Through the years, my handle, “GoofyDawg,” has been associated with two things: Web Development and Guitar; essentially what I do professionally, and what is one of my life’s passions. I started this blog to talk about “other” things. These could include tech stuff and music, but with a different, more personal twist.

I’ve had this site for several years, and never really did anything with it but post random thoughts and things about careers or politics. But as of 2020, my life has taken an interesting turn and I’ve now found a new passion: Artisan Bread Making.

It started out as something to do at the start of the Covid lockdown. I looked up some recipes online after some friends had posted pictures of their Dutch oven bread on Facebook. I was like, wow! They said it was so easy to make.

So I looked up some recipes online to find out about the process and I started to make some loaves. But I quickly got bored of making boules all the time. I wanted to make baguettes and batards. I wanted to make hearty country-style loaves. I wanted to make sandwich bread. You can’t do that in a round or oval Dutch oven.

The limitations of my baking media (Dutch oven) quickly led me to investing in a variety of baking tools and implements. I bought a Fibrament-D baking stone so I could bake multiple loaves at once. I bought a spiral dough hook to make my dough mixing more efficient (I still knead by hand, but do the initial mix in my KitchenAid). I got different types of pans to cook uniform loaves, etc.,etc..

In other words, I totally geeked out on making bread.

So going forward, though I may still write about other topics, this site is going to be devoted to my artisan bread making journey.

Update: June 22, 2021

And as luck would have it, now in mid-2021, I’ve baked so much and given away so much bread that I’ve decided to officially start a micro-bakery out of my house called Dawg House Bakery. I want to start fairly humbly with this by doing custom bakes for private and corporate events and will eventually scale up my production to handle farmers markets and larger special events.

Woof!