Thursday, November 18, 2010

Tartine Bread and other delights.


One of our favorite baking books of 2010 is Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson. Chad, along with his wife Elisabeth Prueitt owns Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. They have been a huge inspiration to us, and this bread book is just the icing on the cake. Sharon met Chad and Elisabeth back in 1998 at the same bread conference she met Alan Scott. It was a turning point for our bakery, to find these people living the life we were, with the same passion and insane work ethic. When we finally built our own oven with Alan in 2004 it was an amazingly humbling experience. We thought we had worked hard before, now there was wood to wrangle, a fire to build and an oven to clean, besides mixing, and forming and baking the bread. It has been worth it though, and reading Chads great stories and following his detailed and excellent recipes brings us right back to why we do this in the first place...because we are crazy! Oh, and there's nothing like making people happy with our food. 
Speaking of making people happy...Ben made fudge


It's just one of the many treats coming out of our kitchen for the holidays. The season kicks off in earnest next week as we get our pie on for thursday, then starting friday we introduce our 2010 Holiday Cookie List. We have already made thumbjams and cranberry orange cookies as well as lavender and green tea shortbread. The rest of the list is still working itself out, stay tuned! Until then we will be prepping pies and rolling rolls in anticipation of a busy day before Thanksgiving. It is exciting to have such an amazing staff to help us pull it all together. We remember many a tuesday and wednesday before making it happen ourselves, working long, long days only to collapse on Thanksgiving day after the requisite plate of turkey. 
Which reminds me:
 Don't forget to put in your Thanksgiving orders in by 6 pm on Tuesday! 

No comments: