My friend, Missy, who I've been friends with since I was 5 years old has a younger sister, Megan. Today (Sunday) is Megan's baby shower and Missy has asked me to bake the bread for it. There was no way I'd pass up an opportunity to bake so much bread at once and I said yes without even thinking.
On Friday evening it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to go to Costco and stock up on supplies for all of this baking. Not because I didn't have oh-'bout 25 pounds of flour (and that's only counting bread flour) on hand to bake with but because I didn't want to have a low supply after all of this baking. Saturday morning I dragged Rick to Costco to heave the 50 pound bag of flour into the cart and car. After lunch I thought it was time to get organized.
Here is my Master Plan for Massive Baking:
Looks impressive, doesn't it? Let me assure you that it's not. At all. Let's talk about the Master Plan.
Left Hand Paper: This paper contains the list of breads I'll be baking. At the baby shower, they will be having a lunch meat tray as well as pasta dishes. Missy had not given me any real direction for what exactly she wanted so I was left to come up with the 'bread menu' on my own. I divided into two types: Rolls for Sandwiches and Breads for Pasta. Not everyone will want to have a sandwich but they might like a bit of bread and butter with their pasta.
As an aside, do you think it's wrong of me to bring my own extra virgin olive oil? Not for like everyone--but for me and the bread I plan on eating. Missy and her fellow shower-planners would no more think of providing olive oil anymore than I would think of changing the oil in my car myself. A teeny tiny flask of herb-infused olive oil? No? That would be a bit tacky? Darn it.
Now the left hand paper also contains some other information. Roughly how many rolls/loaves each recipe will make, if they require a pre-ferment, total of mixing/shaping/rising times and baking times. Also, there's a not-quite-a-chart of what bakes at various temperatures.
Middle Paper: This paper shows what order I'll be baking in. It's easier to heat the oven than cool the oven, so I have determined that I will a) Bake the things that require the lowest temperature first and b) At set temperature, bake the things that take the longest to cool first. Does that make sense?
For example: Potato Rosemary Bread and Kaiser Rolls both bake at 400 so they will be baked after the regular and onion rolls that bake at 375. The Potato Rosemary bread is baked in a loaf shape and that takes longer to cool than a slew of Kaiser Rolls so that will be baked before the Kaiser Rolls. Got it?
I have determined that I want everything to be finished baking by 10 am so that I have time to de-flour myself and get ready for the baby shower. The Middle Paper also lists what time each item MUST go in the oven to bake AND allows roughly ten minutes in between each item to give the oven time to get back to the appropriate temperature.
Right Hand Paper: This is where it starts to get scary. Bread, as you know, requires various steps. Mixing, resting, rising, shaping and rising before you get to the baking part. Because I'm baking so many things it's very important to be organized and make sure there's time for everything and everything has its own time. This means, I've got to plan out not only what time everything goes into the oven but also what time each bread needs to hit its various stages.
There's little room for error.
I work backwards. First, I put down the 'Into the Oven' time. Then, I subtract the second rise's time from that time. If there's any resting time or extra time for shaping (ie Kaiser rolls v. regular rolls), I subtract that and write down what time I need to be doing that at. Still working backwards, I figure out and subtract the first rise time and then repeat this wonderful display of mathmatical genius one more time to get the time I need to be mixing/kneading the ingredients.
I do not subtract an hour off for de-chilling any pre-ferments. My plan with that is to remove them from the refrigerator when I go to bed and allow them to warm up slowly in my cold house so they are ready for me when I wake up. It being a Saturday night with the kids out of the house I anticipate that I will be going to bed late on Saturday night anyhow and that the pre-ferments will not be de-chilling for more than several hours. And in a cold house, a cold pre-ferment wrapped in a cold bowl will take longer to come to room temperature than one cut into pieces and covered on the counter will. By my previous experiements with this, this method works well and does not affect the performance of the dough negatively.
I am feeling very smug and very much like the aforementioned math genius when I take another satisfied look at my Master Plan for Massive Baking and see this:
That's right, your eyes do not deceive you. It says 3 am. That's when I need to start the Potato Rosemary Bread.
Funny enough this does not worry me. My main concern is how to not tell Rick what time I will be waking up. Sure, he'll probably know once he hears me get out of bed and he'll definitely ask me when he wakes up. And I won't lie. I'll tell him.
But when he asks me Saturday night if I'm getting up early 'or something' I'll just nod and say 'Yup, pretty early' and wave off the idea that going out is a bad idea. And when we go out and it's midnight and we're not quite home yet....
My only thought will be is this: Can bread and its overwhelming power over me be enough to draw me out of my warm bed after 2.5 hours of sleep when nothing else thus far in my life has been able to do so?
Hungry babies in the middle of the night do not count. I was on auto-pilot for that. There will be no auto pilot for the the breads. I must be awake and fully functioning to deal with all the required precise times. One mistake and I'll fail and 50 people at the baby shower will be left breadless which is a terrible state to be in. Bread's the stuff of life, you know.
Can I do it?
Well, my friends, it's 5 am and I've been working on this post in between steps. I've got the Potato Rosemary almost ready for shaping and the regular and onion rolls are rising. The dough for the Kaiser rolls is rising. I'm about to go mix up the Italian Bread and shape the Potato Rosemary.
Yes, it can. I'm doing it. =)
