3,200 Calories a Day

You might have noticed that I bake a lot of bread — so what do we do with all of it? We don’t have a huge family, I don’t give my bread to neighbors or sell it, and I don’t throw it away after I test a new oven. And I don’t have a crazy high carb diet.

Baking has been a hobby that I have enjoyed for years. I bought a copy of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice in 2001, which really got me hooked on artisan bread. It was Peter’s wonderful book that led me to build my first brick oven, which led to Forno Bravo. Fun. For me, FB was the intersection between two of my hobbies — bread baking and building (I’ve done 10 large home building projects over the past 20 years).

Today I have a new symbiotic intersection. Baking and eating. Leading up to a race, I run about 80 miles a week, so in order to maintain my weight, I need to eat roughly 3,200 calories a day. So eating lots of healthy homemade bread works out really well.

Here are yesterday’s baguettes finishing up in a prototype oven.