Hello Greenville Illinois!

Hello Greenville Illinois!

Welcome to Piety Hill Bakery

Please Note: We are full up on Friday, Oct. 7th. Thank you so much!!

We are currently baking

  Wed., Thurs., and Friday. Email your order to us by 7 pm the night prior, for next morning delivery.

EMAIL YOUR ORDER TO:

pietyhillbakery@yahoo.com

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We are home to Greenville Illinois’ one and only home-made, bagel and bread company. We are a Cottage industry in Greenville, Illinois delivering to any corner in Bond County. Life is too short to eat anything but real bread we figure!

Our specialty are “made from scratch” and boiled, authentic New York-Style Bagels. They are crunchy on the outside, dense and chewy inside; just the way a bagel should be! …

.Our bagels are available by special order through this blog on Wed., Thurs., and Fri., in batches of 6 or 9. Order info here: https://wp.me/PBsf7-p

Breads we currently offer are: French Baguettes, Country Loaf, Garlic/Rosemary Herb, and Grandma’s White Bread, available for delivery on Wednesday and Thurs. mornings. Simply text or email your order by 7 pm, for next morning delivery!

Wood~fired Oven Off On a New Adventure

We said goodbye to our wood~fired oven today, as it headed off to become part of another small food business in Salem, Illinois. We felt nostalgic, but grateful to have been able to experience this old timey way of baking bread, much as our ancestors would have in the past.

The last time we fired it up, we baked about 24 loaves of bread for a wedding, and in its future I see pizza’s and chicken wings possibly fired up on that hearth, down the road in Salem.

Thank you to all my customers who took advantage of this service! We continue to offer true New York style bagels on Tues.~ Fridays, and breads on Wednesdays, baked in our modern electric oven. Not nearly as romantic as firing up a wood fired oven, but certainly much simpler. It was a great romance while it lasted!!

Goodbye….goodbye…..

Piety Hill Plants

CLOSED FOR THE SEASON. OPEN AGAIN MAY 1,  SPRING 2021!

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Our newest home-based business is our front-door plant nursery. In the spirit of all “homestead” enthusiasts we love to try and make something of/with our passions. So welcome to Piety Hill Plants.

Our speciality this season are first year, small (and cheap!) perennial landscape bushes and flowers. Younger plants tend to transplant more successfully, and it’s so much easier to dig a hole for a 4″ pot, than a gallon container!

We are also creating one of a kind, rustic planters made of hypertufa. They are able to be left outdoors through winter, unlike ceramic pots. Resembling aged stone, they are a perfect compliment to the great outdoors.

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Growing Tobacco

I don’t smoke, but my gardening neighbor David had extra seedlings of tobacco.  How could I say no?  Here at Piety Hill Homestead, we are always trying out new plants for their usefulness.

Last summer I grew the common Burley type, used in commercial cigarette manufacturing, and this year he gave me a Hopi tobacco plant. This shorter,  more “rustic” type is used by various cultures in ritual practice, and I read it has about a 9% nicotene content as opposed to Burley’s 1- 3%.  Wow!  That oughta light up a pipe!

To use, I simply air-cured my tobacco leaves indoors last summer after they started turning yellow. Throughout the year, they made an excellent gift for visiting smoking friends.  Because it is a smoke mixture free of the 4,000 odd chemicals that going into store bought cigarettes, I feel happy to offer it as an alternative to my loved ones.

I also use it as a fabulous pesticide.  Dried or fresh, I steep it in water and spray it on plants that host bugs. If you walk by Piety Hill Bakery on 4th St., please pause and become acquainted with this beautiful and useful plant.  I’m sure I’ll have plenty of seed of both types so feel free to email for a freebie!

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Making Dandelion Wine

I have always thought dandelions were pretty.  I do dig them out of my flower beds when I feel motivated,  but I don’t ever use herbicides on my lawn,  so there are  dandelions galore to use from there.

Step one:  picked about 2 quarts, cleaned, used mostly just the blossomsStep two:  boiled for one hour with 4 Qts. water, 1 C. orange juice and zest, lemon juice, grated ginger, 4 C sugar and cloves

Step three:  strained, cooled to 100 degrees and added 1 pk. of baking yeast.  Let sit overnight.

Step four:  bottled, and covered with balloons that have pin holes in them

Step five:  wait IMPATIENTLY at least 6 months before drinking!

Foraging

Piety Hill Bakery was born out of need, but has grown out of a kind of love.  Back in 2009 when many of us were losing jobs we loved, to keep going, to pay the mortgage, we had to invent new ways of surviving.  I always thought Greenville was a wonderful town, but it lacked real bagels!  so I started making my own and offering them for sale.  This has turned into a humble but necessary avocation.  Another survival skill that I have been learning is to forage for food, and I am loving this simple way to find food for FREE!

Here is a pan of greens gathered from around my yard.  Since I am a beginner I am very careful to only eat plants that I know very well.  Included are dandelions, lambs-quarters, plantain leaves, nasturtium and violet leaves.  I sauted them in olive oil, and then rolled an egg around them.  A little pepper, garlic powder, and voila!  Or blacken them with some green tomatoes, bell pepper and serve on a fresh Piety Hill Baguette!Recommended reading for food foragers:  “Feasting Free on Wild Edibles” by Bradford Angier
“The Wild Vegan Cookbook” by “Wildman” Steve Brill

French Baguette

“My love costs me dearly, but I’ve baked and set it on the sill for you to consume. We are match and stick. Eaten up quickly and ever full.” ~ Alex Gohde

An authentic french baguette bakes best hot and fast in a wood-fired oven.   In just about 12 minutes the  crust is very crisp, the crumb full of holes, and it is bursting with moisture,  just for the day.  That is why in France, a fresh baguette is picked up each day.  Let us deliver one to you, each Wednesday or Saturday in time for your breakfast.  They are now available piping hot from Piety Hill Bakery. True bread is never meant to keep for a week!

Order a baguette by 8 pm on a Tuesday, and receive it  between 8 and 10  the following morning. They go great with any meal, and would make the Best Sub Sandwhich’s ever for busy folks like us!

Kulich

Excited to have a little mention of Piety Hill Bakery in the Chicago Tribune last week!

We are baking  Kulich bread up until May Day.  For many Slavic peoples around the world,  the  Easter season wouldn’t be Easter without this festive bread.

My Russian mother made Kulich at Easter-time  for my brother and I  as we were growing up in South America!  Perhaps you can make it a tradition for your children as well.  I bet they would really enjoy the extravagant shape, color and the sweet flavor!

Our Kulich is made with 6 eggs, milk, butter, sugar, flour, orange &  lemon zest, vanilla, raisins, nuts, and a tad of rum in the frosting.

Each ingredient is rich with symbolic meaning.

The Bee Dept.

They say you can never be “too…this, or too that….” but I say: you can never have too many hobbies!

I tried raising bees two summers ago and after a great start, they all suddenly died that fall. I didn’t  know what happened & I was devastated!  An experienced beekeeper was kind enough to come and look over the situation, but he couldn’t figure out what happened either. There is a bee population decline around the world as most people know by now, and I think raising bees may be a very important hobby to keep working at.

And so I am trying again….and I am excited! I love bees very much. Not just that they provide honey for us (which of course goes really well with bagels :)) but that their culture is so cohesive, and so hard-working! What an inspiration.

Here is what my new little bee colony kept busy with this month:

After their journey via USPS to my home, the bees left their crate and settled into my topbar beehive so they could be by their queen. She came in her own teeny box with a couple attendents, and I placed her in my hive which drew the surviving crated bees inside.

First, they need to check out their new digs and they like to cover the entrance to their new home with some kind of substance, as they are doing above right.

Stay Tuned!

Canadian Connections

My father was born in Consort Alberta, and raised on a homestead near Arlee, Saskatchewan.  He was the oldest boy of 11 children.

His parents had left the Caucaus region of  Russia in the early 1900’s  to find a new life in North America, and so my Russian/Canadian connection starts back there.

When he was in his early twenties, my dad’s family moved eastward.  They settled into a much easier life in Niagara Falls, Ontario, leaving behind the rugged  life of the western Canadian prairie.

I inherited many things from my father:  a love of the plains,  cowboys and horses, a passion for building things, and especially his artistic eye, and a “make-d0” frontier spirit.

Even as I make decisions about bread-making I can see this heritage manifesting itself.  There was no doubt from the get-go, that  I needed to make bread the old way. From the numerous wood-fired bread oven styles recorded, I chose to build the 700 year old French oven design, which found its New World resolution in the Quebec clay ovens of Eastern Canada.

And now, as I am deciding which of my all-white bread recipes to offer here at Piety Hill Bakery, I have chosen a recipe passed down from a Canadian woman who was born, raised, and baked bread in a Far North Canadian fishing village some  50 years ago.  She was not my grandmother, but I feel it apropos to call it:  Grandmother’s White Bread.

The recipe is almost exactly like the historic “Sally Lunn”  bread,  much loved by colonial Virginia settlers, except that it does not include eggs.  Better for us all, I figure—less cholesterol.  Old World meets New World!!

available as a pan bread or a boule

Thank you for buying our breads.  They are currently available on Wednesdays and Thursdays.  If we have enough orders we bake in our brick oven, if we have just a few, we bake indoors in our traditional electric oven.  We are  always learning!  Mis-steps are the mistress of learning 🙂 

Call in your order the night before (by 8 pm) at: (618) 581-3480  Or email us at pietyhillbakery@Yahoo.com    

PS.  Thank you for carrying on the Old  World traditions. If your power (or ours) is down, or your computer or phone not working, simply drop off your order in our mailbox.  We will still be baking .

Demonstrations of our wood-fired oven are available at no charge to groups such as Girl-Scouts, Boy-Scouts, DVBS, etc.  Give us a call!  ( Please Note:  we have sold our brick oven, so this service is NO LONGER available.)