How this thing Works.
Well, first, there is just the overall how does this work: Over at the web application I am currently building you can browse, sort of, our products and add whatever strikes your fancy to your shopping cart. As part of that you’ll select what production date you want. You’ll choose your quantity, and the type, for bread it’s currently just “Loaf”, but with cookies you’ve got “Each”, a single cookie, Half or a full Dozen. Each of those options comes with its own pricing.
The next thing that you will be selecting is how your order will get to you. Shipped, mailed by way of the United States Postal Service. Delivered, where I’ll drive it to you. I’m limiting that to being in a 10 mile radius around Redlands. And lastly is Pickup, where you will come to a location and I’ll hand you your order. For Pickup and Delivery you get another option, where you can choose from the available Windows.
By Window I mean a time span on a particular date. That is typically Friday evening and Saturday afternoon for Pickup and then I’ll drive around town Saturday morning making deliveries. As I develop this program, and my customer base, things will change (it’s true, the one real universal constant is change).
Who am I? Who is the Mark behind this ridiculous sounding “Mark Bread” thing?
Funny that you should ask. I am Mark Woodson, the former Chef and person that ran the lunch program at The Grove School here in Redlands, California for over 15 years. I’m someone with interestingly varied degrees of experience, though not really academics. I’ve been a graphic designer, IT support, database developer and just developer in general. Never in a million years did I think I’d end up in Culinary, but the opportunity appeared before me and I took it. If I didn’t think I’d end up in food service, I never, ever, never ever thought I’d function in a role where I was a “teacher”. But again, the opportunity presented itself and I took and I am very glad I did.
What on earth do you mean by “Untraditional Sourdough”?
Well, just like my path from tech support to food service, the evolution of this method of bread making evolved over many years starting before I was making lunch at Grove and turned into selling the bread at the Grove Farmer’s Market on Saturday’s. It all started with a friend from another life, when I worked at SRI, giving me a cook book for my birthday. It was from Tartine, the then famous bakery in San Francisco and I played with making sourdough bread.
The cook book was a pretty standard kind of sourdough recipe, which I played with at home before bringing it to the school. Well, working in an environment where lunch needs to be ready to go at 11:30 complicates things for making something like sourdough bread where the proof time can often be quite a bit more than the 2-3 hours you really need it to be (it takes at least an hour for the bread to cool enough to slice, often more than that). So through a series of experiments, making bread for lunch, I figured out a couple of things we could do.
Firstly, let’s skip the loafing, in the traditional sense at least. I’m not portioning, and then shaping, and then having to proof again because with all that handling the loaf needs to proof a second time.
And secondly, let’s oil the dough exterior. Instead of using flour to keep the very sticky dough from sticking to everything, I oil the doughs exterior to take care of that which is also in keeping with the handling the dough as little as possible in the loafing process. I got this idea from the Italian bread, focaccia.
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