Old Fashioned On Purpose
Old Fashioned On Purpose
S15: E7: A More Efficient Way to Sourdough
I never get tired of talking about sourdough, ESPECIALLY when it comes to ways to bake it more efficiently!
Today I'm joined by Mike from Rosehill Sourdough to dive into some of the common pitfalls in the sourdough world that are costing you time and flour. I love Mike's engineer perspective and he gave me a lot of new ideas to chew on including sifting whole wheat flour, his rule-breaking method of adding salt, why you should let your whole wheat flour age, and more!
Podcast Episode Highlights
- Mike's backstory and how he got into sourdough
- Why it's good to slow down with sourdough
- Biggest mistakes people are making with sourdough
- Talking about salt and sourdough
- A closer look at sourdough discard
- Types of flour to use
- Tips for using whole wheat
- Favorite sourdough tools
Resources Mentioned in This Podcast Episode:
Learn more about Meal Craft here: https://mealcraftmethod.com/meal-craft-main177846-9453
Learn more about Mike and Rosehill Sourdough here: http://www.rosehillsourdough.com/
OTHER HELPFUL RESOURCES FOR YOUR HOMESTEAD:
- Sign up for weekly musings from my homestead: http://theprairiehomestead.com/letter
- Get my free homesteading tutorials & recipes here: www.theprairiehomestead.com
- Jill on Instagram: @jill.winger
- Jill on Facebook: http://facebook.com/theprairiehomestead
- Apply to be a guest on the Old-Fashioned on Purpose podcast: https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/podcast-guest-application
Did you enjoy listening to this episode? Please drop a comment below or leave a review to let us know. This can help other folks learn about this podcast and we also really appreciate the feedback!
So I never really get tired of talking about sourdough. I've done countless episodes here on the Old Fashioned On Purpose podcast talking about that topic. There are blog posts, there are portions in my books about sourdough, and I always come back to it. Even though I've been doing it I think I started my first starter back in 2010, to be exact. There's always new things to learn. I'm always fascinated to see other people's approach to the process and just to slowly figure out all the bits and pieces. So a while back, I got a box in the mail with a variety of sourdough tools, and so, with my platforms, I get things in the mail all the time and I'm always curious and interested. And these tools really caught my attention because, number one, they were packaged in a really cool and streamlined way I do appreciate good packaging and, number two, they were just different. There were proofing baskets that were made out of different material than other baskets I'd seen. There were these mysterious bread mats that were designed to help you lift your loaves in and out of the pots without burning yourself, which is a huge issue. For those of you who've baked, you know the parchment paper sometimes doesn't work great, and so I decided I needed to learn more about this company and so, long story short, I dug into it.
Speaker 1:I was connected with Mike from Rose Hill Sourdough. He is the genius behind these products and, honestly, I've been trying to get him on the show for quite a while. Our schedules just wouldn't align. I stood him up one day. I had my calendar wrong. So we finally made it and you guys get to benefit from this conversation. We're going to talk about a simpler way to sourdough. Mike is an engineer. I love how his brain works, as he is in this product development world and also the baking world, so he has a lot of gems and nuggets of info to share today. Welcome, mike. I'm so excited we get to finally have this conversation.
Speaker 2:I'm very excited. It's been excitement building on excitement for a little bit of time since we first connected, so I'm excited that we're able to chat.
Speaker 1:The suspense has killed me. So yeah, here we are. We finally made it work. It's hard to be entrepreneurs with busy calendars and kids. And kids. Yes, kids are something. So I'm so excited to hear more about your process, as I was just looking at your website once again before we jumped on the interview today and you have such an interesting background. I'm especially fascinated because you were an engineer, or you are still an engineer. Can you kind of give us a little bit of where? You came from and how you got here.
Speaker 2:Sure, I claim engineer as much as my identity as anything else I might say about myself. So I am definitely an engineer and I have worked professionally for a long time in consumer product development for other companies and then, over the last few years, have just slowly transitioned over to my own company and doing product development for home bakers who ran into similar issues that I was running into as I fell in love with bread baking and pizza making and wanted to make better products to serve those people.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I think it's an interesting juxtaposition of the engineer brain, because I have engineers in my family. I know how their minds tend to work, not to put you all in a box, but there is a certain type of personality that is a good engineer. And then thinking of the baking side of things, which can be a science but also an art.
Speaker 2:How do you have those two pieces of yourself come together? Is that a challenge or does it flow? No, absolutely, and feel free to put us all in the same box. I think we would like to hang out together. So I do think it works really well. It's unsurprising to me that when I meet fellow bread bakers or pizza makers that are really good at what they do, they also have a similar brain. They are also former engineers or current engineers professionally, or they are really into the sciences, the process and the want to make things better and more efficient and drive product quality. That works for us in this world of baking, and it's really helpful too, because it forces us to slow down, which is a really nice thing. That I love about the sourdough process is there isn't any instant gratification. So I think that's why we find a lot of engineers doing this work, because we we need it. We need to slow down, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you're speaking my language for sure, and that that's really the whole reason my home said these days it's not necessarily to save money, it's not necessarily because I don't have other sources of food, but I just talk about it so much Like I need. I'm not an engineer mind at all, like my brain is the opposite of that, but I still need that forced slowdown with tactile hobbies and interests and things like that, and I think that's a big piece of it for so many people yeah.
Speaker 2:Huge, and I think that's the coolest piece of feedback I get from a lot of people, engineers or otherwise uh, you don't need to be an engineer to make great bread. It resonates with us but anybody can do it and I think that's something that keeps coming back around. How many people say without putting words in their mouth, but basically what I get down to is building something with their hands and how removed they are from that. I'm fortunate in that I've been able to do work for a long time in physical product development where I get to see the fruits of my labor.
Speaker 2:But so many people who work jobs in information technology or work I mean, that's the general worker in any kind of tech company now or otherwise, even especially with work from home so many people are so far removed from the product that they don't have any physical output that they can touch and feel, let alone smell and taste. And so so many people when they get into sourdough there's such a the first loaf, like I celebrate so often with people because it's so much bigger than bread. A lot of times it's a reconnection with something they didn't know they were missing out on because they've just been so removed from an actual physical output, something substantial that they could put their hands on. They haven't had that in a long time, so that's a cool thing that I get to be a part of with a lot of people, which is an awesome part of the role.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely. I think, just yeah. Modern cultures has really stolen that from us in so many ways, and I think that's part of the reason I know 2020 really reinvigorated interest in Sardo. But I think beyond that, beyond everyone being in quarantine, it's just like we need to build with our hands, we need to create with our hands, so we just hardwired for that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. It's actually pretty crazy. Around 2014, 2016, I started seeing this trend of oddly but not oddly as I thought about it more engineers buying land. A lot of people were exiting tech and taking that money that they made and started homesteading, buying land, and that's when I first started thinking about this more and more. And then 2017 is when I first started my first sourdough that actually stuck. I've been trying to make one since 2012. And just kind of on and off I'd get the bug and then I'd be like, ah, it didn't take happened. That year there was this documentary that so many bakers go back to by Michael Pollan Cooked, which was I love that.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, yes yeah.
Speaker 2:Everybody knows it and what an intersection in history that this Netflix released this documentary miniseries and so many bakers I know reference back to the air episode and talking about natural fermentation and that was finally the final push I needed to get into it. A lot of things happened in my life around that time and everything was pushing me towards sourdough and that was kind of the final, like I just need to try this again. And then that's when I started Rose Hill and here I am today making bread mats.
Speaker 1:Here you are, and good bread mats, to be exact. Thank you, okay, so there's so many I have like so many questions in so many different places. We could start, so I'm just going to start and I'm sure we'll work our way around. Yeah, but I want to talk about efficiency, because that's how your brain works and I do appreciate some efficiency. So I guess let's start with what. Do you see some of the biggest pitfalls or mistakes that sourdough bakers are making that are either costing them time, frustrating them or just making the process less efficient and enjoyable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's quite a bit. My methods are different than other people's methods. My methods are different than other people's methods and that frustrates people who follow me and others, to the point where I often will tell people I would rather you not follow me and make sourdough than follow me and be confused such a history tied to bread making, that a lot of times they can't decouple things that other people teach. And there's there's methods that people teach, namely feeding every day. That works and that has a long, rich history.
Speaker 2:You had to pre-refrigeration, you had to feed your sourdough every day and you had to keep it pH low enough so it wouldn't get infected. So the ratios that you fed out were much lower, which meant that when you pulled from that sourdough, you had to keep it pH low enough so it wouldn't get infected. So the ratios that you fed out were much lower, which meant that when you pulled from that sourdough you had to make a separate leaven build to then go make your bread, and that is a process that is tried and true and has been around for a long, long time. I don't want a giant crock of sourdough on my countertop. I don't want to feed it every day. I want to be able to leave my house for more than 12 hours at a time and not have to worry about my sourdough in the summer?
Speaker 2:Yeah exactly, and when we say every day, a lot of people in the summer, if you live in a warm climate, you're feeding it two or three times a day that never worked for me. When I first started I had read a couple books on the sourdough process. From a scientific perspective what is fermentation? I kind of had a nerdy background. From home beer brewing. I kind of understood what was going on and I wanted to develop a method that would work for my schedule having a kid and wanting to leave my house and so I started using the refrigerator. So I feed my sourdough when I need it and that's what I advocate.
Speaker 2:Other people do Most home bakers from the many that I've talked to they bake on the weekends because they have a job and they've got stuff going on. So once a week that's kind of what I teach people and I've tested over years and once a week feeding works great. You leave it in the fridge when you're not using it, you pull out of the fridge, you feed it, you use it in your dough, you feed it again, you put it back in the fridge and that's kind of your weekly cadence and that's been the biggest thing for me teaching that, because that saves so much flour. There's no discard, or very little discard. Discard I like to use the term is old sourdough, so you fed it, it's risen, it's come back down and now that is discard, or what you leave on your counter. If you feed every day. To me that is a vat of discard. Um, it's terrible word. I've tried rebranding it many times and it never sticks and so we always just come back to discard. Um. So because of that, like in baking with roast or sourdough, I think there's 13 or 15 discard recipes because I don't like waste, so I'm not going to advocate that you throw that discard down the drain, use that in a recipe, but also I'm going to teach you how to minimize that so you have enough every couple of weeks to make waffles or to make banana bread or something like that, but you're not needing to use up a lot of it.
Speaker 2:So I think that's the biggest thing is people get into it and they are confused because they have so much competing information and a lot of that is around potentially. You know pushing that narrative because I do use a lot of mathematical terms. I write things in percentages and I write out ratios, and I just assume people know what that means. But I also have resources for if you don't know what that means, so I will teach you for free. Go on my website and click on a little free sourdough resources tab and I'll teach you what Baker's math is and how to use it in recipe development and how to read it.
Speaker 2:But I think that's the thing that overwhelms people too is my recipes, specifically, are all backed out from baker's math. So it's very specific numbers 371 grams of flour and someone sees that and they see. What do you mean? It's not cups. What do you mean? It's grams.
Speaker 2:What are you trying to do? How European of you, you know like, no, like this is the way to do it, and so you kind of, if you get into my methods, you kind of have to do them all and they will work for you. Like, my methods are all about learning how to work with nature, and so the process is going to work. I'm teaching you how to reliably repeat the process and for me, when I was teaching other people, repeatability was the biggest thing. If they didn't have repeatability in their bakes, they weren't understanding what they needed to do different to get the results they wanted, and so that was the biggest thing for me when I wrote Baking with Roast Hill Sourdough when I was teaching people on Instagram still do.
Speaker 2:The lessons I try to give are based in experiments that I've run. They're based in sound science and they're based in some kind of knowledge. Trying to pass on some knowledge, something that will help you, something educational that you can take away and improve your sourdough baking and you can piecemeal it. You can take stuff you know one bit at a time, but I do recommend just kind of jumping into my whole process and it will. It will make you a more efficient baker. You use less flour, you waste less of your time, you don't need a mixer, you do everything by hand and in the end, I think it gives you a better product that you're more in touch with, that you understand at a deeper level and that you can be really proud of, because it came out of something that you mixed by hand, which is awesome.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I think that's really for all of the homestead processes in the kitchen and elsewhere. I think my goal is always to get people to understand what's actually happening. You don't have to have a science degree, but just know, at least baseline, what is going on, because that's where you have the ability to break the rules, if they are. You know rules, quote, unquote and get creative and understand the nuance and not just get stuck following a blog post on the internet Right, and I love that you're taking that approach to just really understanding what's going on. And then you have that wiggle room to be a little more flexible and play a little bit more.
Speaker 2:Absolutely A great point. A great example of that is this um, this, this I don't even know what the right word is Uh, people think a myth. People think that if you put salt in your sourdough that it's going to kill your sourdough. And it's just like. Not true to the point where, like, using salt in your sourdough is actually a technique that's been used for a long time to slow fermentation during warmer months, so you don't have to feed your sourdoughs often so like.
Speaker 2:There's things like that like you learn that rule, like you just said, right, like salt doesn't kill, but sourdoughs or salt slows. Then you can learn like oh okay, I also know that adding water speeds up but salt slows. So like, and also, adding more whole wheat speeds up and using less sourdough, that slows. So oh, I've got this loaf that has a lot of whole wheat flour in it that I've had to add a lot of water to because whole wheat sucks up a lot of water. Mike reminded me that more whole wheat speeds things up, so I'm going to dial back my sourdough content to kind of slow things down, but it's still going too fast. What can I do? And it's like oh, maybe I increase the salt a little bit or it's going too slow. Maybe I decrease the salt a little bit, or you learn how to play within those variables, and I think that there's this saying that I get wrong every time, but it's like you can't know anything until you know everything and you can't know anything until you know something, or something like that. But you kind of have to just learn all of it and learn how all the variables play together and then you can start creating something. That's really great, and I used to be, I still dabble.
Speaker 2:I love photography, I've always loved photography and I've got really old fun cameras and um, sourdough baking. Photography are great corollaries because if you learn photography, you learn that you're dealing with light and you're adjusting your isosensitivity and your aperture and your shutter speed, um, to try to capture something, and those variables work together in order to expose an image properly. It's the exact same thing with sourdough you're working with flour and water and salt and sourdough to try to create a process that works for your timeline and it's a product that you want, and so it's always fun to play with those. But again it's like I can't just. I'm always checking myself because I can't just give that to somebody.
Speaker 2:They first. They first start, like I'm just I'm working with a friend who's never baked before and I just gave her a jar of sourdough starter and I saw her yesterday. She's like it's still in my fridge and I was like, don't be overwhelmed, just feed it Just one time feed. You don't need to make anything. I don't even want you to make anything, I just want you to feed it. Start feeling what that feels like. Then we'll make something. We'll probably make banana bread the first time we do something. We'll do something really simple, but just start. And that's always my feedback to people is like there's so much you can learn in this. The best time to start was probably 10 years ago, but guess what.
Speaker 1:The second best time to start is today. So just start, yeah, and that's such a good point. I mean, I say that so much with all the homesteading. People get so overwhelmed going from modern life into this old fashioned, even if it's just in the suburbs or in an apartment, it can feel so overwhelming. And it's like the hardest part's the first step, and then it's that we can't over-research, but we still want to know why things are happening. But those have to happen in tandem. You can't have all action and no knowledge, or all knowledge and no action, and so I think that's that happy medium, that when you get in that groove, that's when stuff starts clicking, whether it's sourdough or chickens or gardening or whatever.
Speaker 2:Exactly yeah, I would love to have chickens one day, someday.
Speaker 1:Yes, I mean sourdough is really. I feel like it. Just they kind of go together, so it's inevitable.
Speaker 2:It's a gateway drug.
Speaker 1:It's a gateway drug, okay, so I'm intrigued about the salt. So you do, you add your salt into your dough, all when you add everything else.
Speaker 2:Like there's no staggering there for you. So remember how I said that there's like these processes that are wrapped up in like tradition. So like feeding your sourdough every day is like wrapped up in a in a long and beautiful homesteading tradition where people like my grandmother was one of 20 kids and she would tell me stories that her mom would just bake bread all day long and I have to imagine that she was baking with sourdough and so and she probably had a crock because she didn't have a fridge on her counter that she fed every day, right. So like that's that's wrapped up in that.
Speaker 2:This whole idea that you have to auto lease this comes from bakeries. We're in a we're in a new time for sourdough baking where you either had to bake to feed your family or you baked professionally, right. We are in a leisure baking time. This is a hobby for people and because of that there's things we get to do differently that they don't do in bakeries. And the auto lease is something you do in a bakery and you do that because you want to kickstart enzymatic activity to soften your dough and you want to do that so you have less wear and tear on your mixers and that's. But we don't have that.
Speaker 2:I mean my mix. Maybe I've got tennis elbow for mixing too much dough over the years, but my mixer is fine. Like my upper body strength is fine to mix dough right. I don't need to soften the dough and so absolutely I throw everything in one bowl. And there's people that are like you're crazy, you have to auto lease, or you have to ferment to lease, or you can't throw your salts in, or you have to ferment to lease, or you can't throw your salt in or you have to wait for this point it's like that's too stressful for me, like why am I going to have a bowl of salt out that I have to remember to add at some point?
Speaker 1:And I have forgotten it all in so many times. And then kneading it once the dough is formed is not ideal.
Speaker 2:It's not tricky, it's not. And the dough is worse if you forget the salt. Like there's Laurentine bread, the bread native to Florence, italy, doesn't have salt in it and it's like a crazy tradition, as like an FU to pizza, basically there's like this weird thing, there's this weird history in central Italy, but anyway I won't get into that. But they don't have salt in their bread and I've tried to make traditional Florentine bread and the dough is harder to work with because salt has a binding effect on gluten and so if you do forget salt and you're like trying to knead, it doesn't come together as well without salt, because the salt is helping you in that binding process.
Speaker 2:Well, that's also counteracting the wear and tear you're trying to prevent on your mixer, right? So you wouldn't put salt in because you don't want it to bind, because your mixer, you want to mix this dough up without too much wear and tear on it. You want to soften the dough. So, with your hand mixing, though, just dump everything in, like it. And I've had people run the test and they're like yeah, there's no difference and you won't notice the difference as a home baker, like you won't. So just throw everything in one bucket, mix it up, it'll be fine.
Speaker 1:It's like my favorite thing when people give permission to break the rules. Which should be a rule, but it is. It is a rule, but it shouldn't be a rule. But you can break the rules, friends, do it however you want. Okay, Awesome, hey, friends.
Speaker 1:So I'm interrupting this episode for just a second to talk about something that I actually used to be really embarrassed about so much so that I never talked about it publicly and that is the fact that every summer, I would basically completely fall out of love with cooking, so much so that I just didn't want to do it anymore. And I was thinking that I was the only one who felt like that until recently, when I started to share my deep, dark secret online and I found out that many, many of you feel the same way. I think it's just because we have so much going on in the summers that it's just really hard to find that motivation to get in the kitchen and put food on the table. The problem is our people. Well, they still want to eat, unfortunately, so we still have to find ways to nourish them and ourselves in a cost-effective and healthy way. So I've been wrestling with this problem in my own life and for those of you, for many years now trying different things, experimenting with different ideas, and I finally have created something that I think may just help I know it has helped me. It's called MealCraft and it's not your typical meal planning system. Rather, it's a set of customizable frameworks that are endlessly flexible, based on what you have in your gardens, your pantries, your freezers, your larders. You don't have to go to the grocery store to do specific shopping trips or anything like that. We're just using what you have, which really is what homesteading is all about. So Mealcraft gives you four new frameworks each month and I'm personally having so much fun with these because they can be different every time Saves me a lot of money, it's reducing the leftovers and the waste that's coming out of my kitchen and it just makes it a lot more enjoyable. So if you'd like to join us over in Mealcraft over 600 of you have already joined the fun. You can visit the link in the show notes to learn more. Now back to our episode.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the discard topic. I want to circle back to that a little bit, because that is one complaint I get, whether people are starting or they're just thinking about starting and they hear the discard. Number one the term throws everybody off. Number two they get really freaked out about how much flour they're wasting, and so I love that you are advocating that you don't have to feed every day. Now I'm kind of in the middle.
Speaker 1:There are times where I get busy and I just put my starter in the fridge and I don't touch it for a while, or sometimes a really long time, but we won't talk about that, Um. And then there are other times where I would do do feed every day because like kind of like you were talking about your grandma, your great grandma like I want to bake every day and the feeding keeps me accountable to stay in the rhythm and I have to. You know, I'm going to start my dough at night before bed, and then I know I'm going to bake and then I'm just going to repeat and I like that. But there are times when my life doesn't allow that, so we go back to intermittent. So can you just break down what that looks like a little bit? Are you doing like the dry starter method I've seen some folks do, or is this just like a still a jar of regular hydrated starter, Kind of how? What does that look like for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I advocate for feeding at 100% hydration.
Speaker 2:So that's equal parts flour and water. And I advocate feeding for 95% of your feeds at a ratio of one to two. So one part discard, two parts fresh flour, two parts water. I actually do the opposite order. I do old discard and then I do water and then I do flour, and the reason for that is small. But talking about efficiencies, as I just want those last two numbers to match, so if I put in like a little bit more water, it's really hard to dump water off, especially if it's the last thing you add. But flour is really easy to kind of scoop a little bit out. So I put a little bit too much water in, that's fine. Like just zero out my scale and add the same amount of flour that I just added water, and once those match, then I'm good to go. Even if the ratio is off by a little bit, it's fine. So that's what I advocate for and that removes the leaven build step out of your process. So you get to save yourself eight hours in your process because your feeding is your leaven build and your leaven build is your feeding. So that was a big time saver for me, was not doing separate leaven builds.
Speaker 2:And then the dry starter is really funny. I don't advocate for that because I like the benefits of lactobacillus, which is the bacteria in the sourdough. Feeding too dry benefits the yeast more than the bacteria. There's some scientific reasons for that, but you can over time Now I don't have the science to prove it, this is all theory, but you can, over time, affect the pH of your starter by doing dry feeds too often. Pasta Madre is a very dry sourdough starter and it is very low acid and it's preserved by having very low moisture in it, not having a very low pH. So you have to keep the baddies out, and we in sourdough keep the baddies out by keeping our pH really low. Nothing else can grow in it besides the sourdough or besides the yeast and the bacteria that live in the symbiotic relationship. I feel like people get this really cool bump when they try this dry feed for the first time, because you're just building mechanical strength in your dough, so that's why you're getting a bigger rise.
Speaker 2:There's also been this really popular move to like very specifically like the all purpose flour that Costco sells, and people just love that flour. Awesome, I love it. It's an organic flour, that's great, but it's weaker, and so if you are dry feeding, that's probably the way you actually do need to feed your starter to get to a similar mechanical strength as what I do, which is half high gluten bread flour and half whole wheat flour. So my starter is a little bit drier than yours if you're using a hundred percent all purpose, and so maybe that's why you're doing a little less water. Um, but I advocate for half and half, half bread flour, half whole wheat at the one, two, two. Uh, I find that that gives me um repeatable results. And then if, for some reason, I notice a drop in activity, I noticed my sourdough starter isn't as lofty, like, it's not rising as high, or my bread isn't rising as much, um, I do what's called like a refresh feed, which I do at like a one, four, four, one, five, five, and what that does is that eliminates acid carryover.
Speaker 2:There's a really great book. Trevor J Wilson wrote this book, open Car Mastery, and he talks about this thing, acid carryover. I don't know if he was the one who coined that term, but I give him credit whenever I use it. Essentially, acid carryover is from your old starter to your new starter. How much acid are you bringing along or how low is your pH? So the more acid, the lower your pH. And if you feed at equal part ratios one one ones, or like two one ones, which was really popular for a long time your pH stayed really low, which again is important. If it's sitting on the counter and you're trying to keep the bad stuff out, you want your pH to stay really low. But if you're using clean tools and modern technology, you can feed at a higher ratio, temporarily, raise your pH out of the safe zone. It will ferment and be fine and get back down to the safe zone and then you can use it in your you know, your bread making.
Speaker 2:But that's kind of the the thing that happens with the dry feed. I think, like it does raise your pH and improve mechanical strengths and people get a boost out of it. I think they're just getting a boost and they don't know why they're getting a boost. But it just became like a really popular thing to see on Instagram. Like I fixed my sourdough with a dry feed and it's like you did, but you don't know the reason you did. That's okay. I'm glad you're baking bread. That's awesome. But if you want a little, a little bit more. Give me a DM and I'll talk to you about it.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's awesome. That's great information too. Thank you for that too. Thank you for that. I'm curious. So when you so okay here, when I put mine in the fridge, let's say I put it in for a week and then I am ready to bring it back out and get it ready to bake, Like it almost and maybe this is my own, I'm projecting on my sourdough Maybe it doesn't actually need this, but it feels like it needs a day, 12 hours, 24 hours. When I first bring it out of the fridge, I feed it it. It needs like a day or so to wake back up, enough for me to use it in a dough. Is you find that with yours too? Do you give yourself that buffer or do you have a way? You just bring it out of the fridge, plop it in your bowl full of dough ingredients and off you go?
Speaker 2:so when I pull it out of the fridge, I feed it. I feed it at one, two, two, usually with warm water. If I need it quicker, um, and it comes back to life within that, you know six to eight hours and I can. I can use it in in dough right away. It might be taking a long you know longer for years to come up. If you're feeding at a lower ratio.
Speaker 2:You've got a lot of water is really good at holding on energy, and so you've got now a very cold vat of high viscosity water, essentially, and you're adding some flour and water to it. It's going to stay at a pretty low temperature for a while and, just like with all microbes, low temperature is less activity and so that may be why it's taking a little bit longer, because it's literally just warming up. So I spike mine with a little bit longer, because it's literally just warming up. So I spike mine with a little bit of warm water. I'll even put mine in a warm bath. Like I've got Cambro containers that like I'll stick my Mason jar in just to kind of keep the whole thing warm if I need it a little bit quicker, if that's what I need for my timeline.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's a good idea. I like that. I can do that. Okay, back on the flour. So you said you go half high gluten bread flour and half whole wheat. What kind of whole wheat did you use? Do you grind it yourself? I'd love a little more info on that.
Speaker 2:I don't anymore. I went through a phase of home milling and I got away from it and my mill is like sitting right over there. I see it, it's like looking at me, come back to me. I've gone through a few different, two different brands of mills and I've just haven't been able to get into the groove. I know this has been a big push for probably the last five years home milling and I know it's an opportunity that I need to jump on. I just haven't made the time to write my home milling and I know it's an opportunity that I need to jump on. Um, I just haven't made the time to write my home milling book. Uh, it is in the background and I know how I want to go about it, I just haven't had the time to do it.
Speaker 2:But, um, I use mostly um King Arthur, um bread flour and King Arthur whole wheat, um, the regular whole wheat in the dark red bag, not the white whole wheat, the standard whole wheat. And then I often will kind of go and grab some more exotic flours. Like, I've got a local mill that's fantastic Camas country mill and they mill for um Karen Springs, and so I can get Karen Springs flour locally, which is really cool. So I get 50 pound bags of glacier and of espresso and I'm trying to remember the other one that I have from them, um, or I'll get, uh, like Edison, from their own like house brand country, um, at canvas country, or like their hard red spring or their hard red winter Um, kind of depending whatever. Like their freshest stuff is like I like to go in Polly works there, this older woman, she's awesome and I just go and chat with Polly what do you got Polly, like, what is the new stuff? And so I'll grab a flower from her. So that's what I recommend to people too is like I find that, um, king Arthur's always been a really reliable base flower for me.
Speaker 2:When I moved to Scotland, I was in Scotland for three years so I couldn't get King Arthur, and so I had to, like you know, change up my flowers. But now that I've been back in the states, I've gone back to King Arthur. Um, it's a good base flower, it's reliable. And then when I want to play, I go to a local mill and I chat with them about kind of what I'm trying to get out of it, and people that work at mills like they're just as nerdy as me about flour, and so, like they they're, they're just glad somebody came and talked to them about flour that day, so they'll love to talk with you about it If you want to mix it up and do something fun.
Speaker 1:I love that. I love that. Um, so I've been doing well on the blog and on a previous episode here we've been doing a little bit of a deep dive on whole wheat sourdough because that does trip up a lot of folks just because the different, the gluten in the bran and all that. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that and any best practices you have for incorporating whole wheat flours into your loaves and still getting the texture and the rise that are going to be palatable.
Speaker 2:Oh, love the share. So I'm a huge advocate for increasing your whole wheat in your loaves. Flour is kind of magical once you start like the wheat berry is kind of magical once you start like doing some research on the micronutrients that are with, like trapped in a wheat berry that come out during fermentation. Um, it's pretty crazy. Like it's one of our last natural resources for vitamin B. Um, it's a vitamin K resource. Uh, it's a fantastic. Uh, prebiotic like the.
Speaker 2:The fiber that you get from eating fermented wheat is incredible. There's something I believe it's called spermidine, that's in wheat bran, sorry, in wheat germ. That is amazing for anti-aging to the point where people sell anti-aging supplements and label it. I think it's called spermidine. Um, and it's literally just encapsulated wheat germ. Like because there's no manmade alternative. That's better. They literally just take wheat germ and stick it in capsules and sell it to you, not buying those, just make your own bread, um, so, yeah, bread is incredible and I think it's just unfortunate that it's Mark. It's become a marketing just weird thing in the states around bread because of how messed up our bread um, I don't know what the right word is the bread, uh, big bread, and it's it's so different when you bake bread at home and you let it naturally ferment um in in the way it's kind of intended to uh what happens? Uh, by the way, I love that we're both on like the homestead chic um mason jar uh bottles, by the way.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, that's all the cool kids with their faux brick backgrounds.
Speaker 2:That's so good, we're actually in the same room. We're only doing this so we can get the audio recorded properly. Exactly, no, so yeah, so I'm a big fan fan, big advocate for adding more whole wheat. Like I see all of these people teaching sour sourdough. Teaching has become like this very fashionable thing to do on Instagram now and like I don't want to knock anybody for like trying to make an extra buck and I love that more people are learning how to bake, um, but I cringe a little bit every time I see them baking and they open their loaf and it's like white as snow, just like come on, you've got such an opportunity here to make this such a good thing for your body and you just need a little bit more whole wheat. So big advocate for adding whole wheat. That's literally why I feed my sourdough half and half. So there's always even if I'm making a cinnamon rolls like, and I'm using all purpose flour like at least there's some pre-fermented whole wheat flour in those.
Speaker 2:So if you take whole wheat flour and you want to move into a more heavily whole wheat loaf, you're going to notice some things the first time you do it. One whole wheat loaf You're going to notice some things the first time you do it. One, your whole wheat flour is going to absorb a lot more water, and so my tip is let it like, increase the water content in your loaf. But when you do that, you're going to want to change a couple of things in your recipe, if you can tolerate it. I also up the salt, so I go up to 3% salt in my higher whole wheat recipes and I drop the amount of sourdough in those recipes, because the whole wheat will make things move quicker and the excess water, the extra water you're putting in, will also move things quicker, and so by dropping the sourdough content, you were able to kind of maintain this timeline you were used to before. So in baking with Rosso sourdough there are three recipes that address this. There's a 50% sourdough recipe, there's a or sorry, 50% whole wheat recipe, there's a hundred percent whole wheat recipe and there's also like a choose your own adventure where I teach you kind of the math of what I recommend If you want to start adding some whole wheat. So if you want to start at 20% or 30% or 40%, you put in your whole wheat percentage and the little equations back out how much to increase your hydration by and how much to decrease your sourdough by in order to make a loaf. That is a similar timeline to what you're used to.
Speaker 2:If you're fresh milling, easiest thing to do is sift your flour. That will help you a ton. If you're doing fresh milled whole wheat flour, what you're going to get to is kind of a pseudo T85 flour. T85 is a high extraction bread flour that has the bran sifted out but you're still left with a lot of germs. It's going to be brown in color. It's going to have a lot of oils in it. It's going to be really good for you, um, and that is the easiest way to kind of limit the impact bran has on your loaf. So bran is going to tear your gluten. It's going to absorb a lot of water, but it's it takes a lot longer to break down bran, um, so it's fermentable but it's not necessarily soluble. So it's going to soak up water but not break down. It's just going to steal water from the rest of your loaf. So that's the easiest place to start. I do encourage you to learn how to incorporate bran back into the loaf. But if you're brand new to home milling flour and you are just determined to do a hundred percent fresh milled flour, just sift, and that's the easiest thing to do Another good thing to do.
Speaker 2:Vanessa Kimball has a thing in her book about this. This is part of what's going to go into my book that I need to do the actual experiments on. But she makes a comment in one of her books I think Sourdough School where she talks about oxidation. So if you've ever heard of like a bleached or bromated flower how we still legally sell bromated flowers in the United States is crazy. They don't allow that. I don't think anywhere else in the world I think the US is still like we're going to bromate flower and everywhere else is like you shouldn't do that.
Speaker 2:But bleaching and bromating is just to make the oxidation process faster. So if you mill flour, you want your flour to oxidize so that it can be used to make bread, and so bleaching and bromating were techniques that mills used to make that flour able to be made into bread quicker. Through these processes we don't necessarily need to do these processes anymore. As you can see, with all of the unbleached flours you can buy and unbromated flours you can buy. But I think that's a step that some people don't necessarily take in their home milling. A lot of times the oxidation is a bad word and so they don't want any oxidation to happen. They want to just mill directly into the bowl.
Speaker 2:But there is a benefit to oxidizing the flour after milling. Some people think that the milling process introduces enough oxygen into the flour where you don't need it if you're using a stone mill and the oxidizing is really only need for roller mills. But I have seen some success with basically aging a flour at home, just milling it into a paper bag, letting it sit for a day, a week, whatever, and then using it in your loaf. So that's another kind of next level tip you can make. You can take, maybe mill all your flour for the week on Sunday and then use it during the week and see if there's any changes in your in your loaf over that week due to the you know, extra oxidation. But yeah, those are kind of the big hitters. And then really just the encouragement just to just try it, cause it is worth it. Like, including more is worth it.
Speaker 2:You, you will get a different texture loaf, like if you do a hundred percent whole wheat loaves. There's a reason why, like a rye loaves you have to make in a pan like you. Just it's a pancake like, if you don't right. So, um, you do have to change what you're trying to do, at least the expectation of what you're trying to do.
Speaker 2:If you want to go more whole wheat, uh, a recipe I helped develop with a local woman who really wanted to do non-oxidized meal directly into the bowl had very specific grains she wanted to use. Um, we developed a recipe for her that ended up being a pan loaf because we couldn't build enough structure in it to make it kind of a freestanding rustic loaf. So that is also a way you can route, you can go down is just go into the pan if it's not holding structure, and that will give you a little bit more of an easier to work with dough that you're not trying to like shape and have it tear on you and stuff like that. So, um, yeah, those are the encouragements. But, yeah, do it use more whole wheat.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, I'm right there with you, joe, and good on you for encouraging that too yeah, and one of my favorite things that my kids have even noticed it, is how you know, when you have a white loaf, it's a hundred percent, all purpose. It's hard to stop eating it. Like our body, we just want to eat, and eat, and eat. And then when you have the whole wheat loaf, even if it's just a portion, it's like it clues our our feeling of satiation, like faster, and so you eat a slice or two and you're like that was delicious, but I feel full and I don't need to keep eating it.
Speaker 1:Um, and my kids have noticed that. I think it's so interesting because it's just like our body it recognizes the whole food, it's doing what it's supposed to do and it just tastes better. It's just more nutty and bready and all the things that should be, so yeah.
Speaker 2:And it smells amazing and the color's better. Yeah, and I will say as a last thing I love that your kids notice that. That's so cool. I I could talk forever on, like my excitement for future generations and their appreciation for homemade products. I won't go into that's a different episode.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, but what I will say is there is something that's interesting with fiber, specifically fermentable fiber, and there's so much research going into gut microbiome right now to give language to things that we've kind of known but we haven't been able to say why. But specifically with fermentable fiber I learned this recently and I've been telling everyone that will listen the fiber industry has basically created a product that actually doesn't do anything for your gut. If you buy any of the branded fiber supplements, it's non-fermentable fiber. I learned this very recently and it is. Your body needs fermentable fiber. That's what's happening in your gut and that's why we call things prebiotics. Prebiotics are fermentable fibers. That's what your gut microbiome wants.
Speaker 2:So your kids are 100% right when they have something with more fermentable fiber in it, their gut bacteria is happier and that's why they don't feel like they need to keep eating, because they're sending a signal to your vagus nerve saying I'm good, now I've got enough supply, but if you're eating white bread and they're not getting everything they need, they're not sending that signal. So that's literally what's happening between your gut and your vagus nerve and your brain is the fact that they are getting access to more fiber, and it's such a cool your kids are set up for Just because they had that realization. I'm so excited for the other things your kids must realize around their bodies and how much more connected they must be to what's happening inside them, which is just awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I, and I get so nerded out about that. I'm just reading. I'm actually reading two books at once, which is actually I'm reading like four books at once, but I can't read one book at a time. And I'm reading Nourishment by Fred Provenza and then the Dorito Effect I can't remember the author that not with fiber as much, but just about with, um, secondary chemicals and phytochemicals and food and how, when we're missing those in our diet, um, our bodies don't know when to quit because they're like I need it, I need it.
Speaker 1:And that's where we get to those points with the fake flavors and the artificial flavors where we're eating, to the point where we're gaining so much weight, we're, we're having metabolic issues, but our bodies are still not telling us they're full because they're still missing those nutrients, just like you said with the fiber, um. So I love how it's like a full circle, that it's where bodies are telling us what they need, but with this industrial food complex that we're, all you know, immersed in as modern people, we're not getting it and that's where we get all messed up.
Speaker 2:I mean it's tied to our language. Like you, we literally say, when we're done eating, we're full, and like, yeah, that's a volumetric measurement, and so we look at food in terms of volume instead of in terms of nutrient density, like we're not, we don't need to be full, we need to be, we need to take care of our gut microbiome. Yes, we don't need volume, we need nutrient density, and so it's just such a different way of looking at food where I didn't look at food like that when I was a kid.
Speaker 1:I ate way too much macaroni and cheese and Doritos.
Speaker 2:I have the health problems now too. Thanks for writing, Sure.
Speaker 1:And it's really a trap, for sure, for all of us. Yeah, I did have a question about you mentioned sifting, and I've had that question come into my inbox over the years. What are you using to sift? Do you just like regular kitchen stuff?
Speaker 2:Do you buy a special screen? No, I just use like a little sieve. Um, I have one that's probably about that big around, it has a handle, um, and you know it takes some time, but like I'll do it, it fits a mason jar top really well. So, like I will like just tap into a mason jar and so all the kind of flour will fall out, um, or a bowl, you know, and uh, and the, the what's left is the bran and I put that into another mason jar. So I just use a little one, they.
Speaker 2:You can use a colander like a, like a fine, more finely sinned colander. But what helps with all of this is actually you can set on a lot of these mills. Like I've got a Como, I've had a mock mill in the past. Like you can set the coarseness, um, and so I will grind coarser in order to get a larger bran flake that's easier to sift, higher volume in like a colander. Okay, you don't need to get all of it out, it's just enough to get a little bit of it out.
Speaker 2:Everything else is going to kind of break down, because it's basically all else. You know, I'm painting with broad brush here, but water soluble and fermentable, so everything kind of. During the long arc of a fermentation process the only thing that really doesn't want to break down is that brand. So if you can sit that out then you're going to be fine. It doesn't matter if you grind really coarse and I know there's going to be like a pizza enthusiast can be really mad that I said that but over the long arc of uh fermentation you don't have to worry so much about your grind um uh coarseness. In fact in the UK I used to buy wholemeal flour that was ground much, much coarser and I appreciated that flour a lot more um than what you find here in the States, which is generally more finely ground flour. So it's harder to sift out. Like you can't really buy whole whole wheat flour here and sift out the brand because everything's kind of the same size, but you can if you do it from home.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's a great tip and I've always I always have wondered cause I have my milk and adjust the courses and I'm always like I wonder what the sweet spot is. But that's interesting, I'm going to have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, really, just set it to your sieve, like you know, try a few different coarseness, but the coarser you go, the higher volume you know throughput you're going to be able to get out of your grinder. And so there's like there's different tricks you can play. You don't want to go so coarse where you're not really cracking the brand but again, like you'll see that in your dough It'll feel like grittier if you're not grinding stuff properly. So, like everything, it's such an annoying answer to people but you just have to experiment. I'm like I get excited about that and other people are like just tell me what I need to do and it's you kind of, just need to experiment.
Speaker 1:Yes, got to go by, feel that's a hard answer, but it's good in the long run, better for you. So, yeah, okay, I want to shift gears a little bit. I'd love to hear a little bit more about the bread mat and the proofing baskets and y'all. He, I'm not, he's not paying me to say this. This isn't a commercial. But legitimately I got these tools and you know I was like cool, cool. And then when I use them I'm like, oh my gosh, these are brilliant. So I guess let's start with the proofing basket, because I have proofing baskets there. You, you know there's lots of proofing baskets out there. Mine that I've used in the past were like I think they're chain and they're like the circle cane, like I'm describing that. Well, I'm sure people know what I'm talking about. They're fine, but yours were outstanding. So why?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it all comes down to material selection. So when I was in the UK, I was introduced to a different type of proofing basket. I lived in Scotland for three years. I was the head of engineering for Uni Pizza Ovens, moved my family over to Scotland and worked there, and while I was there I continued to bake and I hated proofing baskets. I had tried woven ones, I had tried cane ones, and when I first started baking and teaching people how to bake, I developed recipes that did not require proofing baskets, and that was because I really did not enjoy using them. And then I got introduced to.
Speaker 2:I happen to have them here, which is that's nice, how convenient. The wood pulp material proof curfew basket these are handmade in germany. There's one company in the world that makes these, so anytime you're seeing any of these on the internet, um, they're all made by the same people. Really nice little group, and I think it's northeast germany. Um, who take wood spruce from a local sustainable spruce farm, uh, treeing, uh, or forestry, I can't remember the name of it lumber barons, we call them up here and where I'm in the pacific northwest, but uh, like deforestation, it's just a different thing in germany, like they have these like old growth, hundred year forests where they like only take oh my dog, give me one second, no worries. My wife came home and my dog got uh distracted no, that's yeah to go off at any moment.
Speaker 1:So you're good, yeah, exactly um.
Speaker 2:So they have these really cool forests, like hundred year forest, so they like they harvest like 100th of the forest every year. So like they're just like. They just have like a different view on sustainability. So one of those forests is a spruce forest and, um, they take the wood from that spruce forest and when it's processing, they take the wood pulp from the processing of lumber and they mix it with water and they compress it and bake it into these bread molds. And they've been doing the same process for over 100 years in this little factory in germany. They're literally all handmade and I found out about them, tried a few different of their sizes and got connected with the company and found a couple sizes we enjoyed using.
Speaker 2:And when I moved back to the States, I worked with them to supply me in the US with their baskets as kind of like on a shape exclusivity. So, um, it was the shapes that I really preferred using of the baskets they made. It's a, an oval um that is like 752,000 grams of dough and then around, uh, which is a little bit smaller, like I do, like 650 to 950 in those Um, and I started selling them um, a rose hill product. So when I get them, I process them and inspect every single one, like the reason I have this one here is because it has a little defect. Like I don't sell onto the effects, um, I stand the edge down, uh, I brand them, uh, with some branding on the front, and I used to hand brand the bottoms too, but literally every single one is hand branded on the front, hand sanded, and then I ended up automating this for laser engravers. So I'm a big nerd and so I put these on the laser and engrave some information on the bottom. Now it saves a little bit of time. But yeah, so those are the baskets and they are just better, and it all comes down to material. So that's why they're better.
Speaker 2:The wood pulp wood is a really excellent construction material around water because as long as you give it time to dry out, it absorbs water, and then, if you let it dry out, it can absorb water again, and so it has this like relationship where it can get wet in the dry and that really benefits you in baking. So you put your loaf in here and the basket absorbs some of the moisture from your loaf and what that does for you is it gives you this thin little drier layer when you go to bake. You mix that with some steam when you bake and it becomes this crispy like glass edge of your dough. So it's not this like thick crunch, it's more of just like this crispy edge, um. So yeah, and I like that. They're like a blank canvas. I like the ridges, so there's like a lot of availability for scoring techniques and stuff on them, um, and yeah, but that's, that's the proofing basket I don't.
Speaker 1:I will say they don't, like they don't. The dough doesn't stick like with my other ones and of course all the recipes say well, floured you wet. I know you're supposed to wet them down and flour them, let them dry and like. I did that with my cane baskets, but there was always a 50-50 chance, even though I would flour them to death, that the dough would stick and it would deflate as it came out and with a wood pulp just like impressive, very impressive, yeah it's similar in pizza making.
Speaker 2:If you've ever made pizza on a wooden peel or a metal peel, um, the wooden peel the dough doesn't stick to, but the metal peel it does. And it's the same with the cane baskets. They don't absorb water and so the water just becomes like a little barrier and it's just high friction and that's why they stick where in these? Um, um, they don't stick as much and there's no thing like I don't know what the thing is called, but like the, the like fabric thing that you can the the baskets like with the cane. What do you do with that? Like I've never known what to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think it's because some recipes will's real gunky. Yeah, no, no, I'm not going to put that like in my washing machine, like what do you do with that? I like hose it out back, like I don't understand how to clean those from those.
Speaker 1:No, thank you, thank you, and then okay, and then the mat. So for those of you who haven't seen this yet, just picture this. So it's. You know when you are, you have your dough in your basket and you're ready to turn it upside down and you know you have your hot Dutch oven. Usually, what I've done in the past is I take a piece of parchment paper if I have it, which is always a big if, because I'm always running out, I never forget to, or I always forget to, get more at the store. You take it on a piece of parchment paper, then you carefully lower the parchment paper into the hot pot without burning your wrists or your hands, and then the parchment paper crinkles around the loaf and you're trying to press it in there. So it's not like making indentation, and that's what we all do, right? So Mike came up with a better mousetrap, and so explain the thought process on these brilliant little gems.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so, exactly.
Speaker 2:So that was exactly the idea. I was baking a lot and I had this idea to come up with something that was reusable. I was going through a lot of parchment paper so much that could source control some of their silicone. So parchment paper is paper coated with a very, very thin layer of silicone, and you can buy cheap parchment paper, but that just means that you're buying cheap silicone. And so I started doing research on silicone, and there's a lot of varieties of silicone, and the cheaper stuff just has some additives that I don't care for. And so I realized, like I need to buy expensive parchment paper. And I was going through a lot of parchment paper and I was like this is crazy, I need to be able to reuse this. But you can't reuse it, um, because you start burning off the silicone. The paper starts to burn, it becomes fragile. I'll say to like wrinkle it up, but then you're literally just like breaking the silicone and making that more fragile. And so, um, I decided to make something reusable.
Speaker 2:I liked the idea of silicone because it was flexible, I could control the quality of the silicone. So I started making prototypes, um, and really the thing that I noticed was that a perforated silicone mat was just way better for baking. Um, you've got more airflow, uh, below your mat, which limited limited hotspots, and that's when I decided to then go ahead and just, I've got a dash L right here. Go ahead and design the bread mat so the dash L just has longer handles. I know this isn't great for a podcast, but the standard size is great for, like, your standard Dutch ovens. The dash L L stands for long, longer handles is good for your deeper Dutch ovens, but that's exactly. It was like I wanted something with handles. So, perforated baking mat with handles that I could lower in and out of my dutch oven. That's literally what the patent's called perforated baking mat with handles. Um, yeah, exactly, and so the idea was that it was, uh, to get rid of single-use in baking and not just not have these disastrous things that, like people write me all the time they finally decide to buy a bread mat because, like they're parchment paper rips and they drop a loaf on the floor and they're like I thought it was the last straw, like I finally just bought one and I should have bought one six months ago, and that's usually the story I hear. Um is is how much this has improved people's baking, because they don't have to worry about this delicate process of taking the bread in and out of their hot oven. I use a combo cooker so I like the shorter handle ones. I've also got one that's specifically designed for the challenger bread pan, which is great.
Speaker 2:The handles are one thing, but then, like I said, also the material selection. It's lfgb platinum silicone. You want to go off and do some research on silicone. You'll learn that lfgb platinum is a platinum cured silicone doesn't have any additives so it's um. It's not. It's actually food safe and it has to pass an lfgb food safety standard, which is a german standard, um and which exceeds our own FDA US standard. So if you go buy a silicone mat right now on Amazon and it doesn't say LFGB, probably because it's not, because it's a more expensive silicone and you don't have to pass it to sell in the US, you only have to pass it to sell in some European countries.
Speaker 2:So the material selection helps you to not burn the bottom of your loaf. It's an ultra high temp silicone so it's never going to melt on you. You're going to limit hotspots, it's going to give the bottom up. People say it's a very professional look the bottoms of their loaf. Especially the people that I work with that run micro bakeries. Their customers always comment on, like oh, the bottom looks so professional. So people like that and yeah, it just helps. Even if you're doing open baking, a lot of people use them on their baking steels just to be able to get their loaves in and out of the oven a little bit easier. So, yeah, that's the bread mat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's awesome guys. And you know me, I don't like gimmicky things, I don't like consumeristic things. That's not my vibe. I don't like consumeristic things. That's not my vibe. I'm not that sort of person online. But when I find something that solves an actual problem I've been having, I will preach it from the rooftops and I'm a fan. I'm a huge fan.
Speaker 2:Oh, I appreciate that, jill, thank you so much. That means a lot. Yeah, I actually got your information from a friend of mine, monet. We were just kind of chatting one day about what we've got about, which is like, oh, I want to buy land and start a homestead one day and she did. And so I was like picking her brain on what she did. And she's like, you really got to listen to Jill's podcast and I was like who's Jill? She's like, yeah, I heard of old fashioned on purpose and and so she introduced me to you. I listened to a few episodes and that's when I reached out and sent you the. You always kind of send those blindly. I send them out to people from time to time and generally the feedback is really good. But I really appreciate that you've not only given me good feedback but you've also wanted to kind of share what I'm doing on on your platform, which I do really appreciate. So thanks for the opportunity to come and tell people what I'm all about all about Absolutely Well.
Speaker 1:It's always a pleasure just to talk to someone who knows their their world so thoroughly, so I appreciate your time. Um, yeah, this has been fantastic. I have a few things I definitely am excited to try back in my own kitchen with my starter. So thank you for this. As we kind of get ready to land the plane, can you just one more time remind folks where they can find your products, your ebook? It's an ebook right. Baking with Rose Hill Okay, where they can find all that goodness to connect with you that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. Easiest place to find me I'm on Instagram, I'm on TikTok, I'm on all the socials at Rose Hill Sourdough Instagram's easiest place to get ahold of me there and then also the website, rosehillsourdoughatgmailcom. Rose, like the flower hill, like a small mountain sourdough, like really good breadcom. I think I said at gmailcom because that's my email. You can also email me there, but rosehillsourdoughcom. You can also email me at mike. At rosehillsourdoughcom.
Speaker 2:I'm highly reachable and I think a lot of that comes down to I really do care about these products and the people I'm helping with them. I think that's. I read lots of books on product development when I was first getting into this and one of the things that was like if you can scratch your own itch, if you can create a product that you would buy for and the group that you are in, that's an added benefit for you. And it was surprising to me that people don't do that. And as I learned more about this group that I found myself in of product entrepreneurs, there are so many people that don't care about a group they're trying to help. They just want to make a product that they think is going to sell. They find the biggest business opportunity and they try to sell a product into that and they miss the nuance of what's going on in that group because they're not a part of it. And so you know.
Speaker 2:I've been helping people bake since 2017 is when I wrote or started writing, baking with Roast Hill Sourdough, which is the ebook that launched in January of 2020. What crazy timing that was. As an ebook, baking with Roast Hill Sourdough, I wrote a follow-up book called Pizza with Roast Hill Sourdough that goes through, I think, nine different styles of pizza and how to make sourdough versions of those styles, focusing on dough and technique and not on topping combinations. But actually what makes a Sicilian style different than a grandma style, different from a Detroit style, different from a bar, from a tavern, from a Neapolitan to New York to Chicago? Like just actually going through and actually identifying how those are different styles. That was a fun pizza or book to write. Got to eat a lot of pizza, which is great.
Speaker 2:But yeah, that's where I'm at, so I'm highly reachable and I care, and so if you've got questions, you know, shoot me a question and, um, I I'm kind of springing this on you, but I also like to do a giveaway, so I don't know how you'd want to facilitate that. Um, you know, if your listener has made it this far in the episode and you know, maybe I don't know the first five people that DM me and say, hey, I heard you about Jan, we'll get the bread mat. Or if you want to chat about how you want to land that in an outro or something, we can figure that out.
Speaker 1:OK, I like the DM idea. Does that work Like?
Speaker 2:that works for me.
Speaker 1:First five. Ok, first five people to DM Mike on Instagram will get a bread mat. Ok, sweet, there you go. So may that odds be in your favor, y'all just.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yep, there you go okay, thanks for doing that.
Speaker 1:That's super fun. Yeah, that's super fun. Okay, awesome. Well, thank you so much. This was so enlightening. Um, I cannot wait to publish this when I know I'm going to get a ton of good feedback from folks. My crew loves sourdough, I love sourdough. It's so fun just to get different perspectives, and efficiency is definitely one of my favorite things. So, combine all those and, yeah, this is. This was a great conversation. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:You've got me combining and you've got me. Yeah Well, I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for having me on. It was really a pleasure and, yeah, I think hopefully it does really well and hopefully you continue to do really well. I'm glad with what you're doing and I appreciate what you do for the community, so thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you.