Bread baking at Tall Timber Ranch

Victoria FitzKnapps, former food service director at Tall Timber Ranch near Lake Wenatchee, Wash., shows the bagel rolling technique in this brief video. Chef Victoria attended Chef Jim Krieg's baking workshop last year in Oregon. We leaned this technique at the workshop last week in Canby, Oregon.


"There is not a better bagel available than the one fresh out of the oven the day you are going to eat it," Victoria said in a May 2011 blog post. "The crisp crunchy exterior breaks open to a chewy, flavorful center."

Victoria wrote this on the Tall Timber Ranch blog last year:

"While many people are trying to reduce the amount of bread in their diet, I am trying to increase the quality of the bread we eat here at camp, so that those couple servings of bread per day can be a delicious experience, not just a calorie delivery system. To this end, I was able to participate in a Baking Intensive class last week. For three days seven camp chefs were tutored under the guidance of Executive Pastry Chef, Jim Krieg, CCE, CECP."

The workshop motivated Victoria to bake as much of her bread from scratch last summer at the camp. The intense three-day workshop gave Victoria the technique and recipes to produce an array of breads, rolls and pastries.

As summer approached, she planned to bake ciabatta rolls for sandwiches, hamburger buns for cookouts and a weekly run of bagels for breakfast. Focaccia and French bread would be baked for "some of our dinners."

"The baking went great," Victoria said in a Facebook message. "Bread was awesome and saving were great." On average, the ingredients to produce a loaf of fresh bread cost her about 60 percent less than purchased bread.