Kneading Conference Testimonial
By Mary Burr
I have attended the Skowhegan Kneading Conference for the past two years and with each event I have come away more convinced that artisan bread baking has to reach a wider audience for several reasons: health; reconnecting with the soil; grain varieties to flour; how to use multi grains; firing techniques and recipes.
We have become so dependent on commercial bread that we have forgotten the art of home baking and with artisan bakeries scarce in small towns and rural areas, we have become complacent with how we feed our bodies. Bread, in its many forms is a staple of life and if we can reconnect with the nutritional value of good bread, we can improve our physical well being.
Understanding the connection between a healthy soil and the resulting growth of a nutrient rich product born from the earth, we can better understand the interconnectedness of body, food, earth.
The Kneading Conference reawakens this interconnectedness and in addition teaches us how to use the variety of grains and flours the way food was an inherent part of every-day life historically before the convenience of fast food overtook our ‘modern’ culture.
I can’t say enough about the importance of the Kneading Conference. I just wish kneading conferences would become part of the main stream and be taught nation wide.
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You can help the Kneading Conference with your vote!
0 Comments | Posted by admin in Fundraising, Kneading Conference, News
| Bangor Savings Bank is giving away $100,000 to Maine non-profit organizations and with your vote, the Kneading Conference could be one of the winners!If we win we can provide scholarships to farmers who want to restore sustainable grain cultivation to Maine. When grains are grown here at home, Maine residents are assured of a wholesome staple regardless of the fluctuations of the global marketplace.
Plus, eating local grains is a great way to nourish the body and nourish local economies at the same time. Your vote will help us help the Maine farmers who grow Maine’s food! All you need to do is follow the link: Bangor Savings website and scroll down to “CAST YOUR VOTES”. Enter your contact information and scroll down to “CENTRAL”, select “OTHER” and write in “Heart of Maine Kneading Conference”. The deadline for voting is March 2nd, it only takes a moment, so please take a moment right now. The winner with the most votes in each region will receive $5,000. The fourth annual Kneading Conference, July 29th and 30th, will bring 25 presenters from around the country to Skowhegan to lead workshops on sustainable grain cultivation and milling, artisan bread baking, and earth oven construction. Please vote and pass our message on to friends. Thank you from all of us on the Steering Committee. |
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Grains in Maine
0 Comments | Posted by admin in Bread Fair, Bread Making, Grain, Kneading Conference
Grains Grown in Maine
by Dusty Dowse, Coordinator, Maine Artisan Bread Fair and Kneading Conference Steering Committee
Maine agriculture is back in the ascendant. After decades of decline, most notably in the potato growing industry, things are turning around. Old farms and fields are coming back into production, and a new generation of farmers is headed back onto the land. In part, this is a result of the rush to grow corn for biodiesel and ethanol. But that is only one facet of what is happening. There is a major trend towards truck farming, with special emphasis on organic produce. Fields once planted to a corn/potato rotation are now being used for vegetables sent to local farmers’ markets and even supermarkets.
The key is the word local. Given the cost of transportation of foods on one hand, and the quality of locally-grown foodstuffs on the other, changes in consumer attitudes is creating a strong trend. This has obvious implications for baked goods, and in addition to the superior quality of local breads, the “Village Baker” is in position to emphasize as much as possible locally grown grains in his or her product.
The good news continues! These locally-grown grains are less likely to be highly inbred commercial strains as grown in monoculture by massive Midwestern agribusinesses. Seed from around the world that has been selected over generations for unique flavor, disease resistance, and an ability to succeed in Maine’s harsh climate is increasingly favored by small Maine grain producers. Besides being in the interest of the consumer in terms of flavor and nutrition, these grains help farmers by reducing fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide usage. The decreasing genetic diversity of crop varieties driven by agribusiness is cited as a major threat to our agricultural base. Enlightened choice of seed, driven by real economic benefits, is a clear trend in the right direction. The Kneading Conference is taking a pivotal role in education, training, seed exchange, and market research to help Maine farmers, millers, and flour wholesalers gain ground.
Jeffrey Hamelman accepted our invitation to be one of two keynote speakers at the 2010 Kneading Conference. This is great news!
Jeffrey Hamelman has been a baker since 1976. He is an employee-owner of the King Arthur Flour Company in Norwich, Vermont, where he is director of the production bakery and instructor of the professional baking classes at the King Arthur Flour Baking Education Center. In 1998 he became the 76th Certified Master Baker in the U.S. He is the author of Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes.
“From July 9th through July 11th I experienced a second childhood of sorts: I spent three days at King Arthur Flour in Norwich, Vermont working to master classic french breads with twelve other bread aficionados (professional bakers and avid amateurs) under the tutelage of the center’s director and master baker, Jeffrey Hamelman, and James MacGuire, author and master baker. It was, as I related to them afterwards, summer camp for adults who like to play with dough. I hadn’t had such fun since I was a camp counselor at a YMCA camp in Rhode Island forty years ago this summer!”Larry Kilbourne, after a King Arthur Flour class with Jeffrey Hamelman, July 2009
We are delighted that he will be joining us in Skowhegan next summer.
A personal note regarding Jeffrey’s acceptance:
I haven’t met Jeffrey except via email. His note in response to our invitation was laced with humor and good will. And so it is surprising that reading it loosened a buried memory of the first person who taught me how to make bread. She was Swedish, old, or seemed so to a 6 year old, and lived in a small house on the side of a hill in our Oregon neighborhood. She was big on glower, short on conversation, and running on empty when it came to hugs. But she was on full when it came to knowing about things made by hand, especially bread, but also rag rugs and fresh berry pies. Half her height, I remember her as a force wrapped in a patterned dress, her planted feet and legs the fulcrum for her moving arms and hands. I especially remember her hands, square, smooth, sure, and always at work.
Looking back I would guess that she chose bread making for the focus, for the long slow burn on her muscles that must have soothed the long slow burn on what as a grown-up I would recognize for what it was: her personal trove of anger. Always there, stashed under the surface, a steady fuel that produced perfect loaves of bread.
She taught me how to change bread from blunt ingredients into aroma, texture, flavor, and sustenance. At some point during those umpteen hand-to-dough pummelings, the ones I watched mesmerized at her elbow, I suspect the tables turned: the dough body stopped holding back, took over the reins, and became the active half, handing her resiliency, aliveness, and the gift of satisfaction. I didn’t know it then, what does a child really know, but she passed forward to me those gifts from seed, air, time, and yeast. Good, delicious, hand-made bread. As good a substitute for a hug as ever there was.
Her memories from another country and time turned into my memories. They stand out as a foundation for so much that later gave shape to moments of meaning: food from scratch, food as a gift, food made for the coming together of family and friends.
About Jeffrey. He has a reputation for making perfect loaves of bread. In that way, only in that way, he resembles my bread mentor. I am eager to hear how his regard for the bread arts diverges from my memory of a long ago master of the craft.
Wendy
Coordinator, the Kneading Conference
12/29/09
Eggnog entirely lifted from Alton Brown on the Food Network except for use of the word raw:
6 – 7 cups
Ingredients:
4 egg yolks (we visited the hens over Thanksgiving, roaming around in their new barn home, full of their own importance and bursting with urgent stories)
1/3 cup fine-grain raw sugar, + 1 TBS.
1 pint whole raw milk (ours comes from Grassland Farm in Skowhegan – delicious)
1 cup heavy cream (Butterworks Farm Jersey cream…local enough)
3 oz. bourbon or rum
1 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg
4 egg whites
Directions:
Beat the egg yolks well. Add 1/3 cup sugar and beat until completely dissolved. Add milk, cream, liquor, and nutmeg.
Beat egg whites to soft peaks. Gradually add 1 TBS. sugar and beat until stiff peaks form.
Whisk the egg whites into the mixture. Chill and serve.
Alton offers a cooked version but we know where our eggs come from and washed them carefully without problems.
‘Tis the season to be merry and in this house that means rolled up sleeves, homemade eggnog, and good friends gathered in the kitchen, nattering away and breathing in the profound aromas of freshly ground whole grain stollen and gingerbread . If the breads are stunning delicious, recipes will follow.
December is the month of reflection. The Kneading Conference Steering Committee has come to one of those peak-of-the-mountain moments that provide a view in both directions: now in its fourth year, we can look back in order to look ahead and ask the question: where to now?
The mission of the Conference only grows stronger: to help individuals and communities bring back the agrarian traditions of locally grown and milled grains and the artisan breads shaped from them. In our perfect scenario, those breads are baked in a wood-fired oven. Checking attendance records from the past three years, we are aware that our mission is picking up collateral steam from the national local food movement and also looking back, we know that part of what makes the Conference fun and meaningful is the fact that it is relatively small and intimate. Teachers and participants mingle easily during meals and between sessions, swapping advice and comparing experiences.
This is part of what makes the conferences a great pleasure for us, too, and worth working hard to bring to life every July. Looking forward, and keeping thoughts of scale foremost in our minds, we are exploring options. We are motivated by the idea of including ever more people in the powerful pleasures and purpose of home-grown loaves. Two ideas contributed by many of you suggest ways to grow without compromising the quality of the experience:
- add workshops during other times of the year, especially favored by farmers whose harvest season conflicts with the July date, and
- purchase a Kneading Conference portable Le Panyol wood-fired oven to take the show on the road, in particular to local schools and factories.
FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN
To fund our growth we are launching our first annual fundraising campaign. We have marked $30,000 as our goal which is a lot, but not that much if many of us can put something toward it. Please make a contribution if you can; your dollars are greatly appreciated and they are tax deductible through the 501c3 sponsorship of Heart of Maine Resource Conservation and Development. You may like to become a corporate sponsor which says good things about your company! Please check out the “Give” button on the website.
In the meantime, Bon Pain! as Julia might have said.
Wendy
