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Happenings

Sudbury blog
Tags >> organic

Loaves and Wishes

Posted by: admin in jac12498

Tagged in: youth , sudbury , school , organic , fundraising , entrepreneur , bread , baking

If it's Thursday, Lily is making bread in the kitchen of the Hudson Valley Sudbury School. She's a one-woman show - taking the orders, toting the ingredients up and down from the school's chilly attic, mixing the dough, baking the loaves, wrapping the loaves, setting them out to be picked up, and collecting the money. She does not love bread especially, nor does she aspire to be a master baker - so why do it? Because she wants to go to London in the Fall.

Lily and four other HVSS students and one staff member are planning a trip to London, and more specifically, to Suffolk, England, to visit A.S. Neill's Summerhill School (http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/). Lily says she wants to visit the Summerhill School because it will be "cool to see how they do things." Baking bread to raise money for the trip started out as a group project, but very quickly everyone lost interest except for Lily. She says she keeps at it because she made a committment to do it and she wants to keep that commitment. Just a few weeks ago, profits were up around $500, but then she spent close to $300 buying bulk ingredients for future loaves.

Baking the bread is a two-day process: On Thursday afternoon, Lily measures out the dry ingredients, adds the water, mixes the dough and then covers it. She leaves it covered on a counter for 12 to 18 hours. There's very little yeast in the recipe, but since the rise is so long the dough has a chance to collect yeasts from the air. On Friday morning she turns the dough out onto a counter, lets it rest for 15 minutes, then shapes the loaves. They are then covered and left to rise for another 2 hours before going into the oven.