I was in the middle of baking the poppy seed sourdough for tomorrow's Bake-Along when Ryan called. 📞"Dad, can you make me some garlic cheddar bread?" As if I had nothing else on my plate... I said yes. 😄 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ So here's how today actually went. 🎥 Filming all the stages of the poppy seed sourdough for the Academy ⚖️ Waiting on a new scale to arrive because the old one finally died this week, and yes... we had something of a funeral for it 💻 Working through my regular workday 🎙️ Prepping for Thursday's podcast with Dave, Counterculture with Dave and Henry 🍍 Folding a second dough using the pineapple juice starter from this week's experiment That's a lot of plates spinning. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ But here's the thing about real baking. It doesn't happen in perfect conditions with empty calendars and quiet kitchens. It happens between phone calls and deadlines... ...and a son who knows his dad won't say no to a request for fresh bread. 🧡 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🔥 I pulled these out of the oven five minutes before podcast showtime. 🧄 Garlic 🧀 Sharp cheddar 🌿 Fresh basil 🥖 And that beautiful sourdough crumb underneath Knotted. Brushed. Baked until the cheese caramelized at the edges. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Ryan got his bread. 🥖 The poppy seed loaf is resting. 🎙️ The podcast got recorded. 🍍 The pineapple juice starter is still pulling its weight. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ This is what "trust the process" actually looks like. Not pristine. Just consistent. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📖 The full recipe is now live on the Recipe Pantry: 👉 https://pantry.bakinggreatbread.com/recipes/garlic-cheddar-basil-sourdough-knots ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ✨ Perfection is not required. Progress is. ~ Henry ⭐🔥 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎓 This is a free resource for the members of Crust & Crumb Academy, built for bakers who come here not to get likes, but to get better. I am glad you have come to bake with us. 🧡