Grainville Food Project

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Grainville Food Project

A food project based on baking, fermentation, and seasonality. We sell bread and things to put on bread, as well as some pastries.

Our business is focused on things somewhere between the farm and the kitchen.

08/11/2023

Oh the struggles I’ve had trying to get some loaves going again. The mistake of a baker is thinking they’ll understand notes and recipes in the future. After playing around with some lower protein flours, and getting absolute flops, I finally decided to go with some high gluten/ high absorbent flours. The dough strength was definitely there this time, but you can see that the proof could’ve been pushed. I’m thinking I’ll need to bump my starter’s feed schedule back to twice a day. Even with the larger holes, most of the dough has a tight structure. This is often referred to as “fool’s proof”, where air trapped during shaping is mistaken for proper fermentation. I think this has really shown me how much of baking is habitual and relies on repetition and familiarity. Hoping to get those reps in and start selling some loaves again. See you soon.

21/03/2023

I think I’ve given up on trying to convince my neighbors I’m not crazy. My front yard is overgrown with stalks a few feet tall. Landscapers come knock on my door asking if I want a fresh mow. I always pause and wonder if I should explain myself when my “No” gets a weird look. Telling someone, “Oh that’s not grass, it’s rye” isn’t quite true because, well, it is just grass.
I feel like a broken record talking about the romance of wheat and other grains. All I did was throw old rye berries in my front yard, thinking it might make decent ground cover or bird feed. Come mid February though and the shoots were already a foot high, much quicker to rise than the rest of my yard. Now towards the end of March, their seed heads are finishing and stalks yellowing. It’s a mess no doubt, but I have moments of appreciation for such a tiny plot of growth and life—seeing why we all chose grass like this to finally plant our feet so long ago.
With just a bit of extra labor, I could winnow, dry, mill, hydrate, mix, and bake the seeds into a much easier form to recognize. Nature did their part and provided me with the materials. All I would need now is to pick what to do with it. How miraculous.

09/01/2023

Eggs are not only integral to baking but to cooking as well. Their rich source of protein and fat, emulsifying power, and ability to hold air make them a kitchen workhorse. Chickens are an integral supporter of its industry at every stage- whose body will be used before birth and after death. In the cafe I work at, we use some 900 eggs a week. A single chicken lays about an egg a day. While it’s unlikely 900 chickens laid these, such an number would require over 2 acres of laid to be certified “pasture raised” and could produce some 6,300 eggs a week. That’s a productive lot of chickens. These chickens, however, would need about 1,600lbs of feed and 1,000 gallons of water a week to stay happy. Now that’s a hungry lot of chickens. While chickens can be an important part of a ecologically focused farm, it’s worrisome to think of the struggles of supporting such a hungry demand. Wether you support industrial farming or not, an improved version of this production at scale will need to be designed sooner than later if we want to sustain the normalcy of our foods.

13/11/2021

Recuperating. What a long past few months. I’m going to sit and think and be back soon. In the meantime, please support local food and fair wages.

Sandor Katz - “ And it takes a village to produce food. Many hands make light work, and good production often gives rise to specialization and exchange. And even more than food in general, fermented foods—especially beverages—play a significant role in community building. Not only are many feasts, rituals, and celebrations organized around products of fermentation (such as bread and wine), ferments are also among the oldest and most important of the foods that add both value and stability to the raw products of agriculture, essential to the economic underpinning of all communities. The brewer and the baker are central participants in any grain-based economy; and wine transforms perishable grapes into a stable and coveted commodity, as does cheese for milk.”

30/09/2021

Milling rye flour for my pop up this Saturday.
I don’t think I’m a good baker. I think I can make a really good loaf of bread- if not quite a few- but I’m not a good baker; they’re two different things. I’m terrible at getting up early, I forget ingredients and have to fix recipes in a scramble, and I typically make those recipes far too complicated than necessary. But the extreme fascination I get from making bread each week always keeps me going. I’m always reminded just how inorganic bread making actually is, especially today, when few people know what the grains look like that their bread is made of. Human intervention comes at every step from the field to the loaf. It takes so much manipulation and yet a constant silent understanding. So next time you get a loaf of bread, please don’t complain about the price. It should be far more expensive. Please just thank your baker for their hard work and sacrifice and thank the hundreds of hands involved in just making a single loaf of bread.

28/09/2021

Looks okay I guess

16/09/2021

Bread is straight up, just hard work. It’s time intensive and time sensitive. It’s precise calculations and quick judgments and educated predictions. It’s a silent conversation in another language. I’ve thought about doing Grainville for the better part of 4 years and the fact that I’m here making 36 loaves for market feels surreal. The feeling isn’t exactly happiness and sometimes I have to remind myself to be satisfied. I can pick myself apart so easily and force myself through guilt to do better. I want people to eat the products I make and feel a part of that silent conversation. Blood, sweat, and many tears have gotten me to what is essentially the starting line. Lately I’ve been full of frustration and anger and I need to take a breath. I hope everyone else can take a breath with me and sit a second with no distractions to let the world dissolve away if only for a minute.
Last week I discovered it’s pronounced Sans Soosea and it’s French for “without worry”

14/09/2021

First bags in about 2 years went about as well as I expected 😂 baguettes can be pretty process driven and getting them to fit in your bake schedule while fresh and proofed correctly is arguably way more challenging than shaping, but I’ll get there. Gotta turn up the temp too. Swipe for wonky boi crumb shot.
25% whole wheat, 25% liquid levain, 0.1% yeast, 1 hour bulk, 14 hour cold proof, preshape 1 hour, 1.5 hour final proof

10/09/2021

Hard to stay humble when you just kill it

05/09/2021

Crumb shot from previous post. I’ve got merch that’ll be posted to the site soon! Stickers, shirts, and bags!

03/09/2021

i like bwed & dont worry i also touched every loaf all over too

30/08/2021

I ordered these ovens nearly 6 months ago- before I even formed my llc. They’re the last piece of the puzzle to arrive and I can finally start working like a real bakery. This new oven means almost 4x my previous production and opens up a lot of more products I can make. Free-form loaves are the first to get going then I’ll work on things like baguettes and sandwich breads. Beyond stoked.

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29617

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