sourdough boule (photo by wm. christman)

(Days three and four at the CIA)

There's nothing quite like mixing, fermenting, shaping and baking bread. Even when you're doing bread bakery numbers.

In the past two days, we have made:
- 18 9" diameter white sourdough boules
- 16 hand formed ciabatta
- 110 4" brioche
- 105 white dinner rolls
- 13 9" rosemary and green olive boules
- 12 7" rosemary batards
- 8 14" braided challah
- 6 5" diameter orange panatone
- 12 8" long sunflower seed bread

Phew....and that's only half of it...there's more below...

rosemary batard (photo by wm. christman)

- 16 10" diameter focaccia (with 5-6 different toppings)
- 40-50 pieces of fresh naan
- three large sheets of lavash
- about 36 lebanese thyme flatbread
- a pile of soft pretzels
- a pile of fresh pita bread

Two days of production (four hours each, so really just 8 working hours), lots of mixing, testing, stretching, forming, shaping, cutting...running back and forth between ovens and benches, ducking the steam vents in the deck oven when baking bread, or delivering most of what we produced to the lunch crew to put out for lunch (or breakfast the next day) and much more...it just goes on and on.

And all throughout, the slightly tangy smell of fermenting bread, long and wide bread benches scattered with flour and ingredients, white coated chefs-in-training scurrying in and around the work areas, multiple sheet pans of shaped and resting loaves, the roasted smells of freshly finished bread cooling on racks...and unless you see it first-hand, there's nothing like this.

And for me, this is heaven.