People on a Sunday stroll along the Hudson River between Tarrytown and Beacon might be surprised to find an unattended white pine cabinet filled with freshly baked loaves of organic sourdough bread. Is it performance art? A pop-up bakery? Maybe a little of both?
This playful moveable feast is the project of Chase Harnett of Ossining, NY, whose business, The Hudson Oven, has attracted gluten lovers from around the Hudson Valley who eagerly await his Sunday morning email with details on where to find the cabinet’s ever-changing location.
While Harnett's weekly sourdough scavenger hunt isn’t new, his rustic open-air bread cabinet—like outdoor food stalls—carries particular pandemic-era appeal as the coronavirus this year limits indoor dining and encourages people to eat and explore outside at safe distances.
Harnett blasts his 2,000+ email subscribers at around 10 a.m. on Sundays, sending his dedicated throng of bread enthusiasts in a dash toward the destination in the hope that they will score one of the 80 loaves he bakes each weekend—a cache that usually sells out by 1pm.
He sometimes lurks nearby to see how long it takes someone to show up. "It's always 15 minutes or something crazy like that," he says, after which he goes for breakfast and a walk.
Harnett loves it when someone randomly finds the full cabinet on their own, but that’s happening less frequently, thanks to an ever-expanding mailing list and almost 3,000 Instagram followers. "They discover the cabinet on social media, so it's a virtual discovery," he muses.
Sometimes he ditches the river for the woods, dropping his bread shed among the trees before sending coordinates to his followers. "It's like geocaching," he says, referring to the worldwide activity where people hunt for hidden objects using GPS coordinates. "People say, 'You tricked me into exercising today!'"
His unusual approach to selling bread was inspired by conversations with his father while he was growing up. "We would always talk about big ideas," he says. "There’s no such thing as an original idea, but I feel like the cabinet is truly unique." Harnett also says he’s addressing what he calls "the dilution of quality" and our single-use culture that relies on cheap goods.
Harnett uses organically grown and milled flour made by Farmer Ground Flour in Trumansburg, NY, near Ithaca. Thor Oechsner, a founding partner, met Harnett after giving a talk on milling. “I was struck by his enthusiasm and ingenuity,” Oechsner says. "The way he's marketing his bread to people—wow, that’s a special setup."
The Hudson Oven uses a pay-what-you-wish model, and buyers can leave cash ("Dough for dough" the sign reads) or Venmo whatever amount they think the bread is worth. Harnett currently averages about $6 a loaf.
"I would like to see $8-10," he says, "but I'm not putting a price on it." People are encouraged to take only one loaf each, with about 90% of his customers paying cash via a metal box, a percentage he finds fitting considering the product and scavenger hunt. "Cash is more analog," he says.
Harnett, 25, grew up in Piermont in Rockland County and feels a special connection to the Hudson River, which he could see from his childhood bedroom window.
He majored in environmental studies at Pace University and apprenticed with a baker after college. When the baker quit the trade, he sold Harnett his oven—a four-ton, wood-fired colossus on a double-axle trailer. Harnett started the sourdough cabinet in 2016 to promote his portable pizza catering business, for which he hitches the oven trailer to his pickup truck and drives to music festivals, breweries, farms and people’s homes.
During the pandemic, he has continued to do small, private outdoor parties, and will go as far north as Hudson, NY. His girlfriend, a trained pastry chef named Madison Goldrick, helps him at events.
But every weekend, it’s all about the sourdough. Harnett starts baking on Fridays by creating a levain, a mixture of sourdough starter, flour and water. Saturday mornings he mixes his dough and begins heating his oven, moving the wood fire around to warm the oven evenly. The temperature equalizes overnight, and on Sunday Harnett bakes 20-25 loaves at a time.
"It's a big experiment in thermodynamics," he says. "Even after baking 80 loaves, the oven still reads 500 degrees for the next several days, and on the following Friday, it’s at 250 or 300."
In October, Harnett began placing a "treasure chest" next to his cabinet displaying work by a featured local artisan, also for sale on a pay-what-you-wish basis. "I figured people who would chase a cabinet around would be interested in a woodcarver or a potter," he says. So far, he says, the craftspeople have been pleased with what they've been paid for their wares.
Harnett didn't build the cabinet, but he’s had to rebuild it several times. "It's had a rough life," he says. "It's been blown over onto its face with the doors open. It's pretty sturdy now." This year, amid the coronavirus outbreak, he has attached a hand sanitizer dispenser onto one of the doors.
Harnett is currently taking pre-orders for Thanksgiving at $10 a loaf, with pickup in Tarrytown on Nov. 25 at Makers Central, a workspace for artisans, and he may do it again for the holidays. He’s also looking for a bigger production space.
But he has no plans to give up the cabinet, or his Sunday morning email, which always ends with the same line: "Have a sour Sunday!"
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