Living the dream!
My experience teaching a pizza class & how you can support Centro Hispano
Good morning bread friends,
I hope youβre all doing well and staying healthy. As always, Iβm excited to share bread with the community again this week. If youβre planning to pick up some of our sourdough on Thursday, please go ahead and pre-order your loaf now on the website.
Last week I shared that I was excited to be leading a pizza-making class for students in the Madison area. Well, Iβm delighted to say that the pizza-making class was a great success! First, thanks to Pasture and Plenty for making it extremely easy for me to host this class. After I told them the recipe I wanted to follow a few weeks in advance, they worked with a number of local farmers to get all the ingredients, and then all I had to do was show up on the day of the class. They distributed the ingredients to over 100 families and had all the supplies and technology sorted out for hosting a very slick virtual experience. Between family obligations, being busy at work, and baking sourdough twice a weekβ¦ Iβm not sure I could have pulled off this pizza class if the organizers werenβt so experienced at hosting this sort of thing. Huge thanks to Christy, Jenina & Emma for being so gracious, and for making my job feel easy and fun.
One of the most exciting parts of the night was getting home and seeing that one of our friends from church was in the class and had been sending pictures to my wife as their son Martin was following along. Look how wonderful his pizza turned out!
All this to sayβ¦ if you ever want to talk about bread or pizza, just shoot me a note. In our house, they are each a cherished part of our weekly routine. Iβm always eager to answer questions and help people gain confidence as they work on their own pizza or bread-making skills with the hope that they may someday bring you just as much joy.
As you may know, for the month of October, our Bread & Justice community is raising funds to support Centro Hispano of Dane County. COVID-19 has been hard on most all nonprofits, and Centro has been hit really hard it by this pandemic. In Dane County, Latinx individuals have one of the lowest vaccination rates but the highest number of cases. Centro is at the forefront of supporting the community, but due to the pandemic Centro has had to cancel their annual gala fundraiser event for the second year in a row.
From vaccine awareness, to managing the Latino Consortium for Action Emergency Relief Fund, to providing support to families with basic needs, housing and immigration, developing workforce skills in high demand sectors like healthcare, and working with youth navigating various learning needs during a pandemic, the team at Centro is working tirelessly to support, and provide a home to members of our community.
Annual galas like this are often the tentpole fundraiser for small nonprofits for the year, so this is a great time to be able to support them. Bread & Justice is proud to support Centro by donating 100% of our profits from every loaf of bread that we sell this month. Thank you for being a part of supporting them through your bread purchase. If you feel moved to provide them with additional support you can do that on their website here.
Cheers,
Mo
P.S. For my weekly pizza at home, I typically do a sourdough pizza crust with a 24-hour ferment. For this class, we needed to make the dough from scratch and be able to cook it within an hour. I want to shout out Hendrik from The Bread Code for having a really great 60 minute dough recipe. I practiced this recipe several times in the weeks leading up to the class, and was really happy with how it turned out. I think a longer ferment on your dough is always going to be preferable if you have timeβ¦ but I highly recomend following his process if youβre in a pinch and need dough within the hour.