👋 We’ve got a lot of new faces in the Academy this week, and the Saturday bake-along is coming up fast. If you’ve never done one before, here’s what to expect. If you’ve been around a while, this is a good refresher to share with someone you’ve been trying to pull in. Here’s how it works. 📅 The recipe for the week gets announced on Monday, and we post about it throughout the week. Teaching posts, technique breakdowns, reminders, prep tips. By the time Saturday rolls around, you’ve already got everything you need to bake with confidence. 🥖 This week it’s Rustic Italian Ciabatta. 👉 Recipe here: https://pantry.bakinggreatbread.com/recipes/rustic-italian-ciabatta ☀️ Saturday morning around 8:00 AM ET, I open a dedicated thread right here in the community feed. That thread becomes the living room for the day. Everyone gathers there. Photos of dough in progress, questions, wins, struggles, troubleshooting, side conversations. All of it happens in one place. 🚫 You don’t need a Zoom link. You don’t need to log in anywhere else. You don’t need to RSVP. You just show up in the feed. You’ve got three ways to participate: 🔥 Bake with us live. Some folks start Friday night, some start midday Saturday. It doesn’t matter when you begin. The group pace gives you a built-in rhythm and you can jump in wherever you are in the process. 🕐 Bake at your own pace. Some members have other commitments and don’t finish until Sunday. Some bake Monday. Doesn’t matter. Post your bake whenever you finish and you’ll still get eyes on it and feedback. 👀 Just watch. A lot of first-timers do this one. Read the thread, watch how people handle each step, see what questions come up, see what the dough looks like at different stages. That’s how you learn the rhythm before you ever touch flour. There’s no minimum participation requirement. 💬 Any questions about how it works, drop them below. No question is too basic. Henry ⭐🔥

PROBLEM; The recipe says to add butter in increments while the mixer is running. I do - and the glob of soft butter ends up adhered to the inside wall of the bowl and doesn’t incorporate. I stop the mixer and scrape the butter down. Maybe twice until it finally gets caught up in the mixing process. Add another portion of butter and the process repeats. Grrrrrrr! 😩 SOLUTION: I’ve learned to stop my mixer and smear the soft butter over the top of my dough. Turn the mixer back on and it incorporates nicely. Repeat with each addition of butter. It’s a small change in process but works very well. 😎

From the the Carbohydrates Sourdough Anonymous Team. @Gaylord Foreman @Deborah Karaban @Stacey Avraham I had a special request from my Dear Friend @Deborah Karaban for all of us to put our 2 cents in how not to eat too many of our delicious carbohydrates sourdough breads and discard baking. Besides exercising to lose weight and consuming less. What are your suggestions it will be greatly appreciated. For those of us all watching our figures to me, it is always portion control and eating in moderation. @Henry Hunter

I’ve been seeing a lot of videos on TikTok especially about plastic bowl scrapers getting frayed on the ends and leeching plastic into the food. Of they’re selling what they say is a better scraper. So it made me think about is what they say true about the plastic bits getting into the food. May I ask, what type of scraper(s) do you have and use most often? What is your opinion on the plastic leeching into the food?