Jo's Loaves

Wow.  I am glad those two weeks are over.  I have an unusual real job, in that I work pretty much from home and can work when it suits me (as long as I reach my deadlines, of course).  But for the past two weeks, my job has taken me away from home and baking and into a warehouse, where along with another work buddy, we have been merchandising all kinds of grocery items onto mock supermarket shelves and chillers.  It’s been a tough challenge but the worst is over.  Tomorrow, I return to the ‘shed’ as it is affectionately known, laden with my purchases from several supermarkets, in order to swap over some of the products on the shelves (mainly meat) that will have gone bit nincky, since last week.  I am looking forward to getting back to normal, but alas, I fear in two weeks time there will be more stuff to do in the shed. At least the money helps to support keeping my little bakery going.

Talking of the bakery, I am happy to say that I have just started supplying The Lounge Cafe at Stopsley Baptist Church with my Rosemary Focaccia aswell as my malted loaves, so if anyone needs a fix outside of my baking days, get yourselves down there for a lovely lunch.  I have dropped a baking day for the time being – I am only baking on Tuesdays and Saturdays now – it’s just been a bit too much to do 3 at the moment. 

So for those of you wanting good tasting, nutritious, guilt free healthy bread for this Saturday, check out my how to order page and I’ll see you between 9.15 and 10.30!

And for those of you who are still not convinced how bad    supermarket bread is for you, check out this article from the daily mail last year – scroll down to the pink table if you are short of time.  

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2003622/Is-bread-making-ill-How-2011s-loaves-bad-you.html

I think I have a party to go to every week now until the middle of June; or rather my son has. I am also in the process of planning my son’s birthday party, with a jubilee theme. I am ashamed to admit tho, I have asked someone else to make the cake for me – or at least quote for me. Is that really bad? Or ok, since I am a bread not cake maker? After a holiday, July will soon creep up and then again, we have no free weekends! That’s over half the year gone and my little business will be a year old. I need to find a way to celebrate but not entirely sure where I am going to squeeze it in. I was glad to have some new enquiries these last two weeks and hopefully I have some happy customers. I always worry that my home bakery is not the same as ‘a shop’ and sometimes people just prefer to deal with the facelessness of a retailer, rather than the rantings of a batty woman in her own home. Having said that, I have a small following who would love to learn how to make their own bread, which you cannot get from a shop and so I really must pull my finger out and sort out a plan and a date for the diary. Gawd, a date is going to be tricky!! I have now sorted a clearer way to order your bread; there is a tab at the top of this post marked, ‘how to order’. That should help you out. Hope to see you soon! X

Hi Real bread fans! 

I am bouncing back from two weeks of rubbish, into sunshine, health and the prospect of a lot of chocolate coming my way.  To celebrate all things spring and of course, Easter, I have developed a REAL hot cross bun.  Bet you’ve never had a real one, have you?  They are REAL as they have no unnatural ingredients and are left to mature before baking in the old, traditional way  – no commercial yeast used!

I am selling these for 50p each, although there is a minimum order of 4 buns.  Minimum weight for each bun is 90g (industrial buns are more like 70g or less).

Yes, I realise you can get 4 for 78p in Asda, but I don’t compete with Asda.  The nearest equivalent I found was a single bun in  Waitrose from their in-store bakery.  Here is the list of their ingredients:

Wheat flour, mixed dried fruit (31%) (currants, sultanas, mixed peel), water yeast, sugar, rapeseed oil, pasteurised free range egg, invert sugar syrup, palm oil, emulsifiers mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids and mono- and diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, lemon juice, raising agents disodium diphosphate and potassium hydrogen carbonate, mixed spices, maize glucose syrup, flour treatment agent ascorbic acid, salt, pasteurised free range egg white, palm fat, milk proteins, maize starch, flavouring, Mixed peel contains wheat glucose-fructose syrup, orange peel, invert sugar syrup, lemon peel, citric acid.


Here is a list of my ingredients:
Organic flour, milk, butter, currants, water, sugar, free range egg, mixed spices, salt, vegetable oil.

WAITROSE BUN is 89p.
JO’S LOAVES BUN is 50p.

To be fair, I do sympathise with Waitrose that even with that impressively long list of additives, they still have to add FLAVOURING to their buns. Shame.

NEXT BAKE DAYS – PLEASE can I have your orders 48 hours in advance:

Saturday 31st March – Collection 9.15 to 10.30
Tuesday, 3rd April – Collection 9.30 to 11.45
Saturday 7th April – Collection 9.15 to 10.30

If I get a run of orders on Hot Cross Buns, I might prep some on Thursday 5th and bake for Good Friday.  Afterall, that’s the traditional way.

Hoorah, I am finally getting rid of this dreadful chicken pox and I am preparing to bake again THIS Saturday. No surprises, that soon after I started to recover at the beginning of this week, my son was taken ill. Happy to say that I think he too is over worst, and I might possibly send him to nursery tomorrow. There is a limit to how many times a baker can take cutting and sticking and watching epsiode after episode of Andy’s Wild Adventures.


 Interesting to read the news today about people wasting bread, it seems that we don’t value bread in this country any longer; it as become so cheap that we are willing to buy more of the stuff so that we don’t run out, even though it means chucking away slices that we don’t use. I have had two customers purchasing 2 loaves a week from me(on different days) but then whom cancelled one of the loaves loaves owing to the fact that they were still enjoying the previous one. Although it means I sell less, it makes me happy to know that my bread is being used to within an inch of it’s life. My sour-dough naturally has a longer shelf life and in the case of rye, the flavour will also improve with age. 


 For those of you who have ordered for Saturday, Just a reminder that my price rises will kick in this weekend. Check out my loaf menu for latest prices. 


 Next bake days: 
Saturday, 17th March
Tuesday, 20th March
Thursday, 22nd March (Hullaballoo) Etc, etc!

Growing up as a schoolchild in the seventies with red hair could be challenging. My mum always used to say, “you’ve got to learn to fight your own battles”.  A harsh lesson I thought, as bullying is a difficult one to overcome.  But look at me now, standing on my own two feet, with my own little business with the support of my lovely family and friends. For the last four days I have been fighting another horrible battle, which couldn’t have come at a worse time for me.  Chicken pox is a pretty awful disease in it’s own right and if unlucky enough to catch it in adulthood, it is 10 times worse.  (No I am not making it up, check it out on the internet!)  Thankfully today, I had my mum with me who has prevented me from going into mental decline of continued isolation and my mother-in-law keeping my son entertained at hers for the day.  I am so grateful to them both and also to my friend who stepped in to look after my boy yesterday, despite having 3 kids of her own.  
I have had lots of SMS well-wishers, calls and also emails from complete strangers empathising with my situation.
So at precisely this moment in time, I was supposed to be at a proper bakery, mixing up some 55 kilos of dough, in preparation for a big bake-off in their bread oven at some unsociable hour of Friday morning.  As I reported last time, I was supposed to be representing myself at the Kings Walden Farmers Market at 11am on Friday [ok, ok, you don’t have to plug it anymore… inner monologue].  I am devastated that I can no longer fulfil that obligation, owing to the growing number of blisters breaking out in every area of my body.  According to my research, I could still be manufacturing these little blighters well into Saturday, so I am not yet sure when I will resume ‘normal’ baking.  New information will be posted up here and on my Jo’s Loaves FaceBook page as and when I am creating nice little crusts of my own… (sorry, couldn’t resist!)
I was going to put some pictures up that my mum and I took today, but you’ll be pleased to know, I thought better of it.  Not a pretty sight, but we had fun doing it.

Next Bake Day: TBC

I am currently experimenting with free-form loaves.  My oven has the capacity to take 12 loaves in one go, just as long as they are in a medium tin.  It’s not ideal and I think any baker worth his salt would throw their arms in the air in despair.  The advantages of baking loaves in tins, is that they are easy to slice for sandwiches or toast; not many people have 1 ft knives to carve through a whopping circular jobbie.  But I can’t help thinking that expanding into the realms of boules, batons, and batards will give me a) more credibility b) less hassle with fiddling about with tins and grease and reduce the stress at turn-out time – it’s stuck, nnnnoooooo!!  Of course, my oven will only take 6 (and it’s risky!) shapes in one bake, which is totally impractical.  So with a bit of help, I plan to make two major purchases of a proper bread oven and a mixer to help with all the extra bread I plan to sell.


I had a chance meeting with the miller the other week, and I told her my plans.  She was very encouraging and she had clipped an article from the Telegraph for me, about how two teenage siblings have opened a home-bakery in London and are selling loaves the same weight as mine, at the £3 mark; I thanked her and said that I’d already read it the day before, having conducted my usual sweep of the media about bread related issues.  (I know how to live!!)  I had also read about a successful baker in the York, who like myself, was baking Real Bread and was proud to be one of the first 50 bakers in the country (as am I) to have signed up to the Real Bread Campaign’s Loaf Mark scheme.  There were some good and bad comments posted underneath his article, which I thought I’d share:


“£2.50 a loaf??? Even Bettys don’t charge that much”


“Call yourself an artisan baker and you too can charge such rip off prices.”


“£2.50!!!? You’re ‘aving a loaf! That’s a lot of dough!”


 I was dismayed at seeing these comment and how could people be so scathing!   But then I spotted this one and it stuck with me…



“£2.50 for a loaf made with quality flour in the traditional way is very reasonable. Good bread is very rare to come by and the alternatives on offer at supermarkets, which are masquerading as ‘healthy food’ rarely have any real nutritional value. The breads which Mr. Kippax is offering are made with ingredients which are both easy to digest and especially in the case of wholegrain and seeded versions, are very healthy. The mass-produced breads are mostly leeched of any nutrients owing to the ingredients and methods used.
So, taking this into perspective, £2.50 is a snip. Anyone who is reluctant to pay this for this kind of product really doesn’t put much value on their wellbeing. I’ll bet they would happily part with this for a pint of beer or lager or a packet of 10 cigarettes.”


Therefore, upon the advice of the miller, my main retail outlet (Kings Walden PO and Village Stores)and my gut feeling, I need to increase my prices. From the 9th March,  Malted, White and 40/60 will rise from £2 to £2.20 per loaf.  Spelt will rise from £2.20 to £2.60 – Spelt is literally is twice the price of other flours.  I am sorry that I need to do this, but I do need to bring prices in line with other Real Bread bakers and I think these rises are a small price to pay.  Afterall, my oven isn’t going to pay for itself…


NEXT BAKES


Saturday, 3rd March – Orders by Thursday 6pm – collection from home-bakery
Tuesday, 6th March – Orders by Sunday 6pm – collection from home-bakery


Friday, 9th March – NO ORDERS but hope to have between 60 and 80 loaves for sale (gulp) at the Kings Walden Farmers Market – 11am until 2pm, follow the signs, I would love your support if you can make it even if you don’t buy anything!!


THERE WILL BE NO BAKE for Saturday, 10th March as I will be in bed.


Normal Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday services resumed w/c 12th March.

Ok, so I know it’s not Friday, but it’s very frustrating.  Last night I spend about 45 minutes before bed writing a little bit of blog (it was late, but it was good!) and then when I came to publish the words… BAM!  Gone.  Where did it go?? It was saving nicely as I went along, and then, poof!  Just disappeared. As if I haven’t enough to do, now I have to write it again.  And it won’t be as funny or witty.  Grrr.  (Mind you, at least I can blag to you that it was in the first place….!) 
So what’s new with me?? Well, I am please as punch that the Kings Walden Village and Post Office stores have been announced as regional champions in the Countryside Alliance Awards and I am very proud that this Champion store has been selling my loaves for a couple of months now.  Long may it continue and prosper.

I am also gearing up for the bi-annual Kings Walden Farmer’s Market, which is on Friday, 9th March between 11am and 2pm.  I have yet to work out the logistics of how many loaves I can produce to take along with me to sell; not as many as I’d like, that’s for sure but I will be really grateful of help from my mum, she’s a very good spokesperson for my bread.

I have also sent my first press release into Luton Today in the hope that they will publish my piece on being one of the first fifty bakers to adopt the Real Bread Loafmark developed by the Real Bread Campaign, so keep your eyes peeled! The Campaign defines Real Bread as made with all-natural ingredients, and without the use of any processing aids or other artificial additives (sadly there are 4 that still have to be added to flour by law,.. these are currently under scrutiny by the campaign;who needs chalk in their bread!!) Sadly, something like 95-97% of the loaves we buy in Britain fail to meet this basic standard.  Visit http://www.sustainweb.org/realbread/ for more information.

My Cafe customer has asked that I provide them with lovely round loaves, which I am delighted to do for them, but given the limitations of my oven, it’s going to be impossible to do any sort of quantity of these as my bakery grows. For now, he only needs 3 a week which is manageable.    So I have started investigating what I need to do in order to get a proper bread oven installed into a converted bit of the garage and then I can offer a wider variety of loaves.

Finally, you can now follow me on Twitter? @josloaves profile is all set-up ready to go.  If only I knew how to use it to my advantage!

Remember, I bake for Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and occasionally in between!  I bake to order and due to the process that I use, I need to know by 7pm 2 days before (so that’s Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday respectively). 

Happy Monday peeps!  Just musing over the weeks that have slipped by since my last update.  I continue to be busy in and out of the bakery and enjoying all the bread challenges, not so much the other worky stuff…   My latest additions to my Brotfollio (see what I did there?  Brot is German for bread – biggest eaters of bread in Europe, incidentally) are my 100% Spelt sourdough and my Rye with Caraway seeded loaves. (second picture).  Spelt has a lovely flavour to it, but it can be really tricky to perfect; I think the one in this top picture was a bit of a fluke as it managed to keep a perfect structure.  Subsequent loaves have over-proved a little but I can only learn by keeping at it.

Every bakery is different, all flour is different, the weather temperature is fluctuating greatly at the moment and all these factors are difficult to control when you don’t have expensive bakery equipment to regulate the whole process. My Rye-bread – the brick looking example in the second picture I thought was a wrong’un (shape-wise) only until I saw more-or-less the same loaf being sold on a Farmers Market in Harpenden yesterday, so thrilled and relieved that there’s nothing wrong with my baked off-spring.

I also took a couple of inner pictures of the loaves so you can see that they are far from bricks:

So onto this week’s new products, that are hopefully going to be successful and possibly born out of error; I had the misfortune to temporarily remove my brain whilst I was shopping for desperately needed loaf tins.  I have ended up with 10 whoppa tins, which would mean a whole new overhaul  of my recipes, so instead I am trying out some DOUBLERS.  These will be two smaller loaves baked side by side in the one tin, making one big loaf that can be split in half  – one for eating now, one to give away/freeze for a soup day or something.  Not sure on the name yet, my they might just end up looking like a giant chest…

I am also now offering SMALL Foccacias, perfect for the twosey picky tea, with olive oil and balsamic vinegar to dunk it into to. hmm hmm.

NEXT BAKE DAYS:
Although I am always baking for Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, I still need 48 hours notice as this is when I need to refresh my sourdough levain from the fridge.  If I do too much, I’ll end up having to throw some, or if I do too little, disappointed customers.

Or why not do a standing weekly order, as many of my customers do?

TUESDAYs (Order by Sunday 10am)
THURSDAY only MALTED (Order by Tuesday 10am) – delivery to Stopsley Baptist Church, Term-time.
SATURDAY’s (Order by Thursday 10am)

An apology to everyone for my lack of blogging and baking since Christmas Eve.  I thought I’d give myself a little break from the mixing and the kneading and the tinning up and spend a little more time with my family over Christmas and New Year (that is allowed, right??).   I have also used the time to question just why I put myself through the stress and sometimes physical pain of single-handedly producing around 36 loaves a week on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.  Not to say that I reached a crossroads, but I am reaching a point where I am starting to wonder if all this hard work is worthwhile; I certainly make no money from this venture and there seems to be so few people out there who care about what they put into their bodies that I might aswell have decided to sell drugs instead.

I am currently reading ‘Bread Matters- Why and How to Make Your Own Bread.’ by Andrew Whitely.  It has injected a new determination in me to continue my quest to put Real Bread on the map in Luton.  Whether I do this single-handedly, or launch something a bit bigger in the community I know I want to continue making Real Bread. So I have been experimenting with rye and spelt sourdough starters and learning a great deal more about the bread we eat.  There are some shocking facts and these are my favourites below, however if you want to know more, ask me and I’ll bore the pants of you, or read the book:

FACT: Roller-milling to produce white flour for 80% of breads sold in this country removes a massive proportion of vitamins and nutrients that are naturally occurring in the grain.  The flour I use is all organic and stone-milled, which means it retains the maximum amount of nutrients.

FACT: Industrial loaves have very little proving time and therefore, artificial flavourings are added to cover up the taste of the chemical cocktail that is added to assist with the rise and loaf structure!  None of this is needed in my bread, as the slow development gives a far superior flavour.

FACT: Celiac disease and intolerance to wheat has increased since industrial bread processes introduced in 1961 and Ireland have a high incidence of Celiac -(coincidence that they eat a lot of soda-bread which is chemically risen with Bicarb of Soda??).

FACT: Lactic acids that are allowed to develop in slow fermented dough help to neutralise the harmful gliadins in the gluten that are harmful to celiacs.

FACT: You’ll pay around £1 something for a white Bloomer baked at Asda (although the dough might have been brought in frozen) which has very little nutritious value and a cocktail of chemicals.  My loaves will cost nearly double but will have three times the nutritional value.  Therefore, to get the same amount of sustenance    from industrial bread as my bread, you’d have to eat three times as much.  (Is this why I have lost weight in the last 6 months???)

3 slices of industrial bread, v 1 slice of a Jo’s Loaf.

Now whose bread is better value……

NEXT BAKE DAYS:

Thursday, 12th January, Hullaballo, 10am. orders by midnight on Monday,
Saturday, 14th January, Collection from Tameton Close between 9.45 and 10.30am, orders by midnight on Wednesday,
Tuesday, 17th January, Collection from Tameton Close between 10 and 12pm, orders by midnight on Saturday.

I don’t know if I mentioned that I was recently given a friendship cake as a gift by my neighbour. It arrived as a silky, creamy liquid in a cling film-wrapped bowl. Herman, was the name given to this living, yeast based mix which I was to either nurture for 10 days or I could tip down the sink. Being a frugalist (does such a word exist?) I obviously chose the former – waste not want not in this house. I followed the instructions, I fed it as required and come the penultimate day before baking, I had to divide it up into 4 baby Hermans, one of which I would be baking the following day.
 As this bake would follow the eve of my annual former antenatal mums and dads Christmas party, I suspected that the last thing I would want to do on that morning was to bake s cake. Plus knowing what I know about yeasts, I decided it was best all round, if I measured all the extra ingredients out on the Saturday evening before the party, combine them on the Sunday morning and then leave the yeast to work some magic and bake in the oven in the evening, when my anticipated hangover had subsided. My instincts served me well.
Upon regaining consciousness on Sunday morning, the last thing I wanted to experience was the whiff of apples, raw eggs and cinnamon. The effect of this on my hanging stste, was one of, well, how can i put it nicely, an internal uprising. Despite this unwelcome interlude to my morning, the cake was all prepped for the oven, which meant that i could happily accompany my husband and son to my brothers for a spectacular pre-christmas with other members of my family. We had a lovely day, i managed to recover in the nick of time to enjoy my festive dinner and perform as a normal human being. (ok, it’s me, near normal). Unfortunately we got stuck on the motorway on the way home for an extra 90 minutes to our usual 30, so it was a quick oven on, for the now ‘blooming’ Herman. I set the timer snd when up to temperature, Herman entered the oven. It Had been a long, tiring day, but I had succeeded. I was in my pjs ready for an imminent ascent to bed. The timer went off and I applied my hot gloves to check on progress. I pulled Herman from the oven to check whether he had finished, alas, another 15 minutes i thought, so as I grapsed him to slide back into the oven, he decide he’d had enough and dropped to the floor… The moral of this story? Heck, there isn’t one, except sometimes, things just go wrong and it’s a pain in the arse.

Bread available on Christmas Eve, (pre-orders only as usual) and then I am going to have a BREAK. Yep, no bread for New Years Eve chaps, sorry. in fact no bread until…
 Tuesday, 3rd January, and then Saturday 7th and so on and so on.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my customers and I thank you for your support in 2011.  With love to all, from all at Jo’s Loaves. (o, that’s just me then…!) Xx