Remains of the Day

Yesterday I taught another workshop, this time in my home. In case you wonder what breads we baked, here's the end-of-the-day evidence:

...it was buckwheat sourdough

I set my summer workshops in June thinking our not-well-AC'd kitchen wouldn't achieve full summer heat by then. Oh, was I wrong! It was >90 outdoors yesterday, and well above that near the oven. Still the class of 7 soldiered on until about 2 PM, when things became truly unbearable. On request I kicked on the AC and (silently) crossed my fingers that we'd not send the smoke detectors wailing. Luckily we did not.

We also baked some great-tasting bread. I promised some Facebook followers I'd post a shot of the product. All day I spent my energies teaching and only picked up the camera this morning. What you see is what I got - which is why I'm baking again tonight.

Every workshop has several learning moments. Some of them are too self-critical to indulge; others are share-able "Ah Ha!"'s. Here is one of yesterday's:   Brown rice flour - used to dust my pizza peel for an earlier workshop when participants couldn't eat corn - generates too much smoke, probably because brown rich has a good amount of fat. Corn meal, the traditional peel dust, smells good as it chars and doesn't trigger the smoke detector but tends to cohere into blobs that look like burned styrofoam on the oven floor. Unbolted buckwheat flour neither smokes nor coheres, so as peel dust, it rules.

Strike another blow for unbolted buckwheat.

Bake on friends. Rain is coming. Soon I'll be posting mycelia - rather than My Celia - news.