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Josey Baker

Baker

in baker, food

Who are you, and what do you do?

I am Josey Baker and I bake bread.

What hardware do you use?

One of the things I love about baking bread is that you get to use toys of all shapes and sizes. There's small stuff like scales, buckets, tubs, thermometers, knives, but then there's the big stuff, like ovens and mills. In my new bakery I just got my oven installed from Italy. The sucker weighs in at a whopping 20,000 pounds! We had to put reinforcements in the floor, so it wouldn't sink into the Earth.

Also, I just got my flour mill, all the way from Austria. It is mostly made of wood, but at the heart of it are two humongous circular stones, which actually do the grinding of the grains. I am so unbelievably stoked about all of this, I cannot even begin to tell you.

And what software?

As for software, we could take this in a few directions. There are the various grains I use to make bread, which is a whole world I am just starting to really delve into. That's one of the reasons I am so excited to have my own mill - I will get to do all sorts of experiments with different types of flour. Flour made from whatever the heck I want, things like buckwheat, rye, barley, oats, corn, not to mention the thousands of different varieties of wheat out there.

But then there's also the formulas I use in order to make my bread. The more I bake the more detail oriented I become about this stuff, taking care to keep extremely detailed notes, measuring things precisely, and I feel like every time I bake I am learning so much.

Get this - one of the most relaxing things I can do is to go over my humongous spreadsheet that has all of my recipes, and tweak, refine, evolve it.

What would be your dream setup?

I am about to have it! I am building a bakery cafe with the amazing folks from FourBarrel Coffee, and once it is done I will have my dream bakery inside of a cafe that's run by some of the most generous, knowledgeable, and badass people I know. I'll have a stone mill I use to make all of my whole grain flours, I will have a huge oven I can use to bake 100 loaves at once, and I will get to hang out in a cafe all day. Doesn't really get much better than that.