Baking Support
Christy Timon & Abe Faber
Timber Baking Consultants
FORMULA DEVELOPMENT
We can help turn all of your baking ideas into reality with clear standardized formulas (Excel based in Bakers Percent) and processes that work with your equipment, your employees, and your schedule.
PRODUCTION EFFICIENCES
We can tailor your existing formulas and processes to better fit your production schedules while enhancing consistency and quality in your bakery. Troubleshooting of challenges with your existing formulas and methods. We can conduct employee training from implementation of artisan baking basics to the rollout of new formulas and processes.
We are familiar with a full range of naturally leavened, as well as yeasted preferment-based, breads as well as lean and enriched doughs, holiday specialty breads, Viennoiserie, and pastry. Review of new bakery business plans, equipment and floor plan specs and design, etc.
We are especially excited by the opportunity to work with Maine Grains customers because we transitioned our bakeries use of whole grain flours over to locally sourced Maine Grains flours back in 2014 and have since worked extensively with Maine Grains flours both for existing products as well as developing many new breads inspired by, and based exclusively on, Maine Grains products. Therefore, we are well positioned to assist others with issues involved with transitioning formulas and processes to Maine Grains products.
FEES
We can be contracted on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis. Support can be in person or provided for some individual technical support issues by phone or email. We can also create formulas on a fee per formula basis. Please call or email for details that go into determining an appropriate rate for your project. Initial meetings to determine the scope of a project are complimentary.
About us
Christy founded Clear Flour Bread in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1983 in response to persistent requests for regular production of the naturally leavened breads she was baking for her catering business, Café Small. Abe came along a year later for a “temporary” job to fill in the gaps in a young artist’s pay and ended up instead gaining a wife as well as a life’s work and calling. Together, Christy and Abe grew the bakery to produce a wide range of authentic European breads and pastry in a manner that honored, preserved and nurtured the art and craft of traditional baking. For 35 years, they enjoyed the daily challenges of running the bakery, transforming flour, water, and yeast, into bread and pastry.
Christy and Abe are founding members of the Bread Bakers Guild of America, and have been recognized nationally as pioneers in the American renaissance of the production of the traditional hand-crafted, authentic, breads of Europe and continue to be involved at the forefront of modern applications of traditional baking education in America. Clear Flour Bread was recognized as the BEST OF BOSTON® by Boston Magazine in 14 separate years, as well as being recognized as one of America’s best bakeries by national magazines such as Food and Wine, Yankee, and Bon Appetit. In 2015, when the James Beard Foundation added a new award category for Outstanding Baker, Christy Timon and Abe Faber were honored to be named as semifinalists in that inaugural year of the award.
In late 2017, Christy and Abe “passed the torch” of their beloved bakery to a younger generation of owners. Now that they have retired from the daily 24/7 life of running a bakery they look forward to sharing their skills to assist other bakers around the country in developing, refining, and troubleshooting artisan baked goods and processes in their own communities.
