SlowMornings

The mill came before the oven

We bought a small stone mill in 2020, second hand, from a bakery in Colorado that was closing. It sits in the back room and makes a noise you can hear from the counter.

Flour goes flat. The oils in the germ oxidise within a few weeks of milling, and what you lose is the part that tastes like anything. Commercial flour has the germ taken out for that reason — it fixes the shelf life and removes the flavour in the same move.

Forty pounds at a time

We mill about forty pounds a week, usually on a Sunday, and use it inside five days. It is more work and it costs more per loaf.

You can taste it in the country rye and, honestly, not much else. That is why the croissants are still made with flour that arrives in a sack.

Two hours, then it is a different thing

A morning bun comes out at about half past seven. The sugar on the outside is still crackling and the middle is loose. By ten it has set. It is still good. It is not the same thing.

What we tried

Baking in two waves worked for the ten o'clock crowd and gave the seven o'clock crowd a colder oven. Holding dough back and baking to order takes twenty-two minutes, and nobody waits twenty-two minutes for a bun.

So we bake once, at seven, and put a card up when they are gone. If you want one at the top of its arc, come before nine.

One weekend, six hundred pounds

Hatch chile is a season rather than an ingredient you order. It runs about six weeks and then it is finished. In September we drive down, buy roughly six hundred pounds, and roast it over two days in the lot behind the shop.

Frozen, and we say so

It goes into the freezer in one-pound bags and comes out through the year. Frozen roasted chile is close to fresh — better than canned by a wide margin, and not identical to September.

We would rather tell you that than write the word fresh on a menu in February.