rock n roll pizza

get ready to party honey babies.

SAISON COUNTRY
we gettin crazy in the bakery – check out this fruitful experiment… we took our country bread and used belgian saison beer yeast in our pre-ferment. VOILA! saison country. still just playing at this point.

this friday night we’s gonna be slangin slices of *P*I*Z*Z*A* and listening to The Beatles allllll night long at The Mill. and by allllll night long, i mean from 6-9pm. we’re bakers, remember?

yup, it’s the first installment of rock n roll pizza, and it’s pretty frikkin simple: we make pizzas the best way we know how to, you come and hang out and eat a few slices (they’ll prob be $3.50/slice), and we get all good and vibey to some good ol fashioned rock n roll. we’re starting out with a band that only total a-holes don’t like: The Beatles. i am very pumped to have my right hand man Rafi helping out with pizza on this fine night, so when you get here please shoot him a wink, maybe even pinch his bum.

and in case you’re curious, we got some good news & some bad news on the milling front. what do you want first, the good or the bad?

good, gimme the good news first, cuz news is like food, and i always eat dessert first. 

well i certainly don’t agree with that type of approach, i am going to give you the bad news first, because i like to save the most delicious stuff for last. ok – bad news is that we got all our hopes all pumped up about some very nice grain that we were going to be sourcing from a farm not too far from here, and then it all fell through. i was very bummed out about it.

well that sucks baker, i’m sorry to hear that. but i see your point about that whole saving dessert for last… what’s the good news??!?

the good news is that you can’t stop us, we’re masters of turning lemons into lemon bars, and we spoke with our grain guru Nicky Giusto up at Central Milling in Petaluma, and WTF, we bounced right back and are now milling ALL of the wheat for our whole wheat breads!! $HIT YES!!! this wheat is coming from a farm in Washington, grown at the hands of a man named Spud Brown. sorry for continually blabbing about how pumped i am on this, but i just can’t overstate how excited it makes me to be at this point in the game. a very special thanks goes to viking baker extraordinaires Wendy and Ryan, who fearlessly took the plunge while i was gallivanting around Chico with this guy:

DAVE & MACHU
Dave tends a small herd of goats on his property, but he also has Machu & Picchu, two gorgeous llamas, to help him keep the goats safe.

i spent a couple days last week out in Chico with Dave and it was so so so nice. it was my first trip out to visit him since we opened The Mill, and it was just as refreshing and relaxing as ever. it was also the first time that i’d actually gone to the Chico Farmer’s Market with him, to see the breads get handed off to his customers in person. it was pretty crazy – in about 4 hours he sold just under 400 loaves of bread to a steady stream of regulars. and this isn’t special, this is just what happens every week. watching the mutual appreciation expressed between him and all his customers was very special for me.

last week me and the whole JBB crew went out to Bolinas for our first overnight retreat. we spent the afternoon on the beach surfing and swimming and drinking micheladas, and then headed back to my good and generous buddy Kacey’s home:

the evening was spent bbqing and playing ridiculously entertaining games such as ‘spikenpuppen’ and ‘pomme bomb.’ wish i could share images of these in action, but i’ll just let your imagination work with this – one of the games involved picking up a crab apple with your butt cheeks. how bout them apples?

on a more professional note, as i am a man interested in mills and milling and all things related, last week i made a trip up to the Bale Grist Mill in St. Helena. what a spectacular glimpse into the past this thing is! i couldn’t actually go inside, but i snapped some nice pics, take a looksee:

tomorrow ushers in October, and i am ready for it, i love autumn. hope you’re ready for it too my dogs.

hearts & rainbows 4eva,

j