Practicing
Sharing December Donations & learning about rugbrød
Good morning bread friends!
One surprising thing about baking bread as often as I do is that I typically don’t notice the smell of our bread baking. A few months ago a family friend came over on a bake day and they commented with amazement about how wonderful it is that our house smells like a bakery. On that day I had to really concentrate to even notice the smell that they were referring to. Fortunately, while the bread is in the oven this morning… I’m grateful to be sitting on my couch writing to you and casually enjoying the smell of sourdough baking. This smell is beautiful in its own right, but it also reminds me of how far I’ve come in honing my craft as a sourdough bread baker over the past two years.
Whether it is baking or anything else… I would guess that you too have something that you do with so much regularity that you often overlook the beauty and skill in it. Everyone has a skill or passion that would be amazing and wonderful to someone else. Whatever that is for you, I hope that you take a moment to appreciate that this week. Because basking in the smell of the bread this morning really is bringing me a ton of early morning joy, and I want that for you too.
December Donations
Speaking of spreading joy, I need to update you on our donations from December. As you may know, Bread & Justice is a philanthropic enterprise. What that means for us is that 100% of our profits from the sale of bread are donated to organizations working towards a more just society. For the month of December, we chose to partner with The Rainbow Project here in Madison. If you didn’t catch it, Melissa wrote a beautiful letter a couple of weeks ago explaining why this youth and family trama resource center was on her heart this past month.
After all of the bread that you purchased, and all of the generous donations that were made directly to Bread & Justice on our website, we were able to donate a total of $516 to The Rainbow Project. As we shared before - this trauma resource center provides restorative healing and hope for young children and their families who have experienced trauma, helping them build a foundation for the mastery of life-sustaining skills. They provide individualized and responsive services including short- and long-term counseling, prevention, and early intervention services for families. Disproportionate to our community’s overall demographics, 65% of the children and families that The Rainbow Project serves are Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC).
Practicing Baking
One thing that I want to make time to do more of this year is practicing different baking recipes and techniques. I don’t have any near-term plans to expand the menu from the rustic sourdough loaves that we’re serving, but as I practice new things I will try to share those learnings in this newsletter.
This weekend I had the great joy of collaborating with Melissa to make a rugbrød. As I’ve shared before, Melissa is the real baker in our household. After several thousand loaves of sourdough, I have become rather good at producing consistent sourdough loaves - but she has a real knack for success in all her many baking adventures. Cookies, cakes, sweetbreads, shortbreads, bread breads, muffins, scones, buns, biscuits… you name it and she’s done it well.
When sourdough first entered our lives, it started out as a group project. We were trying to learn together. My obsessive tendencies really stuck on to the idea of trying to master this one thing. Meanwhile, she maintained an interest in baking a wide variety of things. So it was a great delight when she randomly asked me the other day if I’d want to work together to make a sourdough danish rye bread from her Nordic Baking Book. This is a really cool book that explores the rich baking history of the Nordic region with hundreds of traditional recipes and photos. I admire the book for its commitment to translating and cataloging so many historic recipes of this region… but if I’m honest I sometimes find the recipes to be a bit confusing to read. Sometimes it feels like they are written a bit like a personal journal, where I’d really benefit from being able to ask the author to clarify what he meant by certain things. This recipe had that element… and it was a 4-day long recipe. So we sought out looking for a comparable (albeit less time-consuming) recipe.
I ended up turning to a youtube baker that I’ve enjoyed over the past couple of years, who calls himself The Food Geek. On his page, he has a recipe for a naturally leavened danish rye bread (rugbrød) that was more straight forward to follow.
I think it turned out really fantastically. This wonderful rye bread is packed full of whole grains, seeds and nuts. One tip from our family to yours is that if you’re soaking rye berries - do make sure that you soak them for a very long time. We soaked them overnight and they still don’t feel quite as soft as we’d like them to in the bread, but we’re otherwise really happy with the bake.
Anyway, I hope you have a fantastic week. Please do pre-order some of our bread from my website if you’re in the area.
Be safe out there.
Cheers,
Mo