Wild Mushrooms

While waiting for the dough to rise, I love to get into the forest and search for wild mushrooms. I've been doing this for a very long time, and it is one of my most satisfying pleasures. Yes, you can use wild mushrooms for toppings on your wood-fired pizza creations.

A few of the wild mushrooms I eat are shown below, but not the very last one

  Black trumpet

 Chanterelle

 Inky cap

 Sulphur shelf or chicken mushroom

If you're far from field and forest, there is still hope for you. I frequently find lots of inky cap mushrooms right in town.
Get a field guide and use the web for identification. Understand that a few common edible mushrooms can cause an allergic reaction with some people, and poisonous mushrooms can cause a lot worse things than that.
One of my favorite quotes in reference to the edibility of amanita muscaria "though not usually fatal, it is an experience not easily forgotten."

Amanita muscaria

Night Of The Living Bread

I did say, didn't I, that this blog was about bread and all of its manifestations.

Dying To Learn

If you're dying to learn how to build an earth oven, and you live in Maine, then join me for an intensive two day workshop and learn how. It's happening in the beginning of October.

Couches

 Probably you know how to leaven a dough in a basket or banneton, and you can expect your baked loaf to look something like this.

 However, if you are baking a baguette-style loaves, then you need to leaven them in couches.

 Use linen or cotton fabric to make your couches.

You might say, "why not just leaven them in gutter pans and bake the whole ensemble in the oven?" The reason you don't do this is because you want your breads to make intimate contact with the floor (hearth/deck) of the oven for superior loaves.

The mini earth oven

 Intensifying the fire with blowpipe

If you can't decide if you really want an earth oven in your backyard, or if you're not sure how much work it will take to construct one, then consider building a mini earth oven first. It should only take a couple of hours of your time, but it will give you an idea of what to expect if you're ready to build an "official" oven. Although the mini oven is tiny, it is not so tiny that you can't bake little things inside. You could bake pita breads and even six inch pizzas.

Your brick floor determines the oven size

Workshop participants construct a mini oven on top of oil drum

Cutting an exhaust hole (which is covered during baking) makes it much easier to start fires in mini ovens

Corn

Recently my brother came to visit, and he made excellent sweet corn in the earth oven. After fashioning a wire grate and then raking hot coals under it, he then placed the corn on top to roast. I highly recommend this ancient method of preparing corn.

Kneading Conference Images

The 2010 Kneading Conference is over, and it certainly was a wonderful experience for me, and I'm sure, for a lot of other people as well. In the earth oven workshop that I led, we constructed three earth ovens on Thursday, and we were baking flat breads and pizzas on the same day. Actually, we didn't have the pizza ingredients until Friday, so on Friday we made the pizzas, but on Thursday we made pitas.

Hi energy

Shrink wrapped

Father Paul with his shrink wrapped oven. Ready to travel.

Little Sis

 RUNNINGMUSIC: Homage New Orleans

 

Little Sis

“Let me first introduce myself.

My real name is Debbie LeGrande but here at

Rivers End, I'm known as Little Sis.

My parents are of french Creole and cajun decent.

Most people think that I'm Native American because of

my dark skin and jet black hair.

I'm only twelve years old but I've been baking bread for

three years now.

When I was eight years old, my mother fell off a tractor

when it hit a bump.

The tractor started going in circles and my mom tried

to get out of the way but the plows cut off her legs.

She was in the hospital for three months and I had to take

over the bread baking for our family.

I have three older brothers who do all the kneading for me.

I bake six loaves a day. (Basic white bread)

My dad made a special bread board that my mom can

hook on to her wheel chair.

We sit together at night and knead some dough for the

next days bread.

last month we all loaded up in both our pickups and took

a drive to New Orleans.

This was not a pleasant drive because it's mostly a hundred

miles over dirt roads.

The food in New Orleans was so good it almost brought

tears to my eyes. (Almost)

The bread was so good that it did bring tears to my mamas eyes.

It was the first time that any of us had ever tasted Sourdough.

We wanted desperately to make this bread at home so we went

to a health food store and bought 50lb. bags of whole wheat, rye

and Cajun, unbleached white flour.

We also got a few packets of "Mojo Sourdough Starter"

As soon as we got home we started a starter right away.

We used one cup of whole wheat and one cup of well water.

And the "Mojo Starter" of course.

After 12 hours, we saw little bubbles and noticed a fruity smell.

It smelled like peaches and apples.

We added another cup of whole wheat and well water and waited.

On day two, there were a lot more bubbles and the same fruity smell.

Day three the starter was climbing out the gallon jar and still had a

fruity smell to it.

We used a cup of the starter to make some bread and put the rest

in the fridg.

The bread came out really good …”

 from Bread Earth and Fire (soon to be published)

Pizza Making Video

Check out the pizza making video from Wildwoodovens.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxAsLfKozR8
I particularly like the rolling pin used.

Moor Street Community Garden

Thanks to Ellen Paul,  Mary Dunn and many others, we officially opened the Moor Street Community Garden in Waterville, Maine with brick oven pizza for all. The oven shown was put together with 100 red bricks and some angle iron. It took 30 minutes to assemble.