Just before Thanksgiving, my wife Denyce and I were lucky enough to be invited to merry old England to meet with and video award-winning artisan baker, Emmanuel Hadjiandreou. We filmed him non-stop for three days at the School of Artisan Foods in Nottinghamshire where he now teaches. Emmanuel made wheat breads, barm breads, rye breads, sourdough starters, holiday breads, puff pastry, croissants and other recipes from his recent book, “How to Make Bread.” When we get done editing and organizing the huge volume of info, you will be seeing the videos here on Breadtopia over the coming months. It was an amazing ride, and we came back inspired to say the least.

With the holidays immediately upon us, we decided to try to tackle his award-winning stollen. (Right, something simple.) Denyce chronicles the venture here. Part 1 of the Stollen Chronicles is how we made made marzipan stollen. Enjoy, and Happy 2012!

http://www.breadtopia.com/stollen-recipe/

The Poppyseed and Marzipan Stollen that Emmanuel made for us in the UK.

Need gift ideas for the bread baker or aspiring bread baker in your life?

We put together a collection of some of our favorite and most popular items that might do the job. They’re featured in the following video or you can view the entire collection here.

The starter kits offer 10% off the price of the items purchased separately.

Products profiled in the video include:

• No Knead Bread Starter Kit
• Sourdough Starter Kit
• Cutting Board & Bread Knife Combo
• Great Bread Cook Book
• Bread Dome
• Kevlar Oven Gloves
• Danish Dough Whisk
• Super Peel (Super Peel Demos)
• Sourdough Starter
• Recipe Rock
• Wood Bread Board
• Table Board
• Bosch Mixer
• Wolfgang Grain Mill

We also put together a page featuring only Breadtopia products made in the U.S. 

Hope this helps!

At least we can feast our eyes on this… Sent in by Heinz Imhof. It was taken last Friday at the Le Pain Quotidien bakery in Polanco, Mexico City. Thanks Heinz.

Le Pain Quotidien Bakery, Mexico City

While I’m at it, here are a couple more gorgeous loaves created by Mikal in New Mexico.

Mikal the Bread Artist

He used a scissors to cut small “lips” in the proofed dough. 8 snips. 3 on top and 5 around the middle. Then a medium thick wash of corn starch. Then sprinkled on hemp seeds, sesame seeds, golden flax meal, wheat bran and then sift on oat flour until the loaf is coated.

Dear Breadtopians,

Campfire Bread in the Tetons

I just posted a couple new videos chronicling my adventures with baking bread while camping this summer.

http://www.breadtopia.com/campfire-bread/

Not a camper? No problem. I think new bakers may take some inspiration from how simple it can be to turn out decent sourdough bread.

Enjoy,

Eric

The Kneading Conference, held in Maine for the past several years, is fun and highly informative. Denyce and I skipped this summer’s event but very much enjoyed the two prior years.

Now the food savvy Northwest has invited the Maine folks to help them organize the first Kneading Conference West which will take place in Mount Vernon, Washington, September 15th – 17th in the beautiful Skagit Valley.

The story of the Kneading Conference really begins with a few individuals who, recognizing that things were difficult and getting worse in their community, decided to do something about it. Like many of America’s rural towns , in recent decades Skowhegan, Maine suffered from an exodus of Main Street businesses due to the success of chain store competitors and a lifestyle turned upside down by jobs shipped overseas. This group of KC visionaries (I came along later) knew that up until the 1850s their community and several surrounding counties produced 100% of the grains eaten by people and animals in the state of Maine. Why not bring back grain farming?   As it turns out, many regions across the U.S. produced their own grains until cheap transportation (railroads and the Erie Canal) made the long growing season and fertility of the Midwestern soils abundantly available.

The stroke of genius of the conference founders was to realize that knocking on the doors of farmers and suggesting they add grain crops to their rotations was not going to work. The knowledge and necessary infrastructure had been lost eons ago. Instead, they would need to bring to the table a diversity of support:  millers, wheat breeders, bakers, and eaters. From the ensuing exchange of ideas, experiences, and concerns, new relationships and new plans could emerge.

As it turns out, this was a great model for bringing back the wheat! In Maine, the Kneading Conference has become a successful incubator for baking enterprises, wheat farming, new grist mills, and most importantly, for the understanding among bakers, novice and professional, that nothing tastes better or offers more nutrition than whole grains, freshly ground, that taste of the land where they were grown. Now in its fifth year, the Maine Kneading Conference attracts people from around the U. S. and Canada and even Europe and, last year, New Zealand. It is a model of grassroots activism mixed with innovative entrepreneurialism that is gaining traction elsewhere.

All in all, what the Kneading Conference does best is inspire people to take pleasure in something as basic as bread and to think of it from its source – the seed planted in the soil – to its final delight – the bite! And to look around and think about whether grains might grow nearby.  Something as foundational as grains can become a cornerstone for rebuilding communities and even for instilling a sense of community.

Both websites have more information, the keynote speakers and presenters and schedules, and on the Kneading Conference (Maine) website, articles, photos, and videos, that describe the experience.

Greetings Breadtopians,

We’ve posted a couple of new videos to our website that we hope you’ll enjoy.

Financier a la mode

One is of Denyce making up a batch of Financiers, a small delectable cake/pastry, popular in France, which will have you swooning with delight.

Couronne Bordelais

The other is Eric playing with bread dough to make a Couronne (meaning “crown” in French), a bread ring that’s fun and easy to make and perfect for special occasions.

On the way to visit our new idyllic grandchild in New Hampshire, we visited this idyllic grain mill in Sudbury, MA, near Boston. Rich, the miller and historical custodian, answered our questions and gave us a quick tour.

We left with a couple small bags of flour, whole wheat and “white” flour. Their white flour isn’t like what you buy in the store. They simply sift the whole flour through a bolting cloth to remove the larger bran flakes, leaving the nutritional germ and the finer bran. The flour appears to be about half way between whole wheat and white flour and the bread made from it has a wholesome nutty flavor that you’d expect to get from whole wheat but is light and open like what you’d expect from white flour. A great combo that’s not difficult to duplicate at home with a home mill and sifter.

,

A working mill.. for tourists

These granite mill stones show several types of patterns, called the dress, that were cut into the stones to improve their grinding and cooling efficiency. With the top stone turning at 120 revolutions per minute, a set of millstones can grind 500 pounds of grain per hour, necessitating after 2 weeks a re-sharpening, called re-dressing, of the lands and furrows of the stones. This task takes about 14 working hours per stone. Tradition and preference determined the dress of the stone while the life of the millstone, which varied from 10 years to a century, was determined by composition and use.

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Old Milling Stones

Inside the mill with Rich. Millstones in the foreground.

Sourdough bread made with the Mill's flour.

Love this story on Hot Bread Kitchen, a non-profit social enterprise that creates better lives for low-income women and their families.

Breadtopia Spawns Breadmania

Thanks Kris for sending this…

My husband says that I have an obsession with the bread-baking thing and have become a bread baking “MANIAC”. The disorder, I guess has been named BreadMania. According to the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition), LOL, there is no cure!

For the pita, I doubled your plain bread flour KN recipe. it takes quite a bit flour to keep the dough from sticking to the board and rolling pin, but that’s okay; it didn’t seem to harm the texture. This morning I rolled out large ones for stuffing. (Tennis ball size balls.) The nice thing is that they do not need a second proofing and take only about 6-8 min. in a 500 F oven on pre-heated stone. I own several bread books and have made pitas and other breads the old fashioned way, but will never go back.

Tomorrow, I will experiment with whole wheat and rye flour and seeded tops.

“GO PACKERS”

Kris Nickel

Also, check out Madelyn’s perfect pita here and here.