The Mill

Apr28

at long last we’ve landed on a name for the new cafe bakery. we’ve gone through a million different iterations, and a exchanged a million text messages (in many of which i was [inaccurately] positive that i’d struck gold)…

are you ready? you wanna know what it is? are you sure???

The Mill.

its awesome, right?? i know! we are pumped.

(logical next question) hmmm, why in the heck are you calling it The Mill? it sounds real good, but why??

BECAUSE I’M GETTING A MILL. TO MAKE FLOUR. ‘THE MILL’ WILL HAVE A MILL AND WE WILL USE IT TO MAKE FRESHLY MILLED WHOLE GRAIN FLOURS.

this is what the mill will look like:

and these are the dudes in Austria that are going to make it:

i think we’re gonna get along realll nice.

i cannot overstate how totally effing excited i am about this.

we’ll use said mill to grind our grains and we’ll use said grains to make bread. and scones. and coffee cakes. and cookies. and whatever the hell else we feel like.

so there. are you pumped? i hope so, cuz i’m coming for you.

❤ josey

p.s. check out the first slug of the season! found this lil beauty on a glorious bike camp trip adventure that i took last weekend down to half moon bay. it’s beautiful, get out!!!

my trip to meet the baker

Apr13

i just got back from a rad breadventure up in Sonoma. snuck in about 2 hours of sleep for the night, but it was well worth it.

i’d heard tales of a righteous baker man who baked delicious bread in a wood-fired oven with a bunch of whole grains… in a shipping container that he converted into a bakery.

i decided it was high time i meet the man they call “de bejkr,” so i dropped him an e-mail, and asked if i could come hang. no questions there, he was super gracious, and invited me to come right on up. fast forward to last night about 10pm, i’m hopped up on the PizzaHacker’s wares, powering through a headache, and rippin through a thunderstorm heading north, arriving just in time to see him mixing up his first batch of dough:

no mechanical mixer in this bakery, just a burly pair of man hands and some strong ideals.

Mike has worked in bread for upwards of 16 years, and i have the sense that he’s really found his stride. he works for himself, making the types of bread he wants to make, the way he wants to make them. at this time of year he bakes once a week and sells at the Sonoma Farmer’s Market, doing everything himself, mixing everything by hand, baking it all in his woodfired oven:

he bakes a handful of different breads (kracked kamut, pain de campagne, ryebatta, pain biologique, baguettes, to name a few he had today), as well as wood fired pretzels, which he bakes up right at the market. when he does the evening market he also does flatbreads with herbs and veggies from his garden. i’m sure they’re just as killer as the stuff i tried.

one of his favorite flourishes is to rock a flour stencil on top of the loaf, which is mighty sexy, if i do say so myself: