September 10, 2015 - 10:41am
Aloha from kauai
Sorry I missed this part when i first started posting.
Im a simple monk in Kauai, Hawaii. I make beer for my 21 brother monks and recently fell in love with baking SD breads and pastries. I started my batches about two months ago in a Wolf Convection oven and recently switched to an Il Fornino wood oven.
I look forward to being a small part of this wonderful community. Already I have gotten so much help from you all. I cant thank you enough for taking the time out of your busy schedules to help me out. Actually, by helping me out, you end up making 21 other people happy with better baked breads. Mahalo.
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Welcome, is the name Natyam or Mahalo, it may be that Mahalo is Hawaiian for farewell ,forgive my ignorance.
We would love to hear about your routine for both baking and brewing for your fellow monks as that is quite a big family you are catering for.
kind regards Derek
Morning Derek, Hawaiian time that is.
Mahalo is Hawaiian for thank you. Using it as a farewell is common. Actually one can use the word Aloha as a greeting and farewell, so you could say "Aloha, hows it?" and then when parting say "Mahalo, Aloha." Kind of a relaxed system.
My full name is Natyam Rajanatha. Natyam is my monastic title which literally means "dancer". Rajan or "king" is my Hindu legal name given to me by my guru when i took vows, and finally "natha" at the end of Raja denotes the lineage to which I belong to. The Natha lineage is the oldest in Hinduism, meaning "master" or "adept". So my guru named me "master of kings."
Our monastery does not use white sugar or white flower, so I am strictly a whole wheat baker. Interesting to note, since we stopped eating sugar of any kind in 2011, no monk has gotten sick with the common flu. Anyway, Ive been baking about twice a week for a few months now, each time needing to make enough for 21 people. So, occasionally i can fit in one loaf as a test batch, but it doesn't give me that much assistance, since the real batch size is much bigger. I kind of jumped in head first, did many hours of research and started mixing flour with water.
Most of the monks perform some craft; carpentry, landscaping/plants, tech/html/web nerd, I happened to fall in love with brewing and most recently baking. I make about 11 to 12 bbls(brewer barrels) of beer a year, thats around 350-400 gallons, kind of a "nano" brewing setup. We always have beer on tap year round and I manage the inventory, re-stocking, brewing, packaging and serving. I culture our own yeast from a yeast "library", basically a small collection of pure yeast in very small amounts. I can culture a few pure colonies of yeast the week before brewing, knowing its uncontaminated and strong. We dont have a brewing store on Kauai, so thats our cheapest option, but I ended up taking a real joy in microbiology.
When my brother told me that sourdough bread needed a live culture, a few months ago, I immediately knew that was the next thing to master. With my brewing background, I understood the SD culture and fermentation aspects very well, the balance of lactic, acetic and sacch yeast was easy to get. The baking has been the hardest part for me. Oh, and how much water to use, since beer is mostly water!
Having learned initially with a commercial Wolf range convection oven, we decided to move on to a more monastic approach, wood fired. So we got an Il Fornino pro series and Im slowly getting the hang of it. Since we are on a tropical island, wood is easy to come by. We have a wood mill, so we can take any tree, fell it, mill it, and dry for one to two years. Right now I am setup with a few months supply of old cypress that we could not use in the carpentry shop. It burns nicely.
So thats where TFL came in. Whew, thats alot to take in. No other monk has done sourdough or all grain brewing, so I have had the pleasure of bringing the two crafts to our home.
Hi Natyam Thanks for your response, wow. Perhaps you will be renamed with your growing expertise in both brewing and baking and master of yeasts. I find the fact that the removal of sugar from the monks diet has made an improvement to their well being most interesting, there has been a lot of comment recently about sugar being the biggest health threat being recognised since tobacco. The fact that sugar has been increased in people diets often to compensate for the removal of fats that we were told were bad for us, and that it is added to just about everything we buy at the shops.
Do the monks keep bees by any chance for Honey? if so i see the chance of Mead in brewing and as a useful ingredient in your baking inventory.
I would be really interested in seeing your dough formula for a usual bake and what machinery you have at your disposal. Do you buy your flour in commercially ? would you consider milling your own ?
I'm sure the TFL folk would love to see some pictures of a batch of bread being processed if that is allowed or possible especially in and out of the wood fired oven.
Kind regards and Mahalo Aloha
Derek
the bees. The monks first came to Kauai in '69, and they paid the bills with honey! We had a small warehouse in town where we processed all of the honey that came from approx. 3,000 hives around the island. The monks back then kept one barrel a month for making mead. We brewed in 200 gal batches and aged in oak barrels. We stopped making mead in 2011 during the sugar annihilation. I got to be a part of the last batch of about 175 gallons.
Thats me stirring the kettle during our last mead making. The oldest batch we have stored is from 1986 and 1995. Mead only gets good around year 20 :)
There has been abit of discussion about my dough learning in the thread Too Much Water. Im in the beginning stages of really understanding water amounts in whole wheat and keeping our wood oven hot throughout the bake, which i plan on using your advice you gave me for the stone from now on. In case you miss it, the formula that Mini Oven, The Supreme Baking Goddess, has helped me develop is such;
For 70%
2300g flour +250g (flour in the starter) = 2550 total flour, minus 30% = 1785 and minus 250 (water in the starter) = 1535g of water
Salt is 2% of total flour weight: 70% dough uses 51g of salt.
I mix by hand because I can, theres no rush and I really love handling the dough, I dont know why. We buy Bobs Red Mill Organic whole wheat at the store, its only $6 for five pounds and I can get 5, 800g loaves out of it with some extra for a small loaf. We considered milling our own but the cost of shipping the sacks was more expensive than Bobs 5 lb bags.
Ive already started posting what little pics I have, they are all probably trackable in my homepage I think. But, since you asked, I just baked croissants and pain chocolat this morning! I made 30 chocolate breads and 33 croissants and they were amazing. I followed the directions from Vincent Talleu's video on making french sweets.
Im firing up the oven tomorrow and will def have to post so I can reassure Mini that none of her time was wasted! Im using the recipe she helped me with and will report back.
Aloha
When i asked about the bees i didnt expect quite so many as that. The sugar annihilation is that where you referred to the Monks giving up sugar, do you still produce the honey and look after the bees presumably for sale.
We have a Monastry here , in fact a monastic town New Norcia a Benedictine order of monks they used to have their own Bakery but sold off the name to a city concern.A little item that shows some pictures of the monastry www.lifeonperth.com/newnorcia.htm. Some other info if you google New Norcia.
Have you looked at mixing doughs in the old bakers trough which was basicly a wooden tub. I think there was some discussion here on TFL about building one, there was a link somewhere showing one in use in France with a woman mixing the dough by hand, i shall see if i cant find the links for you.
Unfortunately i was unable to open the picture of your mead making,
Anyway good evening from Perth Western Australia
Aloha Derek
browser is blocking the picture. Anyhoo, we dont manage bee hives anymore, fortunately the hard work of the monks from the 70's paid off and we dont need to work outside the monastery.
I have seen the wooden trough used by Nicolas Supiot. That would be fun. maybe some day.
Hi again Natyam here is the link i refered to
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/27990/rustic-french-dough-trough
regards Derek
just realized im deleting the images that im remotely hosting. My Bad
hobbies. To make beer you have to have some kind of malted grain and if you make your own you are also on your way to making sprouted grain bread. If you sprout grain until they just chit, then dry them in a dehydrator and then mill the dried grain you have sprouted flour and sprouted four is about as good to bread making as great malted barley is to beer making, My bread making and beer making has gone to another level since i started making my own sprouted grain, malting my own barley and other grains and making red and white malts.
These two hobbies go together like two peas in a pod. Welcome and happy brewing and SD baking