Baking at Home Tips and Q & A with Baker Bleu The lockdowns of 2020 saw a huge surge in people making sourdough a home. Do you have some secrets to sourdough success that you can share with our readers? It’s great to see so many people trying sourdough at home. A few of my best tips would be to use your senses, get a thermometer and emulate a really hot oven by using a dutch oven. To cultivate a good starter, make sure you feed it at regular intervals. There are lots of great guides online to do this. Use the same container/vessel to store it. This helps to keep it strong, active and healthy. A thermometer is a great tool in the kitchen, particularly for bread making. Temperature can affect how active the dough is. Too hot and you’ll potentially overproof your bread, too cold and it may not rise. Using a thermometer can help control these variables. Checking temperature along the way will help regulate your dough and bread across the process. At our bakery, we use really high temperatures to bake our bread. Home ovens won’t reach these temperatures but you can use a dutch oven to create a similar environment. Ensure it has been pre-heated in the oven before transferring your loaf. Pop the lid on and put it back in the oven. This helps to trap heat inside and will give you a great crust and end product. What’s your go-to loaf and why? My favourite loaf is our Super Country loaf. The wet dough weight is 2kg, so it is a big loaf. It’s mostly white with a touch of stoneground emmer 昀氀our giving it a slightly nutty taste. We bake it for a long time in the oven and it develops an amazing dark crust with a super moist crumb. The slice size is perfect for sandwiches and it’s just a super versatile bread. It is a popular one amongst restaurants as a table bread. For lunch, our corn, chive and chilli pizza hits the spot! Congratulations on your much anticpated new store opening in Hawksburn Village - a nice new neighbour for Minimax. What’s your vision for the new store? Thank you! Our new store is set to open in May in Hawksburn Village. It will be a retail space with on site pastry production. We will sell all of our current range but are excited to expand on it, offering more pastry, grab and go lunches and Market Lane 昀椀lter coffee. We’re moving our pastry production out of our current home in Caul昀椀eld North to aid in making more bread and pastry. We moved to our Caul昀椀eld North site in the middle of 2019 and the space is slowly feeling smaller and smaller so it was time to expand again. We’re excited to have John Paul Twomey (former Carlton Wine Room chef) join the team as our product and recipe development manager.