Monday Mix 4/24/23

Post-Lune croissant workshop debrief

Happy Mondays, everyone! Hope you all had a nice weekend, especially if you happened to be lucky enough to attend the Ashville Bread Festival, where many of my friends were either teaching or attending. (I watched their Instagram feeds all weekend with a mixture of vicarious joy and deep FOMO, vowing to get down there next year, finally.)

One reason I could not be there was because I was busy teaching my Lune Croissant Walkthrough workshop, which was a great success. It took place over three days, Friday to Sunday, with a total of eight Zoom sessions. It was the first time I’ve taught a virtual workshop in “real time,” instead of compressed into a few hours, and while it was a ton of work, it was also in some ways less stressful than a compressed class, because I didn’t need to do a ton of prep ahead of time, I just had to follow the recipe from start to finish.

We had 140 sign-ups, though the most we had tune into the class live was around 50 people, so most intended to watch the videos after the fact. (Good news, I managed not to forget to hit record at the start of each session, so we have the whole thing documented.) I’ll make the package available for anyone to purchase soon, but in the meantime if you don’t want to wait, you can just “sign up” for it at the original link and you’ll get an email along with everyone else on how to download it later this week.

I really love teaching classes like this, for a bunch of reasons. One, it’s gratifying to know you are passing along useful information and/or giving people the confidence they need to do something they maybe thought was beyond their capabilities or skill level. More than a few people in the class mentioned that they’d thought of croissants as something they’d never want or be able to tackle at home until I’d made it look so easy during the workshop.

Two, it gives me an opportunity to learn something I hadn’t yet. Before teaching this workshop, I’d made croissants maybe three or four times. To prepare for it, I spent six weeks or so practicing Kate’s process, and by the end I knew it if not not inside out, well enough to make some pretty perfect pastries and to show others how to get to that point themselves. When I first read the Lune cookbook I knew I wanted to learn the process, but honestly, if I hadn’t decided to create a workshop around it, it probably would have been months or years before I actually gave it a go, much less actually learned it. (This is maybe the dirty secret of those of us who teach baking —we do it as much to learn something ourselves as to teach others. Even when I teach a class I’ve held before or a method I already know, I still learn new things and know it better than I did beforehand.)

Three, it gives me an opportunity to show off my collection of bread t-shirts.

Anyway, all in all, it was a great weekend, even if I couldn’t be at the Bread Festival. If you attended the workshop (or decide to purchase the videos after the fact), feel free to share your thoughts and results in the comments below and/or the chat thread I started earlier today:

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See you all in a few days, though one note: This Wednesday’s email will likely arrive a day or two late, because I am waiting to get some assets for the final post for Breadcrumb Month, which will be excerpts from Tamar Adler’s excellent new book, The Everlasting Meal Cookbook.

—Andrew