Hello, D E C E M B E R ❄

I probably wrote about this last December but this time of year is my favorite...I get to enjoy my birthday, Christmas, and New Year's celebrations all in one month. But along with this excitement, it also seems to be the month that goes by way too quickly. There's many things to wrap up, other than presents of course, and much to plan for in preparation of the coming year. When I started thinking about my resolution for 2018, what comes to mind first is "community" - the community of people that we are fortunate enough to be able to nourish, nurture, and grow with as all of us center around the love for good bread. 

Over the last four weeks, we had the utmost pleasure of baking with some of our CSB members as we hosted two different groups for a sourdough class at C&C. It was so much fun just getting to know everybody and spending time together. We even discovered that our oven bakes up pretty darned good pizza too! I think I learned just as much as I'd hoped to teach during these sessions...and after all the requests for other classes have come through, I've found that our community is as passionate to learn the craft as we are open to sharing our knowledge of it. We have now posted a schedule of classes that you can sign up for on our website and we'll post new dates as every 3-month bread share rotation begins.

Speaking of our Community Supported Bakery program, we have been working on creating a better experience overall from introducing an SMS pick-up reminder service to building member corners on our website [pictured above]. You can now easily access the pick-up schedule for all share levels as well as view a gallery of breads that have been baked throughout the rotation by going to the CSB tab on the site navigation. The first rotation of 2018 is set to begin on January 3rd and the full schedule is listed in the Winter/Spring Member Corner page. The last bread share delivery for 2017 is a couple of weeks away and the deadline to sign up for the next round is December 29th.

We are also now accepting pre-orders for holiday miches through December 18th. You will be able to pick up your bread on the Thursday, Friday, or Saturday before Christmas Eve at Artale & Co. We didn't get to do any of this last year so I'm happy that we are in the position now to hopefully be a part of your holiday season!

A Thanksgiving Message ❤

Back when Rockford City Market first started, I was just a new graduate desperately seeking my perfect job...and by perfect, I mean any job. Long story short, the odds were definitely not working in my favor and so I stumbled my way into learning the bread-baking craft in order to become a vendor at the market. "Just for the summer", I thought. By the time winter had rolled around, I finally found myself at the doorstep of Barbara Olson Center of Hope, a not-for-profit organization that serves people with developmental disabilities, ready to begin the first real job in my chosen career. I have been there for 7 years now. And though my pursuit of Crust & Crumbles has taken me more and more away from the Center, this place is so near and dear to my heart.

I bring this up today because Thanksgiving is a time for gathering and gratitude...and a true Thanksgiving is also in actually doing that - giving. For many years, I helped with running the Center's annual #GivingTuesday campaign, a day dedicated to inspiring people to help their local community and give back to the causes they support. And throughout those years, I have been witness to the incredible generosity of our friends and neighbors. Having been on the other side of the fence, I can also tell you that every gift goes towards serving and championing for those that are the most vulnerable among us. Not only that, all the nonprofits in our city together employ a great amount of people within this community through their operations...people that are making a difference in someone's life every day.

Any online contribution made to the Barbara Olson Center of Hope on Tuesday, November 28th will receive a matching donation from the Coleman Foundation in Chicago. I hope you kindly consider making a gift to the Center...and if not, please reach out to the organizations and charities you care about this holiday season because as the saying goes, "We rise by lifting others."

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

Thanksgiving Bread

Last night I attended the Beaujolais Nouveau Party hosted by our dear friends at Five Forks Market. This is the second year we have baked all the bread for this event to accompany bottomless bowls of a special peasant stew being served (SOOO good!) as bottles of this year's wine were being uncorked at everyone's table. Beaujolais Nouveau, originating in France, is celebrated annually on the third Thursday of November as a time to commemorate the end of the harvest; to sit back and enjoy the fruits of all that labor alongside friends and family. 

Next Thursday we will be celebrating the end of harvest ourselves and giving thanks for all that is good. I have much to be thankful for this year...the health and happiness of my family, the company of good friends, the purpose and productivity of my C&C team, and the community of people that propel this dream venture forward by sharing in our love of good bread. 

Next week we will be helping friends of C&C give thanks of their own by baking miche /meesh/ loaves to be gifted forward. It is the classic French bread rooted in history and tradition that is centuries old. In villages across France, when the baker fired up the communal oven, all the townsfolk brought their dough to him/her for baking and the resulting miches weighed anywhere between 4 and 12 pounds. These large loaves kept their moisture better and would be enough to feed the families for days or weeks until the next baking day. 

We were originally planning to start accepting holiday miche orders just for Christmastime but we are able to bake a limited amount of these loaves alongside our bulk orders if you'd like one for your Thanksgiving table next week. You will be able to pick up your order Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday at Artale & Co. If you are a CSB member, just send me a note and we will be able to deliver the miche to whichever location you normally pick up your bread on Wednesday. Here is the link to our online shop where you can place your order from now until noon Sunday - http://www.crustncrumbles.com/shop/

Goodbye, O C T O B E R ☔

Tonight we will begin our prep work for the last market day of 2017...time flies when you're having fun and I've gotta say I'm feeling a little caught off guard that November is already here. We will be at both the North End City Market and the Downtown Beloit Farmer's Market this coming Saturday morning. So whether you are in town or decide to take a little drive, I invite you to come visit and close out the season with us. There will be a Halloween costume parade and party in Beloit, so we will have some treats at our booth for the kids. We are also planning for something fun at our North End booth as well.

We have been enjoying baking for our CSB members and truly appreciate all the feedback we have been getting through the last month. Past Wednesday was the distribution of our first experimental loaf - a mushroom sourdough bread encrusted in sesame seeds with shiitakes and porcinis inside [pictured above]. Our membership is growing and we are excited to be welcoming new breadheads here in a couple of weeks as well as to the Winter/Spring rotation. If you'd like to join in, the deadline to sign up for NOV shares is Friday, November 4th on our website.

Two weeks ago we started up the #ToastTuesday collaboration with our friends at Octane downtown. It's an all day feature on the menu every Tuesday and so far they've come up with some awesome flavors to pair our bread with. I sneaked in there for lunch this week and had roasted apples & pears topped with brie cheese, Eickman's bacon, and cherry compote on the Country White. If you haven't had a chance, I hope you will stop by one of these days and check it out. 

Anyway, I'd like to finish this post by saying thank you so much for your support and patronage throughout the 2017 market season. It means the world to all of us here at C&C and we wouldn't be able to do what we love without you.

Modernist Bread

Most people that have gotten to know me as a baker don't really know that all my educational background is in science and that I didn't get to this point via culinary school. I went through my undergrad majoring in biology/chemistry and then continued my schooling to go into the healthcare field. When I first delved into opening this bakery, I'd often thought, "gosh, I can't believe I went through all those years and racked up those college bills to now end up doing something completely unrelated!" But more and more it's becoming evident that baking bread is ultimately an exercise in science.

Last night I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture and Q&A discussion in Chicago with Francisco Migoya, co-author of Modernist Bread, as well as get a sneak peek of the real thing before its Nov 7th release date. This five volume set of 2642 pages and weighing in at over 50 lbs is the culmination of four years of research by the folks at The Cooking Lab founded by Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft. An interdisciplinary team of historians, baking industry greats, and scientists including chemists, microbiologists, as well as physicists joined forces to assemble these groundbreaking, in-depth reference tomes on the subject matter. I'm so excited for this collection to join our resource library to help the C&C team continue in honing the craft and producing the best bread we can for all of you.

This week also marked the end for our short term CSB members...we wanted to give a proper send-off by baking one of our favorites, the Black Sage, for Wednesday's distribution. If you have been thinking of trying out Blind Date with a Baker, this is a good time to sign up for November shares. We have also made it possible on our website to sign up for the Winter/Spring rotation for those of you would like to secure a more long-term share. If your favorite market loaf has not yet made an appearance in your CSB bag, we will be at North End market tomorrow morning with Country White, Olive Oil Semolina, and Seven Seed Whole Wheat sourdoughs.

Toast Tuesday 💥

We have had quite a week at C&C since the last newsletter with baking for markets, CSB bread distributions, and for other events. Our trip to the Downtown Beloit Farmer's Market was really great and, despite the somewhat cold rainy weather that day, we received the warmest welcome from all the market patrons.

We are pleased to say that we will be up there again for their closing day on Saturday, October 28th with lots of bread as well as treats for the 600 children that approximately come through for the Halloween Costume Parade & Party. We will also be at North End City Market that day to close out the market season with our Rockford folk as well as every Saturday leading up to the end...only three left

As we move into the holiday season afterwards, we will open up orders for miche loaves [pictured above] - these large 3 lb beauties are perfect for family gatherings and gifts. They are made with organic high-extraction wheat flour and leavened with our dark rye sourdough culture for complexity in flavor.

I may have mentioned this before but since early May, every week we would do this thing called #ToastTuesday on our Instagram feed where we would come up with creative ways to use C&C bread and make tartines. We have tried everything on toast from peanut butter with pickles to grilled baby octopus. In the last few weeks, we have taken a break from it because we were working on bringing it from online to real life.

I'm so excited to say that starting this coming Tuesday, October 17th, you can order a ToastTuesday special from the menu at Octane downtown. Chef Pat Alberto is ushering in mushroom season with this one - hen of the woods and portobello mushroom medley with braised radishes from Angelic Organics and fried eggs from Ten Men Farm. We are baking Shiitake & Sesame loaves for this debut and hope you will stop by Octane for lunch or dinner next Tuesday and try it out!

Hello, Wisconsin!

Maybe you have heard about this already but last Friday was the most attended closing day in Rockford City Market history...not to mention over 107,365 people experienced the downtown market throughout the 20 weeks making the 2017 season a record breaking year. C&C had a line starting to form at 3pm before the market even opened and, I tell ya, it was a remarkable sight to behold. We are proud to be a part of this community and so grateful that you chose to visit us each and every week. 

Blind Date with a Baker started this past Wednesday and just like for any "first date", we had a bout of the jitters! We double, triple-checked the distribution list and hoped everything would go smoothly for all the share members. Our house sourdough, Organic Country White, was the bread of the week because we realized that some members are new to C&C and this classic is a great introductory loaf to who we are. I hope everyone enjoyed it and is ready for something fun and a little different next week. 

Tomorrow we are making an early morning trek up north to be a guest vendor at the Downtown Beloit Farmer's Market before their season is over. This award-winning market has been going since 1974 and is currently the second largest in the state of Wisconsin - second only to Madison. We are ecstatic that C&C will be joining this market for the 2018 season and that we will get to share our love for good bread with the people of Beloit.

Unfortunately we don't currently have the resources to be in two places at once, so that means we will not be at the North End City Market tomorrow morning. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. We will be there next week and the following two Saturdays to finish out the season with all of you! 

Missing You Already

Tomorrow is the last day of Rockford City Market for the 2017 season...and what an amazing season it has been! All of us at C&C have poured our hearts into our work, baked thousands of loaves, and got to share our passion for good bread with the incredible people of this community over the last 20 weeks. Unlike last summer though, things aren't ending...rather we are at the doorstep of many new beginnings.

Blind Date with a Baker - our CSB program - is starting next week [by the way, the sign-up deadline is midnight tomorrow if you haven't secured your Oct-Dec share yet]. We are expanding our presence to the north as C&C has been invited to join the Downtown Beloit Farmer's Market for 2018 with an introductory market visit sometime next month. We are also excited to start working with local restaurants this fall as well as launch into our viennoiserie line. The ambient temperature in our kitchen this summer was not conducive to working with laminated products but, I assure you, the promise of fresh croissants still stands.

With all that said, here's what's going on now. We have joined forces with our friends at Prairie Street Brewing Co. and Countryside Meats & Deli to celebrate Oktoberfest with great beer, reuben bratwursts, and these Bavarian-style pretzels pictured above. The Oktoberfest Dam Jam 2017 event will be held tomorrow at Owly Oop Sports Pub downtown with live music from Unity the Band and games hosted by 104.9 the X from 4:00 to 11:00 pm. For more event and ticket info, please check out their website.

In the spirit of Oktoberfest, we will be bringing a limited amount of full sized pretzel breads or Laugenbrots to the markets this weekend. And as is our tradition, we also bring back many of the market favorites to the last day. Here's the full menu: Drunken Hog (bacon & bourbon bread), Chocolate Porter, Black Sage, Jalapeño Cheddar, Cranberry Walnut, and Country White Sourdough. Though this list doesn't include every single flavor we have baked this summer, there are still Saturday mornings at the North End Market till the end of October to grab those other loaves.  

CSB Member Corner: First of all, thanks so much for signing up! I am excited and looking forward to our upcoming Blind Dates :) As soon as the sign-ups close tomorrow, you will be receiving a more detailed email regarding pick-up dates as well as info on the artisan bread baking class for those early birds who secured the spots. Please add baker@crustncrumbles.com to your contacts to ensure receipt of CSB-related correspondence.

Here, There, Everywhere.

This past weekend, we were so honored to have been a small part of a farm dinner held at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Preservation up in Spring Green, WI. In celebration of the famed architect's 150th birthday, this dining experience was one in a series of three scheduled for 2017 that was prepared by our dear friend, Jonathan Griffin, Executive Chef at Prairie Street Brewing Co. Jonathan is an amazing chef who is passionate about sourcing local, sustainable, and seasonal ingredients...and we are so thankful that he picked C&C to share this experience with [as well as sending over these beautiful event pictures above]. 

We also had another fun opportunity to share our love for good loaves with Rock Valley College students. Dr. Megan Pease, who is one of our regular customers, invited C&C to come talk about wild yeast baking and the slow fermentation process at her laboratory-based life science course, "Plants and Society." The class is intended to derive connections between different plants and their impacts on society as well as examining how various things are created from them. For instance, she had the students bake their own bread while discussing wheat and biological functions of yeast. Devin did an awesome job representing C&C while sharing his knowledge on sourdough bread baking.

While we are on the subject of classes, the special offer we were running on early CSB share sign-ups is now closed. The first 20 folks who signed up for the 12-week option have secured all the spots in our artisan bread baking classes for this rotation - to those of you who got in, class dates are TBD and we will send out scheduling info soon! You can still sign up for Oct-Dec shares until next Friday, September 29th at our booth or through our website. 

At the markets this weekend, we will have Country White, Cranberry Walnut, Olive Oil Semolina, Seven Seed Whole Wheat, Chocolate Porter, and Kalamata Olive loaves. Next Friday is the last City Market of the 2017 season - we are working up a big menu for it!

Community Supported Bakery ❤

On the eve of our last week's CSB program launch, a friend and mentor of mine forwarded us an article published on Civil Eats, a source that "provides critical thought about the American food system and aims to shift the conversation around sustainable agriculture in an effort to build economically and socially just communities." The article speaks about food waste that occurs in our country, grain products in particular - an estimated one-third of all the bread made in America is going to waste. This number boggles my mind...it is saddening to imagine the sheer amount of time, energy, and resources being discarded.

Within the core values of our company is the intent to do exactly what this article states. To always remember that "breaking bread remains a symbol of the shared labors involved, and of the necessity of our cooperation." That is one of the reasons, besides our incredibly supportive customers, that over the last 18 weeks of the market season, we have sold out every time. We make it a mission to carefully plan out our production so that the likelihood of waste along the breads' seed to stomach journey is minimized. More is not always better.

So far we have had such a positive response to our Blind Date with a Baker program over the last week and we were complimented on what a great concept it was. However, the CSB model is really not a new idea - many small bakeries such as ours that lack a retail outlet take this route, reach out for community support, and bake only the loaves that people have pre-ordered. The deadline for Oct-Dec shares is September 29th and if you're interested in signing up, you can do so at our market booth or you can click HERE to do it on our website.

Speaking of markets, this weekend we will be bringing back the "Everything Bagel" loaves alongside our regular fare. Though the North End market will continue on Saturday mornings all through October, there are just a couple of Friday night markets left. If you'd like us to bring back any of the specials we have had over the season for these last two nights, let us know!