girl myself, through and through. In fact, it is exactly the fact that I lived most of my life in Moscow (now a city of almost 15 million people!), doing weird intellectual jobs (first as a musicologist and then as a translator) that sent me in the opposite direction of looking for Paradise Lost. I think my country life, which includes growing my own fruits and veggies, doing fiber arts (knitting and felting), making my own butter and sour cream, putting up the harvest and baking bread comes pretty close to idyllic. A LOT better and simpler than it was in Moscow. I wish I had more bookshelf space for books, though. ;)

Re you are not ready to do this. Necessity is the mother of invention, at least it was in my case. A year ago I could not even dream that I'd be making my very modest living by baking bread. And even when I briefly contemplated becoming a vendor at the market, I quickly realized that for me it would be beyond doable, so I gave up on this idea almost as soon as I started thinking about it. But lo and behold, I ended up where I'm doing it anyway. Which to me means that if you're really passionate about something it WILL happen. I know that with small children you really are not yet in a position to start baking for other people but I do wish you that your dream of baking for living will come true. I think it will.

Veggies in the bread. Here's the embarrassing truth: I do NOT have formulas for them. I have a few master formulas that I use for my straight bread, and all the other breads are based on them. Every time I end up with a 50-pound bag of shallots or a bushel of tomatoes kindly donated by a friend I start thinking, ok, how will I put THIS into my bread?! That's actually how my [now very popular] caramelized shallot-thyme bread came about, from a 50-pound bag of shallots that were going bad. Some veggies I saute in olive oil and, most of the moisture having been driven out of them, I add them in place of oil in my recipe (together with the oil they where cooked in). Some veggies, like tomatoes or peppers, go in dehydrated, in which case they are treated like dry ingredients. Onions or scallions oftentimes go in the dough raw, chopped. Potatoes, sweet potatoes or butternut squash go in baked or boiled. Depending on the particular vegetable, its amount and how it was prepped, I do occasionally have to hold back some of the water from the recipe.

Just to give you an idea, I make an onion-dill rye using the formula very similar to the one I posted for my coriander-rye (it doesn't have honey, which is substituted with water). [Side note: the smell of this bread baking makes me laugh every time: it smells like vodka and herring should be mixed right in the dough! :)] For two 1-pound loaves or 1 1-kilo loaf I take a large bunch of dill and a large onion and pulse them in my food processor. Of course, the resulting juice takes the place of some of the water in the recipe, but I can't just say that my 200 grams of onions=200 grams of water (because there's still pulp to be reckoned with), so I start with holding back about 10% of water, and if the dough is too stiff, give it some more water until I have the right consistency. The reason I don't have any reliable formulas is that I don't work with reliable water content in my veggies - I prep them myself, and they (and I) are different every day. So I am somewhat ashamed to admit that my bread baking is very far from being an exact science but is much more of an [not always predictable and successful] art. Which makes it all the more exciting and fun.

I hope that I didn't bore you with this really long and somewhat convoluted explanation.

Spokoinoi nochi,

Nika