Sprouted Flour, the Next “Bread Revolution”

Written By Peter Reinhart

I’m finally back from two exciting adventures and hope to start a new series of postings, reporting from the new frontier of sprouted grain. This is just a brief one, which I will follow over the next few weeks with photos and more details. As mentioned in my last Peter’s Blog, I spent a week shooting the photos for my new book, The Bread Revolution. We did this at Central Milling in Petaluma, CA, where Nicky and Keith Giusto allowed us to use their bakeshop and facility to bake and to also set up an area to use as our photo “studio.” Paige Greene, our photographer, and her team of prop stylists and assistants, handled that side, while I baked 100 feet away with my assistant bakers and food stylists, Karen Shinto and Jeffrey Larsen. It was fun and also exhausting but my editor Melissa Moore, and art director, Katy Brown, were really pleased with the results. I’ll write more about the book and the photo shoot in upcoming posts.

 

When I got home I had a quick turnaround before heading to Atlanta for a two day workshop for the Bread Baker’s Guild of America (BBGA) on these very same breads. It was the first hands-on class featuring these new breads and it went really well, as 12 Guild members from all over the country and Canada gathered at Alon’s Bakery where Alon Balshon graciously allowed us to work in his bakeshop while still having to operate his very busy bakery cafe. I was beyond impressed with Alon’s, which is way more than a bakery. It’s more like a Dean & DeLuca on steroids, with a fabulous patisserie, chocolate shop, a large cheese and wine section, a coffee and espresso bar, prepared food and dining areas featuring soups, sandwiches, very impressive pizzas, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner — and also great bread! The place was packed with customers all day. Like I said, it was impressive and I’m amazed that Alon was able to also host our workshop while still running such a seamless operation. His head bread baker, Abdul Ousman, assisted us and the two day workshop went very smoothly. I’ll have more on this, also, in a future posting but I wanted to take this moment to thank Alon and Adbul for taking such good care of us. We produced a lot of sprouted breads, crackers, pizzas, and even pancakes (10 different products from the book) over the two days and sent everyone home with bags of these unique breads that everyone got to make.

So now I’m back home and immersed in the final editing stages of the book, which will take another 8 weeks of back and forth tweaks, caption writing, revisions, and fine tuning with my editor Melissa as we head to the finish line. I’ll continue to post here, as I come up for air, to explain more about the sprouted grain revolution, so check back from time to time. It never gets boring around here, that’s for sure.

More soon….

Peter