Artisan Breads

Sourdough Based

All of these breads are generated from the aforementioned SOUR and have similar characteristics. They are all 1.5 lbs, have hard, crusty exteriors and soft interiors. They’re relatively heavy breads, not super dense, but not light & airy. Warning: The crust will create crumbs, but the mess is so worth it.

Varieties:
Country Sourdough
Whole Wheat
Multigrain
Olive-Rosemary
Molasses-Fig-Walnut

Yeast Breads (non-sourdough)

Because I am partial to sourdough breads, I only have one staple in my “yeasted” bread repertoire: The French Baguette. Great for a picnic, or anywhere you may not have a serrated knife handy (say, in the car on the way home from work), it’s a crowd-pleasing bread. It can be used for sandwiches or dipping in things, but the best is with a slab of soft, salty butter. Oh, and, the crumbs are REALLY bad on this one.

Croissant Pastries

Ever wonder how we get the croissant so flaky? I know you have, because you’ve asked. Without getting too scientific, because I’m horrible at science, it has something to do with the water molecules in the butter evaporating at really high heat. You see, we start with a big block of butter. Then we wrap a very soft, rich, yeasty dough around the butter and pack it really tightly. So now, the objective is to create flaky layers. So the dough-wrapped butter gets rolled out super thin until it can be folded in thirds. Roll it out, fold in thirds, repeat. By the end we have 27 layers of butter laminated by rich, yeasty dough. Pop that into a 425 degree oven and you have…that’s right, magic (or science) in the form of decadently rich, buttery, flaky pastry.

We use this rich dough to make:
Traditional Croissant crescent shaped pastry
Pain au Chocolat filled with dark chocolate sticks
Pain au Raisin rolled up and filled with pastry cream and rum-soaked raisins
Cherry Pinwheels star-shaped with a pastry cream and cherry center
Apricot Pockets filled with poached apricots and vanilla pastry cream