Bakery Changes in the Wind

At the end of August, the current baker will leave us, and he and his wife will open their own shop in a neighboring town. (Congratulations to them!) We have changes ahead as we replace him with two bakers: Shuzo (who, as I might possibly have mentioned before, is my husband) and the wonderful Midoro-san. Yay! We are all really happy to welcome Midori-san who, in addition to being very nice, has been professionally baking cookies and other sweets for years and now is looking forward to learning more about baking bread.

As September wears on, we should get the menu worked out pretty well. The first few weeks will probably see some experimenting. Shuzo is looking forward to trying out a whole wheat miche; a large sourdough loaf made with 100% whole wheat flour, and will be adding back in our old standby inakapan, another rustic bread leavened with sourdough only (no commercial yeast) and containing a little bit of Hototogisu Farm stone ground whole wheat flour.

Okay, so this picture is a little old, being from fall 2009, but it gives a good idea of what to expect. Especially since we should be bringing in a second harvest of corn shortly.

For the next few weeks we should also have fresh blueberry bread:

We also have kabocha anpan, which is something like pumpkin pie bread. It is very yummy. We make the kabocha an, or pumpkin pie-like filling, by baking kabocha squash (a present from an organic farmer friend down the street) then mixing it with sugar and nutmeg. Good stuff!