We’re bringing back the Oatmeal Raisin Cookie as our featured item this week. Just FYI, we’re still working on the oatmeal bread that we mentioned in last week’s email and hope to have it ready next week.

We’ve had some conversations about our bread during Saturday pickups and realized we haven’t explained our process for making it. When we started Daily Grains, we focused on three pillars to guide our decisions and serve as the foundation for our bakery: Flavor, Health, and Sustainability. All three of these help explain our process, which actually takes three days from start to (finished) loaf.

Your loaf begins two days before you pick up your bread. The sourdough starter gets fed more frequently, and flour is milled. We mill the day before making bread dough to ensure the most flavorful and nutritious flour possible. Milling our own flour also allows more variety: spelt, einkorn, etc but also Rouge de Bordeaux, White Sonora, etc. It shifts our mindset and makes bread more sustainable: maybe we can’t get ahold of the Yecora Rojo wheat we want right now, but we can use the Turkey Red available from one of our farmers in Colorado or Kansas.

The day before you pick up your bread, the dough is made. Thus far, every loaf of our bread has been made by hand from start to finish. The hands-on portion of bread making takes anywhere from 8-10 hours, depending upon a variety of factors (temperature, moisture, and season can all impact fermentation speed). Then loaves are shaped and placed into bannetons (the rattan baskets that give the loaves their shape and flour “decoration”). We do what’s called a “cold proof” in the fridge overnight. This allows us to bake bread the morning you pick up, rather than the night before. It also adds a depth of flavor to the bread.

Day Three is Bake Day, and Bake Days are the best days. 😀 Ovens are heated, loaves are pulled from the fridge and scored (cuts are made in the dough to allow it to expand, to allow the baker some creativity, and to discern one bread variety from another), and bread is baked. The loaves cool for a couple of hours, get bagged and labeled, and await your arrival for pickup.

If you're interested in learning more about our Bread Share, you can visit our FAQs page. Or if you are ready to purchase a share, you can do that here. More information about Cure's CSA Shares can be found here.