A Working Logo

Among the many fun things to do before opening day is to make ingredient labels for everything. Lucky for me the Avery website has an online label maker, where you input all the text and even a logo and it saves it as a pdf. I found an online logo generator, and created this working logo for the labels.

Tomorrow I get more flour, and a folding card table.

Giant Bagels

While playing around with the bagel dough, i realized that it's easy to make giant bagels. I just take the same amount of dough that would make 6 bagels and make a real big one. They work great for big sandwiches, sharing, etc. I do them because I like showing off.

I gave one of these bagels to my friend, who took it to work. Now I'm making 5 giant bagels to order for them. I was planning on making a couple of giant bagels for the Lawrence Farmer's Market, just to see how they sell. I'm starting to think that they may be more popular than I originally thought. It will be interesting to see.

I have three thought related to baking these 5 giant bagels. One, it is not easy to flip them over during the boil because they take up most of the width of a typical 6 qt pan. Two, I can't fit two giant bagels on a sheet pan, but I can probably fit 2-3 regular bagels along side them, so I won't be wasting baking space in the future. Three, I forgot the raisins I need to finish the last batch of bagels.

Bagels at the Lawrence Farmer's Market

I've been baking for several years, and recently I started making bagels. One goal that I pursued was to bake and sell at the Lawrence Farmer's Market, but exactly what I'd sell was undecided.

With a typical home oven, I can make about 4 loaves of artisan bread at a time. Then while baking 3 dozen bagels for a weekend trip (feed people, they will love you) it occurred to me that bagels was something that I had not seen out there.

So, several hundred bagels later I have several flavors and a good methodology. I also discovered how to make giant bagels easily, and have plenty of experimentation to expand my recipe base.

I'll also do some of my artisan loaves, those are just too darned good to not include. I got the call from the Market Coordinator on Monday, so by Saturday I should have the paperwork, and be preparing for my first weekend at market. I must dig out the sunshade my parents gave me last year, find a sun hat and remember some sunblock.

Building an oven

My dreams of building my own bread oven have been rekindled, with the focus on it being a portable oven on a trailer, and possibly even electric depending on what my research brings up (I know, strange but trying to keep a wood fired oven at a constant temp sounds like a PITA). So here's a link to an oven building forum to research later.

A random bread search on Google lead me to this web page article.

I'll be back to baking tomorrow, this week has been busy and the loaves I've tried to bake ended up forgotten during bench proofing, making for one slack, sucky loaf and another dried out that I just tossed without baking. I owe someone a loaf of whole wheat, if for no other reason than my son just busted one of her tree ornaments today.

Bread without salt.

Someone asked me about Tuscan bread, which is apparently a Florence, Italy specialty. My quick research seems to indicate it's a saltless bread, used with foods that provide most of the flavor. A NYT article about it can be found here.

Baker's Mark from a silicone baking mat

I did a quick prototype baker's mark from a silicone baking mat that I didn't care for (much prefer the baking parchment). The results were promising. A friend that does scrapbooking is going to experiment and see if she has something that can cut the lettering neater.