Nutrimill, Wondermill and Wolfgang Mill Demonstration

It’s hard to beat freshly milled whole grain flour when you want to maximize the nutritional value and flavor of your bread. Milling your own grain has other practical advantages as well. The long shelf life of whole grain berries allows you to buy more economically in bulk and reduces the risk of running out of flour when fresh home baked bread can’t wait any longer.

When you’re in the market for a grain mill, there are, of course, numerous models to choose from across a wide price range. We’ve opted to carry a few of the most popular models and compare them in these videos. We hope the videos at least give you a decent feel for what the mills are like.

For more details: Grain Mill Store

Enjoy a bake-ation in Maine this Summer

Michael Jubinsky of Stone Turtle Baking School

The 4th annual Kneading Conference in Skowhegan Maine promises to be a great time again this summer. Last summer’s event was a blast so Denyce and I are heading back. It’s July 29th & 30th followed by the Artisan Bread Fair on the 30th. Conference attendance requires registration and a fee. Saturday’s bread fair is free and open to everyone.

An especially impressive group of bread baking, grain growing and wood oven luminaries are scheduled to present. Sumptuous, fresh and wholesome food in abundance awaits attendees with most of it prepared in several wood fired ovens provided by Maine Wood Heat.  Besides the obvious wood fired bread and pizza, picture corn on the cob cooked in its own husks and fruit cobbler fresh out of an outdoor wood oven. With so much packed into 2 days, it’s necessary that there are several events taking place simultaneously. My only regret was not being able to attend them all. However we left more than satisfied and knowing we could always return.

Bring Your Kids Along

If you can make it, you’ll learn a lot from any of the following presenters. Amazingly, even more will be lined up by the time of the conference. It’s a fairly kid friendly event too. One of the most impressive things I saw was children sitting with rapt attention through an entire baking presentation. The kids pizza workshop was a big hit.

Jeffrey Hamelman is one of only about 130 master bakers in America. Jeffrey will present a keynote about the challenges and rewards of working with local grains and also will talk about opening a successful bakery.

Dusty Dowse will explore the theory and practice of sourdough fermentation: how to start it, keep it, use it and hot how to convert your favorite yeast recipes to sourdough.

Richard Miscovich and Ciril Hitz, both from Johnson & Wales, haven’t named their topics yet but rest assured, they will return.

Dusty and Richard will team up to bake an array of breads for the Maine Artisan Bread Fair. A limited number of participants will find out what it is like to be a professional baker with a production deadline and a mission to maintain the highest quality edibles.

Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Bakery invented a method for making delicious, artisan, no-knead bread and the New York Times made it famous. He will be here to lead us through the steps that produce this modern version of old-fashioned bread.

Doug Brown from Nova Scotia and Cate Conway will collaborate on a whole grain/ancient grains workshop. Never mind that their pastries are good for you – they are extraordinarily delicious.

Jim Amaral of Borealis Breads, the pioneer baker who convinced Maine farmers to restore grain cultivation on their farms, will compare Maxine wheat harvested from three different fields.

Jonathan Rubenstein, founder of Slice of Heaven Breads at Temple Sinai, watched Stu Silverstein have fun making pizza with kids last year and made a successful bid to teach Pizza with Kids in 2010.

Stu Silverstein will again teach people how to convert clay into an earth oven which will be auctioned to the highest bidder at the end of the workshop.

Pat Manley will conduct a workshop, actually building a brick oven. The oven’s core will be built over the two days and fired on Saturday. Each year Pat travels to Guatemala with Masons on a Mission to help families construct vented brick cookstoves for their homes.

Jonathan Stevens and Cheryl Maffei, owners of the Hungry Ghost Bakery, will teach flatbreads and crackers and reveal stories from their visits with French underground bakers.

Kelley Hughes, owner of Wildflours Bakery, will demonstrate how to make non-gluten pastries that in flavor rival their counterparts in the wheat world.

Stephen Lanzalotta will forego playing with dough this year to talk about his passion: the philosophy of artisan bread, and its root in the historical separation of the forest and the field.

Michael and Sandy Jubinsky, co-founders of Stone Turtle Baking and Cooking School, will share the secrets of two of France’s favorite breads, batards and boules, with hands-on participation so you can get the feel of the dough.

Douglas Coffin, owner of The Big Green Pizza Truck, has sent a tentative affirmative. He has grown a successful pizza catering business using wood-fired ovens built into restored vintage trucks.

At the heart of artisan bread lies quality grain:

Dr. Fred Kirschenmann’s keynote address will open the conference. Dr. Kirschenmann is a renowned farmer and author and serves as Distinguished Fellow of the Leopold Center and President of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture.

Dr. Steve Jones, a research scientist working on perennial wheat and a man who has his finger on the pulse of the national grain renaissance, will join us, back by popular demand.

Élisabeth Vachon and Sophie Beauchemin from Quebec’s family mill, La Meunerie Milanaise, will share the podium to talk about the Agronomics of Grain.

Mark Fulford, nationally renowned soil fertility expert, and Will Bonsall, the maestro of small scale grain growing, will extend their presentations into a second hour for questions and answers, something frequently requested by participants.

Eli Rogosa collects and conserves almost-extinct world landrace grains in the Mideast and Europe, and will give a workshop on wheat biodiversity and baking with gluten-safe einkorn. www.growseed.org

Mary-Howell Martens, and hopefully her husband Klaas (harvest permitting) will talk about the conversion of their diversified New York farm from conventional to organic methods.

Roger Jansen, a grist mill virtuoso, will return to demonstrate the endangered art of grist stone “battening” and other aspects of maintaining grist mills.

Here are some pictures we took last year and and a few minutes of video. Most of the video is of award winning baker, educator and author, Ciril Hitz, working his magic on some baguette dough. It’s impressive and humbling watching these true masters of bread baking handle the dough and explain some of the nuances of successful baking. More pictures and video are on the Conference web site.

Due to the growing popularity of the event, the venue will be changing this year to the Skowhegan Fair Grounds.

Albie (center) and Scott (right) Barden - Master Oven Builders

Richard Miscovich's Amazing Wood Fired Sourdough Bread

Richard's Bread

Richard Miscovich Teaching a Class

Richard (L) Me and Ciril Hitz

Doug Brown - Awesome Whole Grain Baker From Canada

Scott Barden on Pizza Duty

Some of Eli Rogosa's Heritage Grains

What would a trip to Maine be without a kayak excursion to a lighthouse?

Scully, the Wonder Border Collie, and Dodger – big supporters of the culinary arts.

Scully and Dodger

Lydia Riehl emailed in this great shot of her 2 pals moments after their little snack. The pictured flour sack towel had been used to wrap her loaves to take to work. She put the towel on the kitchen counter after returning home and moments later heard a suspicious tearing sound.

As Lydia put it… “Pix attached of Scully’s enthusiastic enjoyment of the crumbly towel as well as Dodgers fairly accurate expression of what he thinks on the matter of ‘Devil Dog’.”

Good stuff!

Hi Everyone,

Yesterday, the winners of Saveur’s best food blog awards were announced and Food Wishes took top honors in the category of most innovative video content. I’ve long been an admirer of Chef John, Food Wishes creator and video host. He has a great style and the quality of his productions is always top notch.

It was great to be nominated for the award and I really appreciate all the votes and wonderful feedback I received from so many of you. But I gotta say, I think the award went to the right guy. If I wasn’t me, I’d have certainly voted for Chef John.

Congratulations to all the other nominees and winners too!

Michelle Safirstein and her members over at  BigBlackDog look like they’re having a lot of fun baking bread and “hanging out” online together.

Michelle formed a baking group, HBinFive, around the popular no knead bread book, Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. They just started baking their way through the book in January, and will be baking together for at least the next 2 yrs. So if think you would enjoy some bread baking camaraderie with fun like minded people, now is a good time to jump in.

Judy, one of the members, says “We post our finished loaves on our recipes twice a month. It’s a fun group, and I am trying recipes I probably never would have tried. I tend to stick to favorites, and this is getting me to try new things. I LOVE the soft whole wheat sandwich bread!!!”

Here’s an example of one of the groups “Bread Braids“.

If you’d like to join HBinFive or have any questions, contact Michelle at ms dot bigblackdog at gmail dot com and she’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Well, how about this. I received an email from Saveur yesterday informing me that Breadtopia has been nominated in their 1st Annual Best Food Blog Awards (Most Innovative Video Content category)!

Saveur is a hugely popular foodie site, so I figured I’d embark on a shameless self promotions campaign and see how I fare.

If you have a minute to spare, I’d be mighty grateful if you’d cast a vote our way.

If you aren’t already a member of Saveur, registration is required in order to vote. When registering, you can uncheck the 2 boxes authorizing receipt of emails if you like, or opting out later is easy enough also. So nothing is too insidious about the process.

Here’s a direct link to the category we’re in: http://www.saveur.com/contest_bow.jsp?ID=1000011143

Last week someone filed a complaint against me for bad customer service through the Ripoff Report website. You can click the link to read it.

I only wish you all could have been in on the conversation and I wish he had reported it verbatim. Just for the record, I did tell him to grow up, but you have no idea how much restraint I had to exercise to keep it that mild.

Don’t worry, I’ve retained the same top damage control consultants who handle Toyota, Tiger Woods and most politicians. So I’m hoping to claw my way back to respectability over the next several years.

Sourdough Rye

You’ll find a new video on the Breadtopia web site… finally!  This one is a fine sourdough rye. If sourdough is not your thing, no problem, we cover the instant yeast version as well.

For a bread that delivers on so many levels, it’s surprisingly easy to make and the ingredients are readily available in most grocery stores.

I’m looking forward to seeing if you share my overshadowing fondness for this bread.

It’s been a good day.

Maybe this photo of Denyce’s cake will save me a thousand words.  Think chocolate and raspberries.

I brought up the rear with a Coconut-Chocolate Bread recipe from Jim Lahey’s new book, My Bread. Hard to go wrong with 1 1/2 bittersweet chocolate Lindt bars per loaf. Used sourdough starter in lieu of dry yeast .

Then a nice walk in the serene snowy woods before logging yet more time taking in some winter Olympic action.

Another Denyce Masterpiece

Jim Lahey's Coconut-Chocolate Bread