@Rose Johnson baked her very first sourdough loaf! She said she had been feeding her starter for months, but felt too frozen by the idea of baking to actually try. Then she did it. “It’s not perfect, but it actually looks like bread. The crust was singing. I could cry.” That’s the win right there. Not perfection. Progress. Rose, we’re proud of you. This is exactly what Crust & Crumb Academy is about. 🍞 ~ Henry⭐🔥

Pizza Saturday is almost here and I need to hear from you. If I know anything about this room, it’s that y’all are creative. So before Saturday rolls around, drop your toppings below. What’s going on your pie? Classic pepperoni? Pineapple (no judgment)? Something weird your grandmother used to make? I want to see it. Might steal an idea or two for my own. Henry ⭐🔥

Quick drop-by with the kind of stuff that doesn’t make it into the recipe but makes the difference between a good pizza and a great one. Save these for tomorrow. 🔥 Give your oven plenty of time. Crank it to max and let it preheat a full 45 minutes to an hour with the stone or steel inside. Not 10 minutes, not 20. The stone needs to be saturated all the way through. Heat from below is the whole game. 🍕No stone or steel? You’re still in business. Flip a heavy sheet pan upside down and preheat that the same way. A ripping hot inverted cookie sheet bakes a beautiful crust. Flour your peel well before you load it. Semolina or extra flour underneath the dough. Give the peel a quick test shake before you start adding sauce. If the dough slides freely, you’re good. If it sticks, lift an edge and dust more flour underneath. Fix it now, not later. 😬 Worried about the launch? Use parchment. Slide a piece of parchment paper under the dough, build the pizza on it, and launch parchment and all onto the stone. Pull the parchment out halfway through the bake when the crust has set. Zero stress. 🥫Less is more. Light sauce. Moderate cheese. Toppings spread out, not piled. Crowded pizza means soggy pizza, every time. You should still see cheese peeking through. 🧂Paint the bare rim. Right before launching, use your fingers or a brush to coat the bare dough edge with a thin layer of olive oil. Then a pinch of flaky salt or kosher salt. Three seconds of work. Turns a pale, bland crust into one that browns, blisters, and tastes like something. 🌿Hold the basil. Fresh basil goes on after the pizza comes out of the oven. If you put it on before, it burns to a brown spot. Tear it by hand and scatter it on the hot top. The residual heat wakes it up. 🔪Let it rest before slicing. Two minutes on a cutting board after it comes out. Lets the cheese set so it doesn’t slide off when you cut. Hard to wait, worth it. That’s it. Tomorrow’s gonna be fun. Henry ⭐🔥

While the rest of us were toasting seeds and fussing over hydration, Betsy was baking through a knee replacement she called “worse than childbirth.” She still got in the working thread. She still ran her own bake. And she caught a mistake I made on the recipe PDFs before anyone else did. Two files, both the same, sourdough version missing. Betsy spotted it. I corrected it. The room kept moving. That’s a baker. That’s a teammate. That’s the kind of presence this community runs on, and it usually doesn’t get a trophy because it doesn’t ask for one. Today it gets one. @Betsy Carey, thank you. For the catch. For the bake. For showing up when most people would have called it a rest day. The dough was lucky to have you this week, and so were we. Heal up. We’ve got you. Henry ⭐🔥

Thank you for indulging me. A few weeks ago, a man I have never met in person sent my son a song. His name is Nick. He runs a Skool community of his own called AI Storytellers, and he had been listening to me talk about Ryan, my javelin-throwing son, in the kind of way only proud dads do. Then @Nick Nebelsky did something most people would not have thought to do. He sat down and wrote five songs for Ryan. The one that landed was called Running in Light. When Ryan heard it, he did not say much. He just nodded the way he does when something moves him. A few days later, Ryan competed at the Duke Twilight, his final meet before NCAA Division II Nationals. He was throwing against professional athletes. He put on his headphones, listened to Nick’s song, and walked to the runway. He finished first among the collegiate athletes in the field. Nick wrote about it in his own community yesterday. He said that in the right hands, AI can take a father someone has never met and a son someone has never met and produce a gospel song that makes a family weep on a Sunday morning before the biggest meet of the year. He is right. That is not a parlor trick. That is craft, taste, and care, applied to a tool most people are still using to generate noise. I am sharing this with the Academy because Nick asked me to, but also because it belongs here. This community is built on the idea that real people, working with care, can make something good. Nick is one of those people. So are you. Thank you, Nick. You gave my son something to carry into the circle. That is a gift I will pass forward. The song: https://youtu.be/uirKj0Jqdm8 Faith. Focus. Finish. ~Henry ⭐️🔥 Below is the song and my thank you poster.