bread loaf
We knead to bake!

Saint Paul Bread Club Meeting Notes 07/17/2004

These notes were made by David S. Cargo as best he could, and should not be expected to be a complete record of the meeting.

First I want to make two important statements:

This was the largest, most successful Saint Paul Bread Club meeting ever.
This was also not a typical Saint Paul Bread Club meeting.

I counted people at one point during the meeting and came up with a total of 38 people. Based on the number of people checked off on my Bread Club Names list, there were 39 people. The actual number for the total individuals present is "about 40."

By way of comparison, the number of people I counted at the bake-off meeting on April 17, 2004 was 25. This shows the power of the publicity that we got from the article that Richard Chin wrote about the bake-off that appeared in the Pioneer Press.

When I say that this meeting was not typical, I mean that it did not have the kind of order that we expect to have at normal SPBC meetings. Nor did it have the order we had planned this meeting to have. People came early. The weather was so warm that people had to get bread into the ovens right away. Lauren and Klecko did have some doughs spun for us to try our hands at (which was great fun), but there was never a time for me to give my presentation about web resources. (I did give out slips of paper with the URL on them, so people could still see most of what I was going to say in person anyway.)

The October 16 meeting should have a lot more structure to it, so please don't expect such chaos to be typical.

If you attended this meeting, and you care to send me an e-mail about your impression of the meeting, I would love to be able to quote some of them to give other people an idea of what it was like from many fresh perspectives. Did you have fun? Did you meet any interesting people? Did you bring home any good bread?

Similarly, if you would like to tell me what you baked and how it turned out, I would love to record it for historical purposes (much as I did for the field trip to Stockholm, Wisconsin).

My own impression was that we had a great crowd of people who love to bake bread, from young to not-so-young, with roughly 16 men and 23 women. We all had a passion for bread, and no matter what else we did, learning about bread and bread making was important to us.