Box Turtle Bakery Blog

The plan for this blog is to have it be part news interesting to the bakery and part open-source platform where I can publish the interesting things I have learned at my successes and failures building and running the bakery.

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I cleaned this equipment up for Flute Song Farm where I am currently doing my grain trials. I tied the rusted scythe blades up with paper towels and soaked it in vinegar for a couple days and then the rust brushed right off. Then it was easy to see what you were doing with the peening and sharpening. I need lots of practice still, but they are very useful tools to have around. It is well worth the effort of learning how to maintain and use them.

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Oldest-known Bread Baking

The world's oldest known date of bread baking has been moved back to about 14,000 years ago with this archeology in Jordan. The evidence points to stone milled flour with particles of varying sizes, but with some larger bran sifted off. It also includes a large wood-fired stone hearth and sourdough leavened bread with the use of ancient wheat relatives as well as barley, and oats. They could find essentially the same evidence in my own hearth! I'm having this mind-boggling sensation of unbroken connection among a set of bread bakers spanning over 450 generations. 

You of course are reading this on a shiny-new technology that is only 1-generation-old so hopefully this post will last, but I feel certain the bread baking tradition will. 

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I’ve changed in the past few years to a no-till approach for the grain trials. At my scales of < 1 acre, broadcasting cover crop seeds and scything down vegetation has worked well. Problem weeds can be hoed individually. Scythe or kama hand-harvesting works well at my small scales, but I’m interested in trying out some form of a seed stripping mechanism for this year’s harvest so that I can just scythe down the remaining straw in the field and not have to transport for threshing all that volume. 

The big problem then is trying to get the seeds planted effectively and efficiently. Broadcast of grain seeds or seedballs I think needs a much better established set of soil organic matter and surface residue and even then would be pretty haphazard for small plots. Manual efforts with individual seeds or a hoe is very time-consuming. I’ve tried a single-wheel cultivator type device too and that certainly helps, but was not great either. People scaling up can invest in a heavy duty seed drill, but for no-till the scaled-down concept is too light weight to cut through residue and ground cover. This past Fall I planted most of my trial varieties with this Chinese-style Jab Seeder shown above - imported by Easy Digging. I have one without the fertilizer side dressing feature. Even in my no-tilled pasture-type conditions, I find the sharp peak pretty consistently pierces the ground cover and neatly allows it to close over the seed. I used some squishable foam and tape to fill in the #1 seed side to work for my wheat seeds - it’s not perfect, but it’s sufficient. I did 500 sq ft/hour changing out a bunch of different varieties to plant out 8′x10′ plots. The ground marks can be subtle enough that it hard to stick to your pattern so I might need to lay out a guide measuring tape when doing long rows.

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Whole-grain breads and other baked goods featuring locally grown and milled grains

I went ahead and put up the baking selections and order forms for the rest of November. That consists of this Saturday, next Saturday, and then the special Tuesday before Thanksgiving market from 3-6PM. I'll be using my special Turkey Red Wheat in the Honey Wheat selections for these last two bakes and then also adding in some special roll options as well. These include the mini Oat rolls w/Rosemary, the tear-off sourdough rolls meant to look like a stalk of wheat called "Épi", and the Holiday Bread type of sweetened milk dough done as some plain sweet buns.  I hope that covers, stuffs, butters, and sandwiches it ;)

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With all the weight of the loaded trailer and the steepness of a couple of my hills, I often start slipping the drive wheel on the trike. I could add an electric hub motor to the other wheel to make it 2WD, but I the easiest and cheapest way is to just give it a push like the wheel on a wheelchair. The wheel is not too far behind the seat to reach so I just built a new fender out of some corrugated plastic with a notch cut on the forward side. The regular metal fender fingers are run through some pre-drilled metal ribbon and everything was just zip-tied together.

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New equipment at the bakery...I’ll make it a Friday evening special - hit the bulls-eye in 3 tries and win a fresh-baked scone!

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New Location for 2017

The grain trials have been going along slowly, but successful enough that I've been looking to make sure I had the security of knowing the land was going to continue to be available and that I could scale them up. I also wanted to have someone who is interested in the same overall approach as me. I met a farmer today who seems like just that kind of fit. (If names like Fukuoka and Toensmeier excite you, then you are that same kind of person!) This farmer is going for an approach called Restoration Agriculture which fits annuals like grains into a multi-layered perennial and animal ecosystem. It's a long process, but I’m excited to get started.

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Saturday August 26th

I didn't have enough enthusiasm in me to travel to see the total eclipse, but had fun hanging out with a bunch of neighbors watching our partial eclipse here. The photo below is of a projected image coming through a spotting scope. It was neat to see the small dark sunspots sunspots along the equator of the sun both travel slowly and be consumed and then revealed again. The bakery is right about at it's 8-year anniversary so I'm going to just go ahead and mark the 8 years as pre-eclipse and try to keep going astronomically and gastronomically from here.

Sourdough Spelt Hearth Bread w/optional Olives or Apricots

Sourdough Spelt and Brinkley Farm Corn English Muffins

Sourdough Dark Rye w/optional Caraway

Sourdough Spelt Pan Loaves w/optional Pecans

Honey Wheat Yeast Bread (optional Cinnamon Raisin)

100% Buckwheat or Oat hearth loaves

Spelt Tortillas

Tart Cherry Pecan Scones

(End of Summer)Holiday Bread

Dry Goods Available

Chocolate Almond Biscotti

Golden Wheat Crackers

Cracked Oats

Chocolate Oat Pecan Granola

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The cellar was almost empty anyway and so I gave the floor an upgrade. It now has two layers of 12 mil plastic to keep out the ground moisture and a level floor topped with outdoor carpeting. I just had coarse gravel in there before on top of some less robust plastic.

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Oat Bread lover Andrea likes to toast slices until they are super crispy and brown and then layer with avocado and cucumber. I like making people happy.

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Here’s the report on the 2017 harvest. The soil still needs a lot more organic matter and it’s hard to hurry that along so I still feel like I am yet really able to see how these varieties will do. All these varieties are wheat - except for the one emmer. Except as noted, they were all planted by drop seeding a 180 sq ft plot that had been sprinkley w/fertilizer and lime to get it to to basic wheat growing conditions post soil test. I harvest these June 13th (all a little early) and let them dry in shocks in my attic which made it very easy and worked well given that it rained a bunch of days since then.

The bad: My Spelt (broadcast w/a thick mulch of Spelt hulls) got over-run also two soft wheats - a VT Read (15g) and an unknown variety did poorly. (125g)

So so were the Ukrainka and Sirvinta (I’m not sure I kept everything separated properly and for part of the Sirvinta the awns looked wrong - produced 275g)

The best where the Frederick Soft Wheat (90 row feet planted in furrows w/biochar and bunny poo on top produced 310g), Banatka (285g of mostly plump seeds), and Blau Emmer (290g but some seeds shriveled. Heads and straw looked amazing though). 

Everything threshed well through my metal-bladed leaf blower. I would pick out the big straw pieces do a little screening or hand gravity sifting on it before shaking it over a screen in a squirrel fan air stream to gently separate out the chaff and lightweight grains. I think for this year I should furrow plant underneath my windrows on the cover crop bed and then rake back on there as a mulch and maybe winter pea cover the in-between spaces. Lightweight seeds should get floated off before I plant too. 

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Whole Spelt Pita made with yogurt and also with the help of my new press. Yeast leavened, but the yogurt gives it a nice tang anyway. Yeah, you can stuff that.

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This is a kind of firewood I love coming across. It was an Oak tree that got blown down and dried a little with the leaves still on it. I use a couple of Silky tree saws I have to quickly cut a bunch of 4 feet limbs of up to 4 inches in diameter. The small limbs work well to get the bed of coals built or when I need just a little more wood and the big ones for a nice slow burn. Assuming I don’t have to haul them too far, It takes me about 1/2 hour of work to get enough wood cut and loaded in the truck for a single oven firing. For this case that included bundling up the sticks in a strip and carrying up a hill. It saves me the work of splitting and it’s a faster/easier way to load the oven when I am firing it.  If you have some hardwood like this that I can help clean up for you in exchange for baked goods, just let me know!

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I have been using a bakery-built tortilla press for a number of years. It worked well, but it still made the tortillas the most labor-intensive thing I baked - which is saying a lot. I mulled over for a while some sort of equipment purchase and finally got this DoughXPress TXM-15 which is shown in the background of the first photo. It has 15″ square platens with the piston that centers the force in the middle. The platens can be heated too and it looks like many recipes will benefit from the simultaneous press and par-bake step. The second photo shows some Spelt tortillas puffing up like giant pillows which is a good sign. Compared to my hand-pressed and stretched tortillas they are twice as fast to make, thinner, more even, and more pliable after baking. The thickness is infinitely variable so crackers, pitas, etc. are all a possibility.  I first got started doing tortillas to do something else with some extra local Spelt I had and these kind of things are a great way to use a huge variety of local grains. All the little bowls in the first photo were for a series of test recipes I did with varying flours, hydration percentages, etc. I’m sure I have a lot more trials to do, but will bringing a lot of these to the market and also looking for other outlets. The labor had been so high before, I couldn’t even think about doing any of this wholesale, but now it’s a much easier possibility so I’m going to try to grow this into it’s own baking day.

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Selections for Sat. April 8th

1lb Sourdough Spelt Hearth Loaves (optional olives or apricots)

Sourdough Spelt Pan Loaves (optional Pecans)

Sourdough Dark Rye w/optional Caraway

Honey Wheat Yeast Bread (optional Cinnamon Raisin) and Rolls

Sourdough English Muffins

100% Buckwheat or Oat hearth loaves

Spelt Tortillas

Scones w/Candied Lemon, Raisins, and Pecans

Chocolate Beet Snack Cake

Dry Goods Available

Biscotti: Chocolate Almond

Golden Wheat Crackers

Cracked Oats

Chocolate Barley Pecan Granola

Sourdough Oat Granola Bars w/Sunflowers and Raisins

Regular Carrboro Market hours now in effect - 7AM to Noon

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I’ve wasted way too much food trying to store root crops in my cellar so have switched to roasting and freezing it. The pumpkin puree on the left is frozen into sheets to make it easy to hammer pieces off with the oyster shucking knife. The beets on the right are just roasted and then frozen whole separately so that it is easy to pull out the weight I need.

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I liked my my improved mill-stand for my main grain mill so much, I made one for my gluten-free mill. This time instead of the pre-drilled Aluminum, I used some true 1.5″ poplar that comes looking nice and pre-sanded straight from Lowes. I’ve had problems with the recessed furniture bolts coming lose, but setup the lockwashers against a washer this time so hopefully that solves the problem. Again with the extra humidity here in the south, the mill really needs the extra air to keep it cool. The fan is something built to be put in-line in circular ducts.