Recently I have been getting frequent messages online with requests for good gift ideas for bakers. If you are gifting to an aspiring or hopeful baker, you may want to start them out with my book for beginners and it’s accompanying techniques video class and head over here to my basic materials and tools list. However for this list, I will assume that we are talking about what an established baker (aka me!) might love for Christmas. !. A giant tub of Maldon Sea Salt Flakes! These are my favorite flaky sea salt for sprinkling on the top of focaccia, or on top of chocolate chip cookies just befo ..read more

I get a lot of questions from followers who are looking to make the transition from hobby weekend bread bakers to a small cottage food operation. ( A cottage food operation is a licensed small business that is allowed to be conducted from a home kitchen). I thought I would go over a few of my recommendations on how to setup a workspace for baking at home. Keep in mind that my workspace as it is now has been built one piece at a time over the past 6 years. I started out baking in my home oven with 2 dutch ovens, using my kitchen table as a work surface. I didn’t have many resources so I had to ..read more

One of the more common questions I get on social media from new bread bakers is about which tools are absolutely essential to get started. Here are my recommendations: A digital kitchen scale. We often say that baking is a science, accuracy, and precision are important! Using a scale is a great way to eliminate errors in the measuring process and ensure your baking comes out great every time. All professional bakers use a scale (you won’t see them adding together hundreds of “cups” of flour to make a large batch of dough!) You can certainly get a cheaper scale, but there are a few reasons I ..read more

I am always surprised by how often I get asked this particular question! My customers that buy sourdough loaves at my bakery here in Central California often want to know how best to preserve their investment in good bread each week, and we would end up having a conversation about it on my porch (for me sometimes many times a day!). After my book Bread Baking for Beginners was published, I was suddenly the bread mom and fearless leader of a growing herd of brand new baby bakers. They also wanted to know how to best store their bread that they had invested their time, care, and high-quality ing ..read more

Baking with kids is always a good idea if you ask me. Here is an article I did for Parents Magazine in August 2019. I felt now would be a great time to archive it here so you all can access it too, and do some baking with your kids over your (possibly extended) spring break this year. If you don’t have my book yet and this little project inspires you to do more bread baking this year, you can find a link to my book and a thorough baking materials list here: www.alchemybread.com/book ..read more

I probably did more cooking, for more people (and for more of a social media audience for that matter) in 2019 than in any year prior. It was a year of branching out from my typical cooking style and repertoire of faithful recipes. Surprisingly, I did not have much of a learning curve with this, which I would attribute partially to experience in cooking, but more-so to the high quality of cookbooks I had to guide me this year. I thought I would share those with you here since I get many requests for recipes and cookbook recommendations. These books were not necessarily published this year, t ..read more

After much demand following the success of my first book, I finally started offering bread baking classes here at Alchemy Bread in September of 2019! As of this writing, we have put 12 sold out and incredibly fun classes in the books, with many more on the calendar for the future. My friend Marilyn was kind enough to drop in on one of my first classes and capture some beautiful photos. Enjoy this scrapbook, and consider joining us for a class! You can sign up for one in the shop, or if you don’t see an available class, sign up for my email newsletter, follow on facebook or on Instagram to keep ..read more