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A Baker's Christmas List

Recently I have been getting frequent messages online with requests for good gift ideas for bakers. If you are gifting to an aspiring or hopeful baker, you may want to start them out with my book for beginners and it’s accompanying techniques video class and head over here to my basic materials and tools list. However for this list, I will assume that we are talking about what an established baker (aka me!) might love for Christmas.

!. A giant tub of Maldon Sea Salt Flakes! These are my favorite flaky sea salt for sprinkling on the top of focaccia, or on top of chocolate chip cookies just before baking. They have a unique shape that is beautiful and this tub might last a whole year! Affordable luxury.

This is one of my favorite chocolates the flavor is beautiful, I love the little bean shapes. They look great in a cookie, fit nicely into pain au chocolat, and are fun to eat directly out of the bag too. There’s also a 6 pound bag if you really like someone.

More salt? Yes! Grey salt has the nicest flavor, I don’t know if I represent all bakers in saying this, but I have an obsession with different kinds of salt. I love using this salt in my pastry doughs, I feel like I can really taste the difference.

Tea is an extremely important part of baking for me, it’s the perfect thing to do “in between” activities. I love loose leaf tea since it doesn’t make any waste. This chai is one of my favorites, especially with sugar and milk.

Vanilla bean paste is another one of those things that is a a bit pricey when considering buying it for yourself, but just the right price point for a special gift.

Buckwheat flour is one of my favorite specialty flours to work with. Buckwheat is beautiful for adding to brownies, chocolate chip cookies, tart pastry, and for making beautiful crepes. The gift of experimenting with new flour would be welcome to any baker.

Baker’s live their lives by timers, and I have used SO many different ones. I now know that I like a timer without batteries, with a mechanical twist to set (pushing a button 45 times to set a timer for 45 minutes? NO!) a loud alarm and a magnet so I can stick it on the oven/mixer/fridge etc. This timer meets my many demands! Merry Christmas!

Bakers tend to get up very early in the morning, and cozy socks are an essential part of staying motivated to get up and turn the oven on. Socks for Christmas may seem sad, but I absolutely love colorful, friendly, warm socks.

If you are new to baking you might not yet have noticed that Birkenstocks are kind of the unofficial footwear of bakers and homebakers alike. While I prefer my leather Birks for production work since they are easy to clean and extremely comfortable to work in, these shearling felt gems would be amazing for cozy home baking with my kids through the winter.

Well, that’s my baker’s Christmas wish list if I was buying a bunch of little things for myself! I hope you find something for someone you like or just for yourself! Have a happy holiday! I’m an Amazon Affilliate, so if you order items through my links, I receive a few cents commission for recommending things that I like at no extra charge to you.

Bonus Secret Item that I really want….

Alchemy Bread- Setting up a Cottage Bakery

I get a lot of questions from followers who are looking to make the transition from hobby weekend bread bakers to a small cottage food operation. ( A cottage food operation is a licensed small business that is allowed to be conducted from a home kitchen). I thought I would go over a few of my recommendations on how to setup a workspace for baking at home. Keep in mind that my workspace as it is now has been built one piece at a time over the past 6 years. I started out baking in my home oven with 2 dutch ovens, using my kitchen table as a work surface. I didn’t have many resources so I had to slowly save aside the small profits from my tiny business and save up for each item, many of the larger equipment purchases were only in the past 2 years after 4 years of making do with a lot less, just something to keep in mind if it seems overwhelming at first. That said, lets jump into it!

My workspace in my home kitchen at Alchemy Bread

My workspace in my home kitchen at Alchemy Bread

The absolute first purchase I would recommend is a work table that is the proper height for you to work on. I spent my whole first year working on a kitchen table before I had saved up enough to purchase a worktable. It makes a huge difference! Some bakers do work on stainless steel tables, but I very much prefer wood. I also chose this table because the bottom of the legs are slightly adjustable so I can set the height. There are a few different sizes so you can pick the one that fits your workspace, mine is 72 inches long. You can use the shelf in to store large (unopened) bags of flour there if space is at a premium.

Another question I get a lot is about flour storage. From the start of my cottage bakery I would buy my flour on a weekly basis, and only the amount that I needed for that week. Long term flour storage shouldn’t be necessary for a small operation. Even now with a very busy cottage operation, I go through about 150 pounds of flour a week. That’s only three 50 pound bags of flour (or six if you buy in 25 pound increments). If you have a small house like I do and space is at a premium, storing flour is best left to your restaurant supply store and not your kitchen! You do need to keep you flour stored at least 6 inches up from the floor. You can install the shelf under your table at this height. (You will notice as I’ve grown I’ve now added a second work table)

Unopened flour stored six inches from the floor in a table shelf. Also a great place to store a 5 year old.

Unopened flour stored six inches from the floor in a table shelf. Also a great place to store a 5 year old.

As you expand a product range and do more variety in your work you will need more storage space for small items ( chocolate chips, baking soda, vanilla, different varieties of grains and seeds) I have a small laundry room off of my kitchen, I got rid of my washer and dryer and sacrificed them for bakery storage. I do my wash at the laundromat so I could steal some more space for some shelving. Hopefully, you don’t have to do that! Here is the shelving that I use for my miscellaneous storage. Once again, there are assorted sizes to fit in a space, the shelves can be adjusted to different heights, and the plastic cambro tubs come in plenty of sizes and are stackable and should be used to hold nuts, seeds, and grains. I also use these tubs to hold my sourdough starter in. There are endless options for clear bins to keep small ingredients in. I keep things I will use together in the same bin, so I can just grab the whole bin out when I’m making cookies for example.

Bakery tools organized in bins in a shelf.

Bakery tools organized in bins in a shelf.

When you start out, you won’t likely have too many tools, but over time you will likely accrue a collection of tools and keeping them organized and separate from the rest of your kitchen implements is in your best interest. When time is of the essence, you don’t want to be rifling through a drawer full of nonsense searching for your pastry brush or your microplane. I have a simple wooden shelf from Ikea for this purpose, along with white plastic bins of varying sizes for all my tools. The one below is pretty similar. I prefer an attractive wood shelf in this case since it’s in my workspace.

Baskets of dough proofing, and pre-shaped dough bench resting in a speed rack.

Baskets of dough proofing, and pre-shaped dough bench resting in a speed rack.

After creating a workspace and storing your ingredients, you will likely encounter your next problem. There is not enough horizontal space in any home environment to shape dough on, proof dough on, and load bread into the oven on, and eventually you will run out of places to put things and your workflow will start to become a game of tetris. When this happens, it’s time to get a baker’s rack, also called a speed rack, or sometimes called a bun rack. This will help alleviate the traffic jam in a small workspace. I have a tall version as you can see above, but a half sized rack that slides under your work table is a good place to start if you also don’t have much floor space. These can hold all kinds of things like hot sheet pans of cookies that need to cool, or proofing boards full of resting dough.

Of course, there is much more to be done in setting up a tiny home bakery (permits! licenses! fridge space! oh my!) however, I hope this is a serviceable start to sorting out some of the nuts and bolts. If you are just getting started baking bread and haven’t got the basics well in hand yet, I would recommend working through my book Bread Baking for Beginners. If you need more hands on help, I have an online class that can walk you through the whole first chapter and get your started confidently. If you need more equipment advice in the realm of small wares (bench knives, pastry brushes, baking pans etc.) you can find advice on all that on my materials list. You can find me and all my homebakery antics over on instagram @alchemybread

Top 3 Tools for Beginning Bread Bakers

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One of the more common questions I get on social media from new bread bakers is about which tools are absolutely essential to get started. Here are my recommendations:

  1. A digital kitchen scale. We often say that baking is a science, accuracy, and precision are important! Using a scale is a great way to eliminate errors in the measuring process and ensure your baking comes out great every time. All professional bakers use a scale (you won’t see them adding together hundreds of “cups” of flour to make a large batch of dough!) You can certainly get a cheaper scale, but there are a few reasons I recommend this particular one: it holds up for a very long time, it weighs up to 8000 grams (when you scale up your baking you won’t have to buy a new scale if you start with this one) and it takes regular double a batteries. (many scales take an obscure watch or disc battery, which you aren’t likely to have on hand when your battery dies in the middle of a baking project). I’ve been weighing about 120 loaves a week on this scale for over 6 years and it’s holding up just fine, just keep water and flour our of your battery compartment and it will survive the test of time and be a great investment. Once you start weighing your ingredients, you won’t want to go back to measuring cups ever.

2. I highly recommend getting a thermometer. Remember how we were just talking about the importance of accuracy? (Were your eyes glazing over?) Bread dough performs it’s best within a particular temperature range. In an ideal scenario, our environments would always be a perfect 75-78 degrees, or as bakers call it “desired dough temperature”. Until we engineer a perfect world, we’ll have to use a thermometer and make adjustments to get the desired results. When I was a beginner baker I had put in a lot of practice and done a ton of reading, but it was when I got a thermometer and started tracking my temperatures that I finally saw truer consistency in my bread. An instant-read thermometer will end up being handy around your kitchen for plenty of other projects too, so it will be a wonderful investment and should last forever, especially since this one is waterproof (surprisingly important!)

Ok, are we still talking about nerdy things like accuracy, precision and consistency? Kind of! The last tool I would recommend for getting started with bread baking is a simple cast iron dutch oven. The issue with most home ovens (even new ones!) are that they struggle to deliver strong, consistent heat in all directions, and they don’t seal well so they can’t contain steam very well. Unfortunately these are exactly the things we need to make great bread! One way to get around this is to bake your loaf in a preheated dutch oven. Cast iron has excellent heat retention so it creates a perfect tiny oven for you loaf, and the lid seals tightly and retains the moisture and steam inside your loaf during the initial bake. This is a pretty affordable hack to make great bread, and a dutch oven is an all around all purpose kitchen tool. This Lodge model is the one I use, it’s nice a roomy for making large loaves, the handle is easy to grab (surprisingly important when things are really hot) and while enamel is very pretty, this cast iron is a great work horse.

With just these 3 tools, you will have a great start to your bread journey! Happy Baking!

Looking for more fun bread baking tools? Check out my exhaustive materials list

If you need more guidance you can check out my book Bread Baking for Beginners

More of a visual learner and want me to guide you through every recipe in the whole first chapter in my book? You can take my online video class

How to Store High Quality or Homemade Bread

A large wheat sourdough miche, with cut side down on the countertop.

I am always surprised by how often I get asked this particular question! My customers that buy sourdough loaves at my bakery here in Central California often want to know how best to preserve their investment in good bread each week, and we would end up having a conversation about it on my porch (for me sometimes many times a day!).

After Bread Baking for Beginners was published, I was suddenly the bread mom to a growing herd of brand new baby bakers. They also wanted to know how to best store their bread that they had invested their time, care, and high-quality ingredients into making at home.

I will now reveal to you these mystical and magical secrets only known to me! The very finest methods of storing good bread!

If you have a large crusty sourdough loaf, you can simply keep it with the cut side down on the countertop. The exposure to the open air will keep the quality of the crust on the loaf. This method is great for loaves that are large, have a lot of whole-grain flour in them, and are made with sourdough like the bread I sell to my customers. It’s also great for bread you plan to eat over a couple of days while it is still fresh, although I have had bread like this 6 days after baking and it was still lovely to dip in soup. This method will not work as well for smaller, yeasted, mostly white flour bread, or bread made with less moisture, those will dry out and stale stored like this, but don’t worry we aren’t done talking about bread storage…

Bread for customer pickup at Alchemy Bread in brown paper bags.

Bread for customer pickup at Alchemy Bread in brown paper bags.

If you have ever bought good bread from a quality bakery, you have likely received your bread in a brown paper bag. We bakers love brown paper for a few reasons, it’s natural, it’s compost-able and often (always in my case) recycled. Paper has a breathable quality that improves the keeping quality of a crusty loaf while keeping it from getting to hard to cut. If you are baking bread at home and want to gift it to someone in a paper bag or store, simply be sure to cool it completely before bagging. You don’t want steam and condensation trapped inside the bag with the bread, this can make the crust very soft.

Kindergarten Honey Wheat loaves with beeswax wraps

Kindergarten Honey Wheat loaves with beeswax wraps

With some loaves, keeping the loaf soft is the overall goal of storing the bread. This is especially the case with sandwich-type loaves, like the Kindergarten Honey Wheat Bread that I make with my kids, and all enriched bread; like brioches, challahs, and milk bread you find in my book. My favorite way to store these types of bread that must be kept soft is with beeswax wraps. These are fabric coated in beeswax, they are washable, reusable, and when you warm the beeswax with your hands the fabric will stick to itself. These are also a great all-purpose replacement for plastic wrap around your kitchen, you can wrap half a lemon, a sandwich, or cover a bowl of rising dough with these wraps. As you can tell, I typically can’t say enough how much I love these things. I have them in lots of sizes and use them every day. You can find them on my Materials List (along with many other baking tools I recommend).

Sliced Sourdough

Sliced Sourdough

For longer-term bread storage scenarios, I recommend slicing the entire loaf, Ziploc bagging, and freezing. This is great for people that live alone and can’t go through a whole loaf in a few days, or people that live far from their favorite bakery (you can stock up on multiple loaves and freeze them!) For best results it’s important to slice the loaf when it’s still fresh and make your best attempt to get all the air out of the bag before freezing. The slicing is important because then you can thaw one or two individual slices as needed in your toaster (or by toasting in butter in a skillet). I have had a friend make me grilled cheese on frozen bread that she bought from me, and I was surprised how good it was and how perfectly it had held up in the freezer. If you need more convincing on this method you can read this manifesto on freezing bread in the New York Times.

If you haven’t started baking your own bread yet, you can get started with this free recipe, with my book, with the tools on this materials list, and with my online techniques class and I’ll get you started on the right path! With my book, class, and a handful of tools, you can have an enriching and relaxing new hobby, and impress your friends and family with your new skills. Don’t forget to tag me in your baking adventures on Instagram @AlchemyBread so I can be proud of you! Happy Baking & Keep Rising! -Bonnie

Loaves with Little Ones

With kids out of school and a lot of free time on our hands, this might be the perfect remedy. Here is an article I did for Parents Magazine in August of 2019. I felt now would be a great time to archive it here so you all can access it. I hope you enjoy, and please feel free to tag me on instagram @alchemybread I love to see kids baking bread! <3

If this little project inspires you to do more bread baking this year, you can find a link to my book and a thorough baking materials list here: www.alchemybread.com/book

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2019 Year Review in Cookbooks

I probably did more cooking, for more people (and for more of a social media audience for that matter) in 2019 than in any year prior. It was a year of branching out from my typical cooking style and repertoire of faithful recipes. Surprisingly, I did not have much of a learning curve with this, which I would attribute partially to experience in cooking, but more-so to the high quality of cookbooks I had to guide me this year. I thought I would share those with you here since I get many requests for recipes and cookbook recommendations. These books were not necessarily published this year, they are just the books that defined my personal cooking and baking year.

Since I’m a baker by trade, I feel like I have to mention first the baking book that I enjoyed the most this year.

The Tivoli Road Baker I’ve only had since the spring and it is already showing signs of wear due to how much I have used it as a reference. It’s almost like 4 books as it has so many recipes and so much utilitarian advice in it. I’ve made sprouted buckwheat sourdough, spelt plum galettes, perfectly spiced gingerbread, and lemon curd filled doughnuts from this book as you might expect from a high quality baking book. Perhaps surprisingly, I’ve also made roasted garlic mayonnaise, pickled carrots, curry chicken, a variety of salads and salad dressings, meat pies, and Cornish pasties. I can’t more highly recommend this book, not just for leveling up your baking and all the small notes of valuable advice tacked into the margins, but the sheer volume of quality recipes in every category. This book never quite makes it back into my bookshelf before I want to look at it again. I wish I had this book when I first started cooking and baking, I have learned so much from it this year.


I started out the year planning to working on my Japanese cooking. Our family has a sustained interest in Japanese food since my husband is half Japanese. I was also inspired because my friend Yukimi, a baker from Japan, planned to come visit us in the summer. I picked out this book:

I mostly wanted to try to understand the type of cooking possibly made at home or as street food. By the time my friend Yukimi returned for a 2nd visit from Japan we had made: ramen, okonomiyaki, tempura, soba, oyakadon, takoyaki, donburi, tonkatsu, udon, and so many more recipes with this book as my guide. I found the recipes thorough, informative, fun, and approachable. Even things that I wasn’t quite sure how it should taste (squid pancake balls? savory cabbage pancakes?) came out beautifully thanks to the explicit instructions. I really enjoyed this book and how it opened the door to talk with my friend in the kitchen somewhat confidently, in spite of our language barrier. Food can really open the door for so much more.

As many of you know, I went to Paris for the first time this year, which was an incredible experience, When I came home I definitely wanted to recreate in my kitchen some of the things I loved to eat there. I brought home a cookbook from Paris that was in French and used my google translate app to interpret the recipes which was a fun exercise, but I definitely needed a little more guidance in my native language. I found this book secondhand in a bookshop and I was so glad that I did.

I had followed David Lebovitz online for a very long time, and I felt that buying this book was extremely overdue on my part. I was correct. I have cooked 3-4 meals per week out of this book consistently since I bought it. Possibly since David originally hails from Northern California a little bit near where I live, his take on french cooking feels somewhat familiar and very attainable to me. I like the breadth of this book a lot, there are plenty of simple recipes as well as more “project” type recipes that are fun to tackle and the desserts are fantastic as well. Get this book.

Finally, we have a book that I received at the end of the year as a gift from a dear friend.

I have only had this book about a month, but I am so excited to use it as a reference throughout the coming year. It is laid out seasonally which is very useful as a newbie to having a small garden. It’s extremely visual in nature which is great for showing recipes to my kids. We do like to cook with a lot of produce, so this is a nice book for our family. I have only made a handful of recipes from it so far and they have all been delicious and helpful for me since I cook a lot but don’t always feel the most inspired and creative when I see a carrot!

Here’s to a new year filled with plenty of good cooking! I hope perhaps you will like one of these books as much as I have.


Bread Baking for Beginners Class Scrapbook

After much demand following the success of my first book, I finally started offering bread baking classes here at Alchemy Bread in September of 2019! As of this writing, we have put 12 sold out and incredibly fun classes in the books, with many more on the calendar for the future. My friend Marilyn was kind enough to drop in on one of my first classes and capture some beautiful photos. Enjoy this scrapbook, and consider joining us for a class! You can sign up for one in the shop, or if you don’t see an available class, sign up for my email newsletter, follow on facebook or on Instagram to keep in touch with what’s happening here, those links are at the very bottom of the page.

BBGA ARTICLE

Friendship Bake:

Building Community

(Article for Bread Lines, Bread Baker's Guild of America magazine)

Bonnie scoring loaves of bread in her kitchen.

Bonnie scoring loaves of bread in her kitchen.

It’s quarter to five on a warm late summer evening. Sourdough loaves glow in the amber light in the small dining room of our tiny 1920’s bungalow in downtown Modesto, California, the results of a full night and day of hand mixing, shaping and baking. I  pull the last of the baguettes from the oven as steam floods the tiny kitchen. Outside I can hear the familiar squeaking of the picket fence gate as my front yard begins filling with a small crowd, arranging themselves into a line. Animated with conversation, the line trails out of the yard, onto the sidewalk and down the street. I open the front door and shout hello to friends and neighbors , greet newcomers, and capture a few hugs from kids as I spread colorful blankets and cushions onto the grass next to the garden beds overflowing with wildflowers. It’s story time at Alchemy Bread. Children gather close to hear a picture book with a bread or baking theme. I read the story to the sound of giggles from the children, their families waiting to buy their weekly bread. 

Guest, author and illustrator Ben Hatke, doing storytime at Alchemy Bread's friendship bake.

Guest, author and illustrator Ben Hatke, doing storytime at Alchemy Bread's friendship bake.

 

The hands of my regulars are laden with treasures. Homemade plum jam, eggs from backyards hens,  a large bag of  coffee roasted in a home kitchen, salsa, a packet of foil steaming with freshly made tortillas, bundles of flowers and a bags full of tomatoes and peppers and herbs. They are all here for our weekly tradition called ‘Friendship Bake” an opportunity to barter anything homemade or homegrown for fresh bread. 

Breads on display on the porch.

Breads on display on the porch.

 

How did a tiny cottage bakery with no storefront, no marketing and no listed address on the outskirts of a rough downtown neighborhood grow to draw a crowd? The answer is community. I started baking out of my tiny home oven and delivering my bread around nearby neighborhoods in my cargo bike 3 years ago. I started small by investing a lot of time in my community. I partnered with my friend who is a doula, to give my bread to postpartum moms after their new baby was born. Donated bread to preschools, elementary schools, church dinners, and made meals for friends that were sick or injured. Taught baking classes to kids through local culinary classes and 4H clubs. Donated bread to art gallery openings, poetry readings, community garden work days, and for sharing at potlucks. Going to a weekly park playdate and arriving with a big basket of bread to share with moms and kids. This same park is where I started an initiative with a few other small businesses to make lunches with local jams coffee and fruit, load it into my bike and take it to the park to serve the homeless that live there. Each small act has touched a new web of people, and as those connections are nurtured and grown, positive word of mouth has extended the line in front of my house. 

Happy customers in line, Willow flower truck making bouquets in the driveway.

Happy customers in line, Willow flower truck making bouquets in the driveway.

 

As Friendship Bake has flourished,  it became an opportunity to support local artists. Featured once a month during bread pickup as part of downtown Art Walk have been watercolorists, photographers, printmakers, textile artists and florists adding beauty to our weekly gathering. A collaboration with our poetry center created “bread bag poetry”, featuring local poems in our bread bags each week, and promoting poetry events in our city. We hosted Porchfest, a community music festival put on in our neighborhoods, where anyone was welcome to stop by and hear acoustic tunes in our front yard and socialize on our porch. We even had a children’s book author and illustrator do our story time and a book signing here. These events have brought new dimensions to what we can do with bread. 

Colorful line stretching down the block, children playing in the wildflowers.

Colorful line stretching down the block, children playing in the wildflowers.

 

Engaging with the community has continuously amended the lovely cast of characters that assemble here each week. The fruits of their labors in their hands, conversations shift from the usual “what do you do?” to “what do you love to do? or, What did you make?” and while the eclectic group includes schoolteachers, gardeners, yogis, musicians, artists, poets, woodworkers, makers, farmers, crafters, cooks and all sorts of interesting folks, bartering as a community and storytelling together has given us a glimpse into the reason we are all here; for a deeper connection, and the opportunity to really know and serve one another.

children eating cookies and listening to Mattea Overstreet sing and play guitar at Porchfest.

children eating cookies and listening to Mattea Overstreet sing and play guitar at Porchfest.

 

When the sun sets on friendship bake and all the bread has sold out, some regulars stick around to gather on the porch. They know that I’ll disappear into the kitchen, and reappear with homemade pizzas and a few bottles of wine. It’s over this food and conversation that we forge the next great thing we’ll do in the spirit of community, together.

Tiny artists always welcome on the porch.

Tiny artists always welcome on the porch.

Pizza with friends on the porch

Pizza with friends on the porch

pizza love &lt;3

pizza love <3

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