Zellie Potgieter

Kate Downham wrote:Here’s the draft Kickstarter video script - what do you think?

Do you bake bread as often as you’d like?

My name is Kate and this is my fourth Kickstarter. I bake bread every day for my family, I used to run a farmers market bakery, and now I would like to share my recipes with you.

Have you ever tried to make sourdough and been overwhelmed with the strict timelines, finicky instructions, expensive gadgets, and hard to find ingredients?

It doesn’t have to be that way at all.

Sourdough can be approachable, everyday, simple bread that fits in with your life.

You can make great breads with minimal hands-on time. You can make 100% wholegrain bread that’s not a brick. You can make great bread without wasting any sourdough starter or using any plastic.

Sourdough without fail is a book that breaks the boundaries of sourdough baking, showing you how to work with what you have to make great bread at home.

This is a book suitable for the complete beginner, and experienced bakers alike.

There are over seventy recipes, from basic everyday breads made from wheat, spelt, and rye, to the best ever cinnamon raisin bread, walnut bread, olive bread, and sandwich breads.

I’ll share my failproof pizza crust recipes, and how to make great pizza in a home oven.

I’ve included a chapter of recipes for gluten-free breads using only organic, natural, ingredients.

You’ll learn how to make great baguettes, burger buns, and rolls.

If you have a sweet tooth, you won’t disappointed. From rustic apple tart, Danish pastries, cinnamon buns, doughnuts, chocolate cake and more, you can make sourdough treats that are healthy and delicious.

So are you ready to start baking great sourdough bread? Choose a reward from the list below to help create this book.

I like that, it's good

G Freden wrote:I hope you don't mind me asking what might be a dumb question, but the last time I clicked on a kickstarter (it might have been one of Paul's actually), which was a couple years ago I guess, the only way to pay was via an Amazon account, am I remembering correctly?  I hope I'm wrong here, but I seem to remember that was the reason I didn't support that kickstarter:  I don't have an Amazon account (nor do I want one).

No, you can pay with credit or debit card also. Or Paypal account.  I've never paid with an Amazon account for anything and I've backed a number of Kickstarters

I like both of the 5 picture ones

Apparently I am not too focussed on the text, it took me forever to realize that the difference between the two pictures are the font in the middle :)

I like the baquette picture (I like that it's not perfectly straight), as well as the burger buns.

I also really like the sweet things, like the buns that looks like cinnamon buns, but I think are not (the filling bit looks purple) and the pancakes.

The pizza picture also speaks to me (again, because it's not perfect).

Of the bread pictures I quite like the first one (with the bread not cut).  I think it's because it looks like it's not quite risen to full height.  Or maybe because it's a little lighter (I don't like the grey look of rye breads, and I really love the yellow look of Einkorn).

And then the two sandwich loaves from above with a few slices cut.

... :) reading through this, apparently I like everything that's sort of sourdough-adjacent vs the normal sourdough picture.  

If I were to group some pictures together I would do all of the ones I just mentioned.  I don't think any of them by themselves would pull me in as much as all together (although I am a sucker for sweet things, so those by themselves might :) )

Reading through the list of recipes, golden polenta and sweet milk rolls caught my eye.  

I love the idea of sourdough bread, but I have killed more starters than I can count, while baking a handful of breads from it.  

Reflecting on it, my issues are:
1. I prefer to use Einkorn flour, which is finicky.  But that said, even normal wheat sourdough bread seems to evade me.  

2. I mill my own flour, so often I will need to adjust the amounts to suit, guessing as I go along

3. I seem to be constitutionally incapable of following a recipe.  I have read and watched countless things around sourdough over the years, so I have nuggets of wisdom stuck in my head that makes me want to adjust the recipe this way and that.  These are sometimes competing nuggets of information :), but I tend to just pick the nugget that I like at that specific moment.

BUT in saying that, recipes that just sort of give guidance doesn't work for me. "Just add flour until this" frustrate me no end, even though I understand the reasoning behind it.  Probably because I don't have the feel for the dough that needs to develop in order for that to work.

BUT ALSO, I want to get to a point where I can have a solid recipe with 600 gram of this and 500 gram of that.

4. I don't want a crispy crust.  I know it's all the rage for sourdough breads, but I prefer a soft crust, which also makes me want to adjust things.

None of the kickstarter covers particularly appeal to me, I think because it looks too much like what a normal sourdough book cover would look like and the particular bread in the picture does not look particularly appetizing to me.  However, when I scroll down and read through the information, that appeals to me a lot more.  
I am not sure what what other picture I would put on a cover ... I mean ... it's sourdough.  But something wonky or differently interesting might be better.  Or something with butter or jam or whatnot added (when I attempt baking it is with whole grain flour, so I know it's not dense and dry, but in that picture the bread looks dense and dry to me)

With a tag line of something like "Easy sourdough for messy lives" :)

I would love to actually get into and follow through with sourdough baking, so I would back your kickstarter regardless.  But I would not necessarily have stopped there to read the description if I was just looking at the picture.

John Suavecito wrote:Syntropic agriculture sounds a lot like permaculture.
John S
PDX OR

It probably is.  I am not religious on these things :)  
The thing that I like about syntropic agriculture is that it dovetails really nicely into some other stuff I know already (like how plants actually really like growing together, and our idea of plants competing is wrong - although I am sure there's some exceptions), and other stuff I didn't think about.  After listening to a few lectures, it now strikes me how many trees are growing in full sun that would probably like it better if they were in the understory.  I know in my yard that even the things we think of as wanting full sun seem to be happier in dappled shade.  Plus, I generally gravitate towards trees (fruit) rather than veg, so the idea of growing trees faster and healthier appeals (which again dovetails into the work from John Kempf that shows we really have no idea of how fast trees and plants can really grow if they are in a healthy environment).  

I like the idea of growing a forest fast.  Yes it's a lot of management, and again, I am not religious about these things.  I can grow a syntropic forest until such time as it becomes too much work, and then scale it back to such a place as the work becomes manageable.  

I think of it as a twin issue - lowering your expenses and boosting your income, and then do something like slowly exchanging your current off-farm income with farm income.

Reading a lot on mrmoneymustache.com has lowered my expectations of how much money I actually need.  

Also understanding that selling fruit or veg is a time sensitive thing, where selling seeds or a plant is not (or something like dried fruit or processed in some way, but I am not really inclined that way).  Plus, you may get $1 or something for your apple or tomato, but if you grow out the tomato seeds you get a lot more than $1.  This is especially true for trees that people use that they would like to buy a lot of, to make a shelter belt, for example.  If you don't sell your seedlings this year, next year they will be worth a lot more, and the extra time you need to keep them alive another year is not a great burden.  I think of selling fruit and veg as a stage in the business, rather than the end goal (or maybe something that gets people to know you.  If they know you grow awesome tomatoes, then next year they might be inclined to buy the tomato plants)

There's a few places that goes into the actual cost of their operations.  Joel Salatin does a lot of money talks. Edible Acres.  Peter Kanaris talks to Jim Kovaleski that does front yard farming and makes enough money (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSvwN4SlzeQ).  I know Joel's farm is big, but he talks about making money renting land and pasturing pigs (? I think it was pigs, may have been beef, also poultry).  

Generally, I think it depends on how you are inclined.  Do you want to find something that just two people can run forever?  Or do you want to grow into a big farm with employees.  Mostly, the type of place that I gravitate towards is a smaller operation that I can envision doing when I am 80 because I enjoy it so it doesn't have a finite race to get enough money to retire with, but it still needs to make enough money that I can invest in order to travel or stop working if need be - this is where lowering expenditures and knowing tax laws comes in.  I like growing fruit, and really enjoy syntropic growing, so a small nursery operation selling starts or rooted plants is more my style than a CSA style farmers market farm.

I haven't seen anything that tells me that it's not completely do-able, but I see it as a 5 year exchange starting at 100% off farm to eventually 100% on farm.

Cristo Balete wrote: ... when there's an earthquake, particularly if it's in a mountainous area where the earthquakes seem to shake the mountains for miles around, more than the flatland.  

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Interesting point, given that all the place I like are in mountainous areas :)  

Cristo Balete wrote:California seems expensive, but if you get in the right area the winter winter heating bills are practically nonexistent.   It always shocks me that people shrug at $500 a month heating bills in freezing winter areas, and then have a fit over mortgage payments.   You'll never see the money that gets spent on heating, but most of the time (if there's forethought about reselling) money put into buying property pays off.  Plus the interest on a mortgage is tax deductible.  And there's protection with Proposition 13 and tax levels staying low, which are also tax deductible.

It's also regulated as far as building codes because of earthquakes.   And when you've got your biggest investment in your life keeping the roof over your head, you will thank your lucky stars that it was built to code when there's an earthquake, particularly if it's in a mountainous area where the earthquakes seem to shake the mountains for miles around, more than the flatland.  

Some friends of ours inherited a cabin in northern California and were disappointed to find that a high percentage of the population was on welfare, the poverty rates in areas that were not retirement areas was high, and some of those areas had drug and alcohol issues.  Now that marijuana is not illegal, the dangers from the growers and their workers protecting illegal growing setups hopefully will be lower.

Ben, are there any issues with the Indian casinos?  Higher traffic volume and more accidents were complained about in farming areas, but not sure how that's played out over the years.

Oh my, so true on the heating!  Those bills can add up quick in colder places.  Same with animal feed and housing through winter.  

I don't mind the regulations on building and earthquakes.  My husband is a builder (who LOVES concrete :) - so not permies, but very useful in an earthquake).  He also did part of his research for university on building in earthquake zones, and we lived in New Zealand, where everything has to built to earthquake specs.  

:) I just finished watching Murder Mountain on Netflix, so that is definitely something that is a concern.  

Ben Zumeta wrote:If you want ideal summers (you choose where you want it 60-100f based on if you go coastal or up to the mountains/rivers) and don’t mind rainy but mild (freezes are rare) winters (but snow within a n hour and a half for skiing), and want to live in a place with virtually no enforcement about how you can develop or destroy your own land, check out Del Norte county in Far nw CA. It’s called Caltucky or Calabama by the sea due to its “rural” culture, but that is changing in the right (leftwards) direction in my observation over six years here. I also still appreciate that even those whose politics I disagree with around here are at least largely adept DIYers. However, we need more permies!

Del Norte is the cheapest place in California but has the greatest water security, has the lowest fire risk in the state on the coast, and is the least populous place by radius in the continental US (nobody living in the Pacific helps that stat). We also have the highest biomass/acre on earth in our forests, and the highest soil biodiversity there as well. Oh, and the largest undammed river in the continental US, which is in my opinion the best swimming river in the world. It is slow pitch softball for permaculture here with all the organic matter around.

That sounds pretty amazing.  Although that is some serious rainfall.  

Rainfall would give me pause, as well as the small population.  While I want the convenience of a small town, I would also need some people close-ish by to sell stuff too if I go that route, though Crescent City seems to be growing pretty rapidly.  It is in a higher earthquake risk zone than what I would like (Ha! High Earthquake risk vs low fire risk :) ), but seems  like something to explore.
Thank you, I will definitely go visit, and see what I think.