Day 59: Risky business

Not a lot to report today. Survived on coffee, just. Second half of the Cooking for Pleasure and Profit lecture today, so no cooking. Got in early though to do a bit of bread work.

I had refreshed my sourdough starter twice over the last couple of days. This morning I took half of the 40 oz and whisked it up to activate the yeast. The other half goes back in the jar and lives on as the starter for my next batch. I let it settle for a while, and set to work on a ciabatta starter (or biga to use the correct term). In the school's ciabatta recipe, we only use cream flour, which has a lower gluten content than baker's flour. This is to keep the dough lighter and preserve the texture. I had been chatting to someone about this. In Italy they use stronger flour for flavour, and you get the chewy consistency. I decide to experiment, so use half cream flour for my starter, and half double zero flour, that the Italians use to make pizza because of its high gluten content. I whisk it up with yeast and water, and leave it to rest until tomorrow.

Once that's dealt with, I knead my sourdough sponge together with the rest of the flour and water. I try and keep it nice and wet. I let it stand and rise at room temperature during the day, and after class I knock it back and shape it into a basket. Its next rising takes place in the cold room, to slow down the yeast activity and give the bread more time to develop the sour flavour. My last sourdough had a great texture but lacked sourness. The starter is more developed this time and I am keeping it away from loaf tins, as they reduce the crust to crumb ratio, thus inhibiting development of the bread's unique and wonderful qualities. We shall see what the day brings forth.

The lecture is interesting, though a bit frustrating at times. We cover costing, pricing, food percentages and profit margins. I am fortunate enough to be quite good with numbers, and this makes me selfishly impatient with people who are not. After lunch we go through a case study of some dude who was setting up a coffee shop/deli in a little town somewhere in Ireland. We have a good summary of his business plan, copy of his proposed menu and even a floor plan of the premises. We have to digest this and answer questions as a group.

I can't see it myself. The town has a population of 1,200. There is a supermarket that processes just 4,000 transactions a week. He is borrowing shit loads of cash to get off the ground. For me the risk/reward ratio is just too high. His menu is really comprehensive too, and in a town with such low footfall he's going to be throwing a lot away. If I was him I would be downscaling my project, reducing my borrowings and seeing how things pan out. But really, I can't help but feel that he has a vision for a business and is trying to make it fit somewhere where the hole isn't quite big enough.

The second half of the case study looks at the changes the consultant recommended, where the business is now (eighteen months later) and what his latest initiatives have been. He's doing really well. What that means, it transpires, is that he is breaking even. In the downturn he has developed an outside catering business, which is proving to be a fruitful diversification. But his debts from the coffee shop will last for another six years. (This is a success story, remember). It begs the question; should he really have opened in the first place? He is running credit crunch specials in the coffee shop and paying astronomical utility bills. I bet if he moved his kitchen gear to some industrial estate and ran the catering businesses from there he'd be a hell of a lot better off. But sans café. Of all the food businesses that fail, how many of them are driven by blind optimism and reluctance to face (or grasp) reality?

Why do I always approach these things with such negativity? We kind of talked about it today - not doing something will never cost you money, I said. It might cost you an opportunity, but it won't make you worse off. It's true. You might miss a few buses along the way, but it's getting on the right one that counts. It all comes down to risk. To take a big one, you need a lot of boxes ticked. You might have a dream, a vision, but on its own, it won't be enough - it has to work too, and it has to make money. You can't spend three precious years busting your balls to break even. Life is too fragile, and people too fickle, for that.

They say every successful business needs a dreamer, a do-er and a bastard. I never could quite work out which one I was. I can say for sure though, I definitely wasn't the dreamer. Come to think of it, I never really did a lot either...