We’re stoked about the week - apologies for the radio silence, but I’ve been heads down on some consulting work and Corinna’s been swamped in the kitchen, but it’s been a really great week over at Corinna’s.

We’re putting out several posts over the next couple of days; two new customers (Hawthorne Valley Farm Store and Kaaterskill Farm Store), some awesome sales and feedback at Chatham Real Food Market Coop, and some exciting new stores that we’re in discussions with.

Also I’m going to blog about the fantastic service we got from our local printer, Pro Printers, where Ryan went above and beyond to help us out. We’re also going to talk about last Saturday at the Hudson Farmer’s Market, where we met several local producers (mushrooms, cheese, eggs and veggies) and lest I forget, the new line of ham and cheese croissants that are selling out every time we bring them out.

But first, lemme tell you about tomorrow’s Ginsberg’s 100th Anniversary Open House. We’re there, under the big top with an array of goodies for sale. We’ll have ham and cheese, plain, almond and chocolate crouissants, of course.

We’ll also have, for sale for the first time Corinna’s quark-cakes. These are real German cheese cake, made with Quark and not Philadelphia - they’re three inches wide and about four and a half inches high and topped with a delicate  tuile butterfly cookie. Delicate and substantial, satisfying but not overly filling. Five bucks.

There’ll also be cheese sticks, lemon petits four, lemon tartlets, rye bread and  palmiers. We hope to see you there - Route 66 near Route 9H!

Last night at the Chatham Real Food Market Coop, Corinna and I set out to do a three-hour product demo, but we sold out after a bit under two hours.

These are good problems to have!

The crowds were good - usually we had several people at a time - and some were pushing others out of the way to get tastes. We went through about three dozen croissants, a gaggle of lemon-curd petit-fours, and about two dozen cheese sticks.

Meanwhile, across the room, the cash register was singing as people bought. This was a great way to get out and meet customers and describe what we do, and we’re very grateful to Marcie at the market for the opportunity.

One thing she noticed yesterday was that the ham and cheese croissants and the cheese sticks sold especially well; today’s order out to the market will contain more of those.
Today we’re off to make deliveries to the Market and Strongtree, plus checking out the Hudson Farmers’ Market.

We’re psyched about the tasting and demonstration tomorrow at the Chatham Real Food Market Coop, 15 Church Street, Chatham, New York 12037.

At 10 am we bring in an assortment of croissants and cheese sticks for the market to sell during regular business hours. Then at 4pm, we bring in a boatload of stuff to give away. We’ll be there until 7 pm, chatting, eating, talking baking, pastry and bread and generally being convivial.

At 4pm, specifically, we’ll out roll plain, sugared, almond-filled, chocolate, our new sensational ham and cheese and cheese-stuffed croissants, plus scones (they’re fabulous, with a hint of orange zest and not too sweet, not too crumbly and not too moist); cheesesticks and some quark-berry windmills.

Please join us! We’d love to see you there.

We’re truly happy that living up here in the sticks provides us with more than the usual opportunities for Community Supported Agriculture - that is, sharing the risk with local (in our case, mainly organic or biodynamic) farmers by buying a share of their harvest before the start of the season. This gives us two key advantages.

First, we get the very freshest fruits and vegetables all summer long, into the autumn. Second, Corinna’s gets to have the finest quality produce and fruits for our products.

To that end, we just bought two shares of the CSA at Threshold Farms, a local biodynamic orchard that does sensational apples, pears and peaches. We bought a third share for our family.

Threshold does three white peach varieties (raritan rose, White Hale and Bell of Georgia) and three yellow (Bisco, Harbrite and Red Haven). It also does Paulared, Gala, Cox Orange Pippin, Jonafree, Jonagold, Macoun, Liberty,  Golden Delicious, Fuji, Idared and Baldwin apples, and Clapps, Bartlett, Bosc and Comice pears.

For more information about Threshold, which doesn’t have its own website, visit their listing on greenPeople.org. We’ll write more about suppliers in the near future.

At the request of a new customer we’ve not yet announced, Corinna’s been messing with scones again. The real thing with scones is that, like bagels in New York, they’re made correctly by few and incorrectly by the masses. There are legions of people out there who believe truly that a scone is some kind of triangular blueberry muffin.

So for the last week we’ve had scone-city up here in Harlemville, but now it looks like we’re good to go. We’re not selling these at many places, but will try them out at Strongtree and this new secret customer, and see how they go.

Meantime Corinna’s been cranking out the vanilla ice cream and that is pretty damn sensational. She does it with organic cream, Hawthorne Valley Farm raw organic (biodynamic, actually) milk and Ronnybrook Farms skim milk, organic egg yolks, and this pretty sensually spectacular fresh vanilla bean we had flown in from Madagascar - the result is out of this world, especially when she does it with a sauce from the raspberries growing on our land.

That last bit was not a product announcement, it was just to make you seethe with jealousy.

Corinna's 'Bernie's Rye'

Back in 2004, when the Selby family moved back from Europe to the US, one of the first things we  realized was that there was a dearth of good bread and croissants. As we say in our Fine Pastry and Croissant page, the bread part was easier than the croissants, but still it’s tough. We’ve had several requests like this one:

“…German breads and pastries are almost non-existent. If you provide real Laugenbrezeln or Laugenweck, you will instantly have at least one family of die-hard enthusiasts.”

Well, yeah, but there is a boatload of good bread here in the German-influenced Hudson Valley region. Our Daily Bread, Hawthorne Valley Farm and others make some pretty good stuff.

Of course, we don’t think it’s as good as Bernie’s Rye, a heavy, German-inspired crusty loaf of truly substantial bread. The trick for the crust - thick but not a jawbreaker with a substantial crunch - is the high baking temperature (500°F), barley malt and apple cider, which makes the crust caramelize while it’s baking without making it sweet. The crumb (baker-snob jargon for, ‘the inside’) is dense and moist - but it’s not wet like most ryes in America. This is what Corinna considers ein echtes deutsches Bauernbrot - a real German farmer’s bread.

From a German, that’s high praise. We’re eating this bread at home now, and Corinna’s experimenting with commercial production. Thanks for asking about the bread, and we’ll be starting to offer it at farmers’ markets and coops in the next little bit.

We’re proud and honored to announce that Corinna’s Croissants are available at the Chatham Real Food Market Coop in Chatham, NY. We’re so excited because we love shopping at the Real Food Market Coop - it recently built out from a farmers’ market to a full-fledged community resource, and it has a truly wonderful selection of extremely high quality locally-produced goods including some wonderful breads, a vast assortment of locally produced fruits and vegetables, and organic goods.  There’s a little cafe, and many people pop by for coffee break, lunch and snacks.

Chatham Real Food was founded with the specific goal of strengthening our rural community. It works with local farmers to develop our food security, and with local artisans, farmers and other producers to help build a healthy local economy in our county. The Market is a cooperatively-owned outlet for the products of local farms and kitchens, provides education about Columbia County agriculture, and promotes a more localized food system.

To some of those ends, Corinna’s baked goods will be available at the Coop from next Friday, May 22, when we deliver an assortment of croissants and cheese sticks at 10 am, in time for coffee-break.

Then, later on Friday, May 22, from 4-7pm, Corinna and I will be at the market doing a tasting and demonstration of the products. Come on out and join us for some fantastic new stuff, to talk baking and swap baking tips and tricks. There will be Mexican food available, so Corinna will bring along a batch of her seriously decadent Mexican Wedding Cookies - pecan-packed, confectioners-sugar-coated diet-busting cluster bombs.

We’re very happy to be selling at the market, and hope to see you there!

Chocolate, plain and confectioners- sugared croissants and palmier, on the way over to Strongtree Organic Coffee Roasters in Hudson - get em while they’re hot.

Lest this devolve into a my-own-horn-tooting exercise, let me say that this is in response to a conversation with a retail outlet we had yesterday and not a generic, ‘Let me tell you why we’re better than the competition’ post. So the thing that we’ve got the most comments about so far has been the fact that our croissants - even the chocolate ones - are not too sweet. This is intentional, and I thought I’d write about how we got there.

So in January, 2008, when we started talking with folks about the possibility of selling croissants at the Hawthorne Valley Farm Store (something that may yet still happen, stay tuned), we began doing some informal research among customers and friends there, in Boston and Brookline (where we used to live) and New York City. The number one comment we got was that people welcomed the idea of a fine pastry line but hoped that it wouldn’t be too sweet.

This was music to Corinna’s ears, as she wanted croissant to taste the way they do in Europe and not the way they do here (another complaint in our family: bagels, once described by the New York Times as ‘an unsweetened donut with rigor mortis,’ are now best described in much of in this country as ’sweetened donuts with rigor mortis’ - what the hell happened?).

The good thing about this was that Corinna’s croissant recipe, modified from that of Cambridge Culinary’s Delfin, was already not sweet. And the chocolate we use, from Cacao Noel in France, is bittersweet and comes in disks (most croissant makers doing chocolate seem to use milkier chocolate that comes in these little sticks - it’s sweeter and gooeyer. Ours taste to us much more like the ones we get in Paris and Munich than the ones rolling off the line at commercial bakeries here).

Even Mrs London’s - the bakery in Saratoga where our friend Ben once and his friend Zeke now roll out sheetpan after sheetpan of spectacular stuff each day - likes them sweeter than we do. We never thought that ‘unsweetness’ would be  a product differentiator for us (we’d hoped things like ‘flaky’, ‘buttery’, ‘MMMMPH!’ and other terms would be the ones used, and to be fair, we get a lot of that, too), but there it is. To us, a croissant is a decadent, buttery, melt-in-your-mouth treat that can go sweet or savory with equal aplomb. And frankly there’s too much sugar out there anyway. No, we’re not going to make Atkins claims, so relax.

Some of the more interesting aspects of setting up a new business are discovering the seemingly arbitrary limitations of local distributors, and just how expensive business stuff is. I remember a friend describing why the McIlhenny Company, makers of Tabasco sauce, only gives out itty-bitty bottles  - really, teeny weeny bottles - of Tabasco sauce when you visit the factory at Avery Island, Louisiana:  people only use so much, so giving you a normal sized bottle would mean you wouldn’t buy another one for like… years.

Case in point: we need rolling slant-topped food-safe plastic storage bins for flour like the one shown at the top-left of this post. Now, how much would you think something like that would cost? I mean, a 50-gallon Rubbermaid garbage can is like $25 at Home Depot. So the answer is, “A buttload.”

Our local restaurant supply store (which we love) wanted $300 for each one. That’s actually disrespectful to the number, let’s spell that out: three hundred dollars. We need four. So we shopped round some local options; the restaurant supply place in Pittsfield, MA wanted $204 - but they only had the smaller version, so I guess the price per pound of flour it holds is around the same. Plus, you know, tax.

So I went online. Hubert wants $308. And two weeks for delivery. Big Tray wants $193 for the same product, and claims two day delivery and free shipping on orders of more than $250. Ace Restaurant Supply has a no-name triple compartment ingredient bin which looks interesting, on a rolly-cage, for $395, and the Rubbermaid version of the Cambro storage containers for $219.98, but can only ship by ground and that sounds like it take six to 26 weeks.

A this point I’m ready, as I’m sure you are, too, to shove the flour in Glad bags - but the Ag and Markets people would likely frown on this practice. I plow forth. Webstaurant Store has the Rubbermaids for $179. This sounds good enough. Two day delivery costs extra but still they’re the cheapest. So I order four and pay a whole lot of money and wait. The emails start.

8.52 am on May 10:

Thank you for shopping with us at The WEBstaurant Store! We have received your order placed on 5/10/09 at 8:52 AM, and will begin processing it shortly.

3.45 pm on May 12:

Hello!
I wanted to let you know that unfortunately the manufacturer did not ship your order today like they had anticipated. I am continuing to follow up with them to see what the problem is. Please let me know if you need to cancel this order as it will not get there in the 2 day time frame you had placed your order for.

4.52 pm on May 12:

Hello again! I just heard from the manufacturer again and they cancelled this order as they were not able to get it out in the 2 day
time frame. Please let me know if you still want this order and I will submit it again to the manufacturer. I apologize for all the
inconvenience. If i do not hear you, I will cancel your order for you.

WTF? WTFF? We couldn’t deliver your order because you wanted it fast, so when it couldn’t come fast enough we made you waste the last two days retroactively in order to speed things…What?

Please re-place the order.

At this point we still have no bins.

UPDATE: May 15: WEBstaurant says the bins shipped and that they’ve upgraded us to overnight.

UPDATE: May 19: Delivered and working great! Thanks, WEBstaurant!