PANARY

Craft baking courses, wood-fired ovens, and consultancy

Newsletter 57 – Gift Vouchers, Christmas baking

by

Dear Panarians,

What a year. Covid this, that, and the other.

Covid 19 cancellations meant abandoning the Christmas cooking course, so I shall make up for that here, giving a peculiar little tip for mince tart makers who are rolling their pastry, and the Baker’s Topic will be my Christmas favourite – stollen.

Look at this photo of a lovely little gadget to set the thickness of anything you are rolling out. At this time of year it will be your short crust pastry for a batch of Christmas mince tarts.

Newsletter 57 - Gift Vouchers, Christmas baking 1
Perfect thickness for bottom of typical mince pie tin, 7 to 8 cm. wide

The tool is a depth gauge. The stem, or shaft, is a skewer, and the type here is simply a common bamboo one. At its blunt end, able to slide on it firmly, is the marker, set at the exact thickness that the pastry should be rolled to. For my mince pie bottoms that is between 2mm. and 3mm . (When I’m making croissants it is set at 6 mm.) That little blue marker is a plastic button, a piece of packaging that held bags on a stake. You can use anything provided it has a central hole that meets the diameter of your skewer.

After rolling to what you think is about the correct thickness, you plunge the marker vertically into the pastry. If there is a gap underneath the marker disc, you have rolled it out a little thin. If the marker disc leaves an indentation on the paste, it is a bit thick, and you need to roll it out more.

CALENDAR

Who knows, perhaps I shall again be forced to cancel the courses set down for early in the year, since many places seem to be heading for Tier 3 restrictions. Here’s hoping with the new Calendar:

January

February

March

Go to https://www.panary.co.uk/course-calendar-and-booking/

When you click on a course in Calendar, you are taken to it, with Booking facility on the right.

GIFT VOUCHERS

Nowadays more and more people give an experience or a course as a gift. Gift Vouchers are a great vehicle for this. Having chosen the broad area, the giver does not need to agonise over exactly which experience would suit best, since the choice is made by the recipient.

PANARY has gift vouchers as an entire category on the website. Visit it at

https://www.panary.co.uk/gift-vouchers/

That’s it Panarians, enjoy your Christmas cooking.

Paul

Newsletter 56 – Hot weather, students’ work, calendar, and working with stoneground flour

by

Monday, October 5, 2020

Dear Panarians,

After the dislocation of the lockdown period, it has been a pleasant change to have gone back to teaching again. Just small classes, only three students with me in the bakery.

That hot spell of weather in August, probably called a heatwave, was very trying for dough makers. When making large doughs, it was necessary to keep water buckets in the refrigerator overnight to have any hope of finishing the dough at a respectable temperature – in the low twenties, C, when the premises are so hot. The task is very difficult when the flour is so warm.

Newsletter 56 - Hot weather, students' work, calendar, and working with stoneground flour 2
20 litres of cold water, chilled overnight, for autolyse dough-making

Students’ Work

A Panarian named Richard Deverell wrote to me about his sourdough. Richard has been to a few courses, and recently he had his fellow class members spell bound when they found out what his job was. He is the Director of Kew Gardens. Clearly Richard had a fair-sized back garden for surviving the deprivations of the lock down period.

During lock down he wrote about his sourdough:

 “I have found that my bread rises well – first rise, and second proving in the baskets.  However, when I place the proved bed on the baking tray for cooking it sort of collapses – deflates – and thus my loaf is not as airy and risen as I would like.  What am I doing wrong?”  

I offered advice on the leaven as follows, ” If it lives in the fridge I would feed it at least twice before breadmaking, to get it first acclimatised then growing to full strength. The feed that precedes breadmaking should be timed so that at the point at which you want to do the dough making it must be ripe and bubbly. 

Newsletter 56 - Hot weather, students' work, calendar, and working with stoneground flour 3
Richard Deverell looaves

After discussing adequate kneading, and the full ripening of the final leaven, I concluded my advice –  “The subsequent collapse is probably straight-forward over-proof, meaning too long in the basket.”

Richard sent photos of improved sourdough loaves. Here they are:

Newsletter 56 - Hot weather, students' work, calendar, and working with stoneground flour 4
LLoyd Phillip’s sourdough loaf

Another student, Lloyd Phillips, wrote to say that since lockdown had begun and there was the terrible shortage of flour in the shops, he had begun using Stoate’s stoneground white, a flour that he would have previously only used when he came to his PANARY course.

Here is his loaf

Calendar

October

November

December

March 2021

Devon Residential

Now that I no longer hold the residential course in the vineyard in Provence, for students who are looking for a long bread course I can recommend this 4-day course in Devon. Regarding Covid modifications the number of students is maximum 5.

To look at it, go to:

https://www.panary.co.uk/craft-baking-courses/4-day-bread-baking-course-devon/

Good baking Panarians, from Paul

Baker’s Topic

Stoneground flour, in the vast field of flour milling, is a niche product. Although it is putting the clock back, there is an explanation for why it has not simply died out, and that explanation is found in its inherent nutrition. The stone-grinding process retains an admirable amount of vitamins …

Learn more

That’s it, Panarians.

Good baking, Paul

Newsletter 55 – Covid 19 update, calendar, kugelhopf

by

July 7, 2020

Dear Panarians,

I write to announce PANARY is back in business. Your teacher is calling you back to the fold. Although, with all that lock down baking being done throughout the land, I hope you haven’t all become burnt out.

Newsletter 55 - Covid 19 update, calendar, kugelhopf 5
Masked up, attending to the croissants – as students see on 1-day French course

With the easing of lock down restrictions and the social distancing reduced to one metre plus, the classroom bakery at PANARY is ready for you – only 3 at a time. The website has been altered to say that maximum class size is only 3 students. There will be attention to hand hygiene and I am requesting students to bring face covering. With these safety features coupled to a careful approach to distancing, I am confident we can resume breadmaking courses in safety and style. Only four of us will be in the room – it can certainly be called a tutorial atmosphere.

When lockdown occurred, the courses postponed from March to be rescheduled for July have now almost sold out, with just one place left on Sourdough, July 25th.

I recommend to you the calendar for the rest of the year given below.

The Baker’s Topic in this newsletter features a bread from one of these courses: kugelhopf, as taught on the Nordic-Germanic course.

CALENDAR

JULY

AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

Good baking, Panarians.

With best wishes for your health and safety,

Paul

Newsletter 54 – Covid 19 interruption, the baguette….

by

Tuesday April 7th, 2020

Dear Panarians,

This newsletter will find you in your homes, undergoing various forms of “lockdown”.

Covid 19 has caused the postponement of all my courses for April-May-June. By the middle of July, however, I am hoping that our lives will have resumed some normal patterns, and on the strength of that hope I am setting a full programme for the second half of the year. See the new Calendar below.

For the Baker’s Topic here I had the mischievous urge to write about the quirky behaviour of sourdough bacteria, thinking it was a topic that chimed well with the current world absorption with another infamous little microbe. But since a virus is not bacteria I have moved on to a more sensible topic. In each of the next few newsletters I shall compose a topic that deals with an interesting facet, or a recipe, from several of the forthcoming courses that had to be postponed.

Click here to view the BAKER’S TOPIC – the baguette

CALENDAR  – the second half of the year

July 2020

August 2020

September 2020

October 2020

November 2020

December 2020

That’s it. Good baking Panarians.  Paul

PANARY Mailing List

PANARY - Teaching Breadmaking Since 1997
For baking tips and special offers.

Contact PANARY

To contact Paul Merry, or speak with him, please ring +44 (0)1747 851102, email using ,  or visit our contact page.