I made @Henry Hunter Sourdough Pretzels and they’re absolutely amazing!! Totally delicious and not a chore to mix and bake. You can find the recipe in the Pantry. Oh! They heat up well in the oven… 300*F for 20 minutes.

2 batches of 80% hydration dough, 5% inoculation, developed the structure in 2 hours, and bulk fermented to a 50% rise in 6 hours. All is good. May 13, 2026 High hydration experiments… 80% hydration at low inoculation, 5%, and room temperature bulk fermentation. I ended bulk fermentation when the dough had risen 50%. Ambient temperature is now 74°f. I’m in no rush because I’m not going to bake the dough today… so I can very patiently wait for Hank and his millions & millions of microbial buddies to work slower because Grandpa didn’t put them on their favorite heating pad. Hank was fed last night with cold tap water 1:2:2 with 50% High Gluten flour + 25% Whole Wheat flour + 25% Dark Rye flour. It was strong at 2:00pm when I mixed the 80% hydration batch above. However It’s now 4:00pm and he’s been at peak for a long time so he might be less powerful.🤷‍♂️ Batch B / 5% inoculation FORMULA: 100/80/2/5 Total flour 1200g 5% recipe: 2 loaves 725g High Gluten flour 315g AP flour 100g Whole Wheat flour 850g water… room temperature. Hold back 50g water to dissolve the salt during Fermentolyse 120g Hank 24g salt ———————- Total weight: 2184g 4:00pm: is when I started mixing. 4:09pm is when Hank was introduced to the flour. Mixed Fermentolyse ingredients and brought it to a shaggy mass. Dough temperature 81°f. Fermentolyse until 5:00pm. 5:00pm: add the salt and remaining water… mix with pincher and Rubaud methods… for about 3 or 4 minutes, until the dough becomes semi-cohesive with a smooth top skin. Dough temperature 81f. Cover mixing bowl with smaller mixing bowl. Rest until 5:30pm. 5:30pm: Do windowpane test - almost passed the test. Rest until 6:00pm, 2 hour final checkup. Dough temperature 80°f. 6:00pm: passed the windowpane test. I did a final coil fold just to gently realign the existing strands for Hank. Into oiled cambro - starting elevation before any rise had occurred, 4” from the bottom of the vessel. Dough temperature 79°f. Bulk ferment until the dough has risen 50% from its original height = 6”.

Not a metaphorical one. A real one. Sharp and layered and impossible to mistake. I'd wake before my eyes were fully open, before the house itself had stretched awake, and I'd already know what day it was. Shoe polish. That dark, waxy smell floated through the hallway before sunrise every Sunday morning of my childhood. My father sat at the kitchen table with yesterday's newspaper spread beneath his shoes, working the polish into the leather with slow circles of an old cloth rag. My grandfather had done the same thing. And eventually, so did I. There was something sacred about the rhythm of it. The scrape of the chair legs across the linoleum. The soft cough of the AM radio in the background. My father clearing his throat while the coffee perked nearby. Nobody spoke much that early. The house communicated in sounds and smells instead. And from the oven came the biscuits. Not the canned kind. Not the kind that pop open with a cardboard sigh. These were my mother's biscuits. Flour dust still hanging in the kitchen light. Butter melting into layers before they even cooled enough to touch. You could smell the heat of them before you saw them. Warm flour. Browning butter. A faint sweetness from the coffee cake she baked almost every Sunday beside them. That smell wrapped around everything. The polished shoes by the door. The steam fogging the kitchen windows. The hiss of bacon grease snapping in the skillet. My church clothes hanging stiff and waiting on the bedroom door. Even now, decades later, if I catch the smell of shoe polish and hot biscuits in the same morning, time folds. I am sixteen again. Barefoot on cold linoleum. Rubbing sleep from my eyes. Hearing my father say, "Boy, you better get moving or your mother's gonna leave us both." And somewhere behind him, my mother laughing softly while opening the oven door, releasing a wave of heat and flour and butter into the air like a kind of blessing. Funny thing is, I don't remember many sermons from those Sundays.

🌾 Today's Spotlight goes to @Dianne Givens for baking her first einkorn sourdough using the new recipe and posting it in the Show-Off Feed. 👏🔥 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Here's why this one matters. Einkorn is one of the harder ancient grains for a beginner to handle. ⚠️ Low gluten tolerance ⚠️ Fast fermentation ⚠️ A dough that will not forgive an overworked hand It's the kind of bread that humbles experienced bakers, let alone someone tackling it for the first time. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Dianne paid attention. 🥣 She built her starter ⏱️ Watched her levain 📈 Respected the timing 🙌 Trusted the process And the crumb tells the story. Twenty hours after she posted, the thread is still pulling responses from the community. That's what happens when a baker shows real preparation and real discipline. People notice. People learn from it. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 👏 Dianne, well done. You set the bar high for first einkorn bakes. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ To everyone else... 👉 Go take a look. 👉 Ask her questions. 👉 Leave her a note. This is the kind of bake that lifts the whole room. 🧡 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ✨ Perfection is not required. Progress is. Henry ⭐🔥

I want to give you a real update on something I’ve been building, and then I want to tell you about something that happened to me today. The update first. I’ve been heads-down on a new course called From Oven to Market based on my book of the same name. It’s the course I’ve wanted to build for years: how to actually sell the bread you bake. Pricing. Packaging. Booth design. Customer connection. Scaling without burning out. Nine modules, a full recipe library built for selling, an AI tool that turns your story into a real website. The whole thing. It should have been finished last week. It is not finished. Life got in the way the way life does, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it is close. Very close. I am in the last stretch and I want you to hear it from me before I start announcing dates. Here is the part I really wanted to share with you today. A box arrived on my doorstep this morning from a member of our community. Carolyn Bajoie runs a cottage bakery in Baton Rouge called NANA’s Old Fashioned Teacakes. She sent me a sample of her work. I want to tell you what that unboxing was like, because it is exactly what I am teaching in the course. White shipping box. Weight in your hands. Open the flap and there is pink crinkle paper folded over the contents, not stuffed, folded. Pull it back and there is the first teacake in a clear sleeve with a white label, a little teapot logo, “NANA’s Old Fashioned Teacakes, Baton Rouge, LA,” phone number right on the label. Lift it out and there are three more stacks underneath, sleeved, tied, labeled. Stacked the way you stack things you are proud of. I had not eaten a single bite when I started writing this. I needed you to understand the experience of the box first, because that is the lesson. Customers eat with their eyes. The first impression is the package. The anticipation is part of the product. Carolyn understands this in her bones. I am going to feature her ( @Carolyn Bajoie ) in the course as a real example of what presentation looks like when somebody takes it seriously. I will also tell you the teacakes themselves are excellent. Soft, lightly sweet, the kind of recipe somebody has been making for years and refuses to change.