A DAY (OR 3) IN THE LIFE OF... IZOLA sourdough takes a three day journey before it reaches your mouth. Ever wonder what that journey looks like? Here's an in depth behind-the-scenes - a day (or 3) in the life of a loaf of IZOLA Sourdough...
Before our sourdough starts to take shape, the team carefully scales all of the dried ingredients for the week. They prepare the amendments that will go into our sourdough like roasting whole cloves of garlic and mixing whole kalamata and Castelvetrano olives with pecans, freshly zested lemon and herbes de Provence.
Day 1: On Tuesday the team warms up our leaven three times throughout the day (once at 5a, again at 11a, then again at 4p), carefully monitoring temperatures and rise. Instead of yeast, we use this natural leaven which gives our sourdough its rise and loft. It's powered by the microflora here in the East Village. If you want to try your hand at sourdough at home, we're happy to share our starter with you! It will become uniquely your own as you feed and work with it in your own neighborhood.
Day 2: First thing in the morning a team member will feed the leaven one last time. We then begin to mix the dough in three steps - the initial mix occurs, and we let it soak for an hour before adding in the powerful leaven. That then sits before we add the salt. Once the dough is ready, we begin the folding stage. In tubs we lift and stretch the dough 4 times throughout the day (we do not knead the dough). Throughout this process the team is monitoring and managing the ambient temperature in the room, watching the rise of the dough, and measuring the temperature of the dough.
When the dough is ready, our team begins the pre-shaping process where they remove the dough from the bins, divide the dough, scale it, then give it an initial shape and let it rest.
After their rest, they get a final shape and into the reed baskets they go, where they will rest overnight in our walk-in cooler. It's a long and active day for our sourdough team get each loaf to this point on day 2!
Day 3: SHOWTIME! On bake day our Bake team will unload the sourdough nine loaves at a time onto our loader, removing them from the reed baskets. They will stencil and flour each loaf, then score each one before they head into our Salva stone deck ovens.
Once the loaves have baked and come out of our ovens, our job isn't over yet! The Bake team checks them for quality - they measure the loaves to ensure the scale is accurate and they will slice into a loaf as well to check the structure of the crumb. All of these QC checks are reported to our Sourdough team via Slack as daily feedback and metrics to help our Sourdough team perfect their craft each day. Once the bake has passed our quality checks they move onto our packing and running station where the team will deliver the sourdough to you, hot from the oven! Pre-orders for the week are open now. If you have a pre-order and can't find a parking spot, no problem! Double park downstairs and call us at (619) 289-8358, we'll run your order down to you. We call it IZOLA DRIVE-BY.
NEXT WEDNESDAY Join us next Wednesday to learn more about our equity offering and how you can become an owner in IZOLA. Jenny and I will share with you how against all odds IZOLA is changing the way San Diego thinks about croissants and sourdough: Super premium ingredients. Hot from the oven all day. Great service. Amazing hospitality. Community. Justice. And our guests are coming back day after day after day even with all of the obstacles - hidden on the 3rd floor, no parking, selling out every day...imagine what we can do with your help. We are planning a future with IZOLA croissants and sourdough available hot from the oven at BREAD CAFES throughout San Diego and Orange County, and via IZOLA Bake at Home available in grocery stores, restaurants and shipped overnight to consumers across Southern California. All driven by equity and justice. How? The key is the IZOLA Dough Innovation Center + Bake Shop in City Heights. It will bring 20 + living wage careers to the neighborhood, increase our production by 1000%, increase our quality and increase our profit margin. The design is almost finished and it will be filled with cutting-edge technology from all over the world: Germany, Japan, Netherlands, USA, France. Round 3 of our Equity Offering is live now! Please visit our IZOLA Equity Offering Portal for more information. And we invite you to attend one of the Investor Conversations (next one is Wednesday April 19, register below). They are a relaxed discussion and peek behind the curtain of IZOLA's Future. Want to help build something amazing? Join us!
IZOLA MUSIC SATURDAY Every Saturday IZOLA hosts live music - come see how diverse and talented our San Diego community is! Here are just a few of the folks that will be by. We publish the full schedule every Friday night in our Instagram Story. Head on over there and follow us now!
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