A Thanksgiving community bread bake at Grist & Toll

If you’ve not been to one of Grist & Toll’s community bread baking events, this next one, to be held this Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., might be the one to try. The Pasadena “urban flour mill” will be hosting a special Thanksgiving oven day at which they’re hoping to bake and donate at least 100 loaves of bread to Foothill Unity Center in Pasadena.

For the uninitiated, Grist & Toll‘s bread bakes are community events in which co-owner Nan Kohler brings Michael O’Malley and his giant mobile oven (MOMO) to the parking lot in front of the mill and its retail shop. O’Malley fires up the oven — a massive wood-burning oven on wheels with a conveyor belt — and loads all the unbaked loaves that everyone’s brought in.

While your bread bakes, you can chat with other local bakers, check out the massive Osttiroler flour mill from Austria that’s inside, buy some flour, and sample some of the snacks and drinks that are served in the cute retail shop. As this bake marks Grist & Toll’s one-year anniversary, there will be plenty on hand. This is good, as all the bread to be baked this weekend is to be donated — thus if you get hungry, as the smell of freshly baked bread is wont to make you, there will be other things to eat.

If you plan to have bread to bake, please email info@gristandtoll.com with the number of loaves you’re bringing, as well as your preference for oven load time (11 a.m., 12:30 p.m., 2 p.m., 3:30 p.m., 5 p.m.) This should be when your bread has proofed enough and is ready to go into the oven. (Maybe err a little on under-proofing, as sometimes you have to wait a bit for the oven to reach the right temperature; better to under-proof than to over-proof loaves of bread.)

“We’ll probably be making this an annual holiday event,” says Kohler. So happy baking — now and in the future.

990 S. Arroyo Parkway, Pasadena.

Follow me on Twitter @AmyScattergood and check out my loaves of bread on Instagram @ascattergood.