Notes from Jeff's Kitchen April 16, 2020

Dear Hayground Families,We know a lot of you are getting into baking these days and what is more delicious than a fresh loaf of bread?We make bread all the time at Hayground using our sourdough starter Juanita. Juanita has a long storied history!Let’s go back to January of 2015, Arjun had been reading up on making a sourdough starter and he found inspiration in the book:Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish.Arjun worked for several days on the starter using the natural yeast in the air in Jeff’s Kitchen.Meanwhile a huge snow storm was brewing and heading towards the East Coast. On Monday January 26th it looked so bad school closed early. Arjun had formed two beautiful loaves and gave one to Scott and took the other one home - we both baked our loaves and they were delicious. Juno shut down all the schools, dumped a whole lot of snow and we named our starter after her. Then after many years of happy baking at school the cleaning staff accidentally threw out Juno!!!! Sourdough starter can look slimy! We were devastated - however we remembered that we had given some to Sebastien Mir a graduate to take home to his mom Elaine! Desperately we texted Elaine! She brought it back to us and we renamed her Juanita. You can get your very own Juanita, she will be available in containers at the Hayground Mini Food pantry this Friday from 12-3 with instructions on how to take care of her. Word has it that there is a shortage of yeast - no worries if you have Juanita! 

Happy Baking, Arjun and Scott