My dear friend Hal Walker has the ability to make music with just about anything. He is a highly skilled pianist and harm0nica player and is always exploring new instruments and ways of making music. He leads a church choir and teaches music of all varieties as an artist in residence and wandering minstrel. It is great to see him in action on his new website playing BANAKULA. Check it out.
I am pleased to announce my first baking workshop in Canada. Come and join me if you can.
I attended the Rudolf Steiner Institute in Massachusetts this summer where Nick Thomas guided a group of 20 of us in a two week journey into the realms of Projective Geometry. Nick led us on an elementary and quite mind bending exploration of the potential for this branch of mathematics, of which Euclidean Geometry is a mere subset. What is so fascinating is that Nick is researching how “tension” between this geometry and Euclidean (conventional) geometry can be a helpful way of understanding gravity, the apparent curvature of space and a host of other phenomena that physics is at pains to explain. It is both refreshing and exciting to experience a new approach to physics that is more comprehensible than super-string theory and quantum mechanics and that in a strange way makes sense. His work will bear fruit if other scientists are able to take it up and develop it further.
While I am not a research scientist, I have found over the years that thinking through elementary ideas in projective geometry has sharpened my ability for accurate imagination and has given me tools for better thinking through ideas connected with karma and reincarnation. I highly recommend it and Nicks latest book, Space and Counterspace, A New Science of Gravity, Time and Light. Here he develops a provocative new geometric basis for physics based on the work of Rudolf Steiner, George Adams and Lawrence Edwards – Excellent work!
My long time friend Yoram has been working on a website to help people assess their carbon footprint and work towards limiting their impact on the environment. This is an exciting bit of social-environmental webware. Pay him a visit at:
http://www.carbonsalon.net/
Jennifer Muller
Today at 6:20am
Hi Warren, I hope you are well. Your daughters look beautiful! I have been enjoying your bread cookbook but wanted to ask you a question about spelt. I used your recipe but cut out the white flour as I was trying to make it with just spelt. However, it wasn’t done on the inside when it should have been, and I noticed that the spelt just keeps taking in more and more water when kneading it. Do you have any suggestions for making just spelt bread with no other flour or do you always suggest using white or wheat with it? Thanks!
Today at 7:20pm
Hello jennifer,
Greetings to ol’ England. We are in sunny Canada and the girls are asleep – almost…
Always nice to talk about bread!
Baking with all spelt is nice and flavourful. As there is so little gluten to make the dough stiff, I tend to work it quite wet in the mixing bowl and kneed it as best I can in the bowl. it does not need as much kneading. then I put it in loaf tins and bake it as usual. If it is raw in the inside, then you could try baking it longe at a slightly cooler termperature.
Good Baking,
Warren
We’ve landed and set up house in Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto in Ontario, Canada. Our garden is filled with wild flowers and large patches of raspberries. I am directing the Teacher Education Program at the Rudolf Steiner Centre Toronto. Luciana is knitting up a storm and taking care of our lovely little girls.
The sourdough starter made the long journey from England to Brazil and at last to Canada. It was a bit sluggish at first, but soon sprung back to life. And the wheat, the hard Canadian wheat is a pleasure to work with, much more elastic than what I had grown used to in England. Tomorrow I am going to consult on my first new bread oven project. A workshop is soon to follow.
A brave group of 18 oven builders gathered at Taurus Crafts to build two bread ovens in one weekend! The first oven was a quickly built ”festival oven” that we fired up on the very same day we built it. We dried it completely on the second day and made delicious pizza in it. This oven had walls about 4 inches thick with neither door nor chimney and stood on a temporary and mobile plinth.
The second oven was crafted to last with a collaboratively sculpted exterior, oaken door and oven walls about twice as thick. This oven will work well for both pizza and many loads of loaf bread and had all of our creative energies pressed into its outer shell. Many thanks to the fine folks at Taurus Crafts who helped organize this exciting weekend. Participant comments are included below the photographs.
Dear Warren,
I want to say a very belated thank you for your wonderful course at Taurus Crafts . I was completely blown away by your heartfelt approach. You really communicated your passion and deep understanding of bread making, which has helped me return to my baking ready to (tentatively) abandon my recipes and start feeling my way into the unknown. I’m going to suggest the current class 3 maybe helps build an oven in our garden.
Another participant who went home to build another bread oven commented:
Hi Warren — here are the photos — We had a really great day doing it – superb weather – good friends and several now want to build their own — and we are the experts!!!
Many thanks for your inspiration.
Here are a few pictures (thanks to Wendy Cook) from our conference and workshop together at Embercombe in Devon. Together we focused on the evolution of human nutrition and its connection with human consciousness. And of course we got our hands in the dough and baked some beautiful loaves in their wood-fired oven.
Thought you might like to know we are baking regularly again, have spread your starter far and wide, and my daughter Mel ran a workshop recently ; unexpectedly Brian Goodwin and Cristel came and Mel taught Brian to bake – he had never done it before and threw himself into the tactile aspect, finding it very satisfying!
I hope you and your family enjoy your travels. Thankyou again for the workshop.
Love, jenny
A group of us came from England to Fabrizio Rossi’s beautiful villa in southern Italy. Each day we baked bread in the old bread oven built into the side of the villa. Then in the afternoons we each worked on one painting for the whole stay. We painted in stages that reflected the process of transformation that the bread goes through from milling, mixing with water, kneading, allowing time to rise, kneading and shaping and at last baking in a fiery oven. Each step is another process of transformation that turns simple substances into life sustaining and enahancing nourishment.
