Monica, our main mixer/shaper is out of the bakery for a class and a competition.  The class is for German rye bread.  We’ll have more details when she gets back (and some new loaves on the way too).

The competition is the California Raisin Board’s annual baking competition, which draws in a large group of professionals and amateurs alike to create bread and breakfast items featuring raisins.  Monica has been working on formulas for pastry and bread off and on throughout the summer (some of you might have gotten samples of the various items), and one of her bread entries was accepted.  This means she’s off to Manhattan, KS for the actual bake off.  She’s been practicing hard and we expect her to make a good showing!  We’ll post results when we know them.

All of her traveling though, means that Chef ended up full time on bread production this week and next. Different chefs have different levels of involvement in a production environment- here, Chef Leaman’s time is divided, being slightly more heavily focused on production stations (typically filling in where production needs are highest), and then production planning, and finally idea-to-product development.  Over the last couple of years, other crew members have taken on some management tasks such as inventory and ordering, and as they take on more production planning, he’ll be working more on product development.  Or, that’s the general plan, but this is a small business, so…

Anyway…since we have dedicated crew for the various stations, these days it’s rare that he has one to himself.  He’s been taking advantage of it by cycling through a wider variety of bread and playing with pre-ferments, and also furthering some cross training for a couple of the staff (every little bit of help with shaping makes production that much faster).  He does work with Monica on mixing and shaping, but there is a qualitative difference between running a station yourself, and assisting on it. 

It’s almost Friday- have a great start to your weekend everyone.