 I took the long way home. The night was wet and so warm I rolled my sleeves up above the elbow and undid the buttons at my neck while I waited at a stoplight. After the day’s heat, scents bloomed in the light rain. I rode open mouthed, tasting the city on my tongue. I wanted to remember each night smell, I wanted to find the adjectives and metaphors to hold them, but they were subtle and I was moving too fast. Between one breath and the next, they changed and were gone. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Herb & Olive Oil Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Shortbread Strawberry Rhubarb Slab Pie Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: MILK & HONEY  “Why do you bike?” she asked me. The question shouldn’t have taken me by surprise, but it did. “Because I like to,” I said, reaching out for more words and coming back empty-handed. The conversation moved on. As answers go, it was true enough, but thoroughly inadequate. Never mind noise and air pollution, never mind the costs of transit infrastructure and public health, never mind livable cities and public safety, never mind geopolitics and oil. Those are all good stories, true stories. I could have told any of them. Or I could have finished the story I’d begun, had I not gone mind-empty and tongue-tied. Here is the story: I like to bicycle. I like having half an hour inside the world and its weather, with the wind and sunshine and the driving rain against my face, with the sky opening above me and the smells of the city—woodsmoke, the chemical choke of fabric softener from a dryer vent, petrichor, cut grass, the bloom of night flowers, the secret wilderness of water and forest under the Dupont bridge—blowing by, even if I spend the rest of the day shut up inside a wood and concrete box. And I like the mechanical efficiency of cycling: the way muscle translates so effortlessly into speed. I like the freedom a bicycle’s speed and size gives me to explore off the city’s arteries and into the winding capillaries of the neighborhoods, with an eye out for pocket parks and abandoned fruit trees. I like the rush of descent, crouched low, waiting, waiting, waiting, faster, and braking just in time for the intersection. I like bicycling as a small, daily act of thanksgiving: for a body that is strong and capable, for the day, for the city, for the minutes between one task and another, when all I need to do is pedal and breath and watch out for homicidal drivers. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Herb & Olive Oil Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Shortbread Strawberry Rhubarb Slab Pie Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: SPICED RING RYE!  I like waking up early to write these Saturday newsletters--truly, I do--but sometimes it's hard to convince myself of that when the first alarm rings, or the second. Sometimes the pull of sleep is too strong. This was one of those mornings. See you at market in a few hours! Sophie Owner | Baker  TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Herb & Olive Oil Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Shortbread Strawberry Rhubarb Slab Pie Sour Cherry Rhubarb Slab Pie Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: Summer Garden  Sixty degrees and overcast: now this is proper Northwestern summer weather. The hot, clear days through April and May and early June were lovely, but felt foreign and vaguely ominous. When I was a child, it rained through the 4th of July. A hyperbole of memory, I'm sure, but how many parades did we shiver through during those island summers, watching the old cars and the floats roll past and scrambling for the saltwater taffy the riders tossed into the thin crowd? TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Herb & Olive Oil Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Oat Scone Shortbread Strawberry Rhubarb Slab Pie Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription through July 31 RED & WHITE Subscription $49 MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription $49 BAKER's CHOICE Subscription $56 Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: FARMER RYE (a crackled rye boule with wheat, buckwheat, and corn!)  (accidentally candid self portrait on the loading dock because I lost track of the camera timer) After long hours cocooned in the fluorescent, time-warping glare of the commissary I stepped out onto the loading dock and woke up for the first time all day. There, for a few minutes, I had the low sun heating my back and the breeze against my skin. I had the sounds of traffic and sea gulls and the busker on the corner. Beneath the breeze I could smell the alley: sewer and garbage and the restaurant a few doors down. And suddenly I was close to tears, the grief caught in my throat as I held my breath against the pressure in my eyes. The whole day gone and I had missed it. A small grief, this lost day, but I stood with it for a moment longer, remembering to breath, remembering the feel and sight and taste of the outside, remembering the sun and the world turning, before I went back in to work. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Herb & Olive Oil Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Oat Scone Shortbread Strawberry Rhubarb Slab Pie! (though I don't know how this will hold up in pastry bags. BYO bowl and fork, perhaps?) Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription through July 31 RED & WHITE Subscription $49 MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription $49 BAKER's CHOICE Subscription $56 Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: Polenta  I pull into the usual Skagit gas station twenty minutes early, park, drop the tailgate, and sit down to wait. Ten minutes later another truck pulls in beside me. Seth gets out, lifting a five gallon bucket from the bed as he walks over and thumping it onto the tailgate just as I stand. We make small talk for a few minutes—business, the warm spring—before I nod to the bucket and ask, “Blackberry?” “Yes,” he says, “from last year. The blackberries are blooming but the honey won’t be ready for a few months yet, and I sent all the maple out with the splits.” I always listen to his bee reports with interest, but this time I hear some of what he leaves unsaid, the assumed knowledge that experts can’t help but layer into their conversations when speaking on their favorite subjects. Hearing it makes me feel like an insider, self-satisfied and maybe a little smug, and I have to grab metaphorical hold of my tongue to stop myself from asking questions just to show off my understanding. I have all sorts of bee facts bumping around my head right now because I’m on my way home from the Honey Baking Summit: two days of lectures, tastings, and baking bench time at Johnson & Wales University in Providence. I was surprised to be invited to the Summit, and thoroughly flattered, though I tried to sound casual when I told people where I was going. “Oh, yes, just another trade group offering to fly me out to a gathering of top bakers, no big deal, happens all the time.” But it’s never happened before, and I’ve never been to an event like this: fully industry funded but free of hustle. I knew a few of the bakers personally and others by reputation. Raven Breads was far and away the smallest business represented, but bakers are are, for the most part, friendly, and there was too much I wanted to learn from them and from the instructors to allow myself shyness. So instead of listening quietly from the edges, as I’m always tempted to do in crowds of new people, I put on my extrovert mask, ill-fitting though it is, and stepped in to learn about honey. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Herb & Olive Oil Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Oat Scone Hazelnut Crumb Cake Shortbread Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription, June 12- July 31 RED & WHITE Subscription $56 MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription $56 BAKER's CHOICE Subscription $64 TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White Herb & Olive Oil Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Hazelnut Crumb Cake Shortbread Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription, June 12- July 31 RED & WHITE Subscription $56 MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription $56 BAKER's CHOICE Subscription $64, and is tentatively made up of the following: 6/12 Toasted Sesame (wheat + sesame) 6/19 Polenta(wheat + corn) 6/26 Farmer (rye + wheat) 7/3 Summer Garden (wheat, herbs, olive oil) 7/10 Ring Rye (rye) 7/17 Milk & Oat (wheat + milky oat porridge) 7/24 Rugbrod (rye) 7/31 Wild & Seedy (wheat + seeds)  Despite all indications to the contrary (namely, my laughably financially insecure profession), I’m not a risk taker. I’m obnoxiously frugal. I look before I leap. Often, I look for so long that from the outside the leap looks impulsive. From the inside, though, it’s the only remaining option. For years, I rolled with the long bake days. If the orders spiked and I had to spend sixteen, eighteen, twenty hours in the kitchen, I did. Sure, it sucked, but with tea and snacks and maybe a nap on the grungy floor, I could make it through. I even felt a kind of stupid pride in my endurance. By last year, though, I was getting tired. It wasn’t enough to push through the week and sleep on Sunday. The bakery was supposed to be work. Work that I liked, certainly, maybe even work that I loved, but not my reason for existence. I was sliding dangerously close to burnout and I was too exhausted to do anything about it. I had my first sixteen hour day in months last Tuesday. By the end I was aching and tired, but I wasn’t resigned. “No fucking way am I getting into this again,” I thought, and went on Craigslist to buy the first used oven I could find that would stack with the oven I bake in now. The newest addition to the mangy herd of ranges and ovens crowded under the Type 1 hood in the commissary isn’t a deck oven, of course. It isn’t even a combi. It’s just another fan-on-all-the-time American Range convection oven. But honestly, when I bought it, I didn’t think about long term equipment investments or the hassle of reselling it when I move out of the commissary. I didn’t think about amortization or margins. I’ve calculated and recalculated those equations, and in the end when I thought about my sore feet, about the production bottleneck at the oven, about how much I hate working through dinner, they didn’t matter. I leapt. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker P.S. I'm not actually sure how I'm going to take these two 680lb ovens off their stands and stack them together. If you have expertise in moving heavy objects, or just good lifting form and some free time Monday, I'd love help solving this rather daunting puzzle.   TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Rosemary Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Hazelnut Crumb Cake Shortbread ORDER ONLINE: Wednesday's BAKER's CHOICE: Raisin Honey Rye Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription, June 12- July 31 Tell me about kitchen thrift. Tell me about breadcrumbs and crostini, about the ribolitta of your childhood, about the almond croissants and bostock at your favorite bakery. Tell me about strata and bread pudding, about casseroles at the end of the week, about kvass bubbling on the counter, and the brødtort you once ate in Denmark and never forgot. Tell me about your grandma pressing the crumbs from the bottom of the cookie jar into a cheesecake crust and about rye slices in the pickle crock. Tell me about bread and pastry rescued and reborn. Eliminating waste is, for me, both an economic and an ecological choice. It’s easy enough in this little one-woman business to be mindful. At the end of a bake day I have an empty flour sack stuffed with burnt parchment, herb stems, and fruit scraps for the compost. Maybe a bottle to recycle, or a bit of unavoidable plastic packaging for the trash. At the end of a market day, thanks to you, I rarely have much left over, and what I do have I can easily barter or give away. But I imagine that as the business grows, so too will its potential for waste. And so I think about apple peel vinegar and orange marmalade, about cherry pits in vodka, about the small economies of cost and flavor. And I think about a cafe menu built on lost bread and pastry and the creativity of working without waste. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Rosemary Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Hazelnut Crumb Cake Shortbread ORDER ONLINE: Wednesday's BAKER's CHOICE: Blue Corn Nixtamal Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription, June 12- July 31  I’m still looking for my bakery. Possible bakeries are not thick on the ground. Every time I walk into one of these potential spaces with a friend or contractor, they ask what I want of it. “Will this be sit down or grab and go?” the friend wants to know. “What will it look like up here in front?” “What kind of trims do you want?” asks the contractor. “Will you need structural changes?” All reasonable and important questions, but ones I’ve found surprisingly difficult to answer. The bakery I’ve built in my mind is so detailed and particular, the daydream is hard to cram into the imperfect reality of these spaces. So I tell the contractor about the utility hookups I’ll need and ask about daylighting. I stand by the front door with my friend and look around. “Sit down, for sure,” I tell him. “But no modern cafe minimalist with white subway tile and house plants!” Which gets a laugh, but isn’t a real answer. If pressed about design and trims, I evade by describing the way I hope the space will feel, filled with light and warmth and the smell of baking bread, with friends and strangers talking over coffee and sweets at the long tables. Or maybe I describe the rough geometric patterns I love: flagstone floors, herringbone brick paths, cobblestones, ikat and shibori textiles, Mayan embroidery, Berber rugs, the sides of Appalachian barns. Perhaps, in a moment of literary overreach, I try to use the country kitchen of the beloved, plodding old books of my childhood as metaphor: the heavy crockery and scarred table, the light slanting across limewashed walls, and just outside the door a kitchen garden, beds lined in low, tidy box hedges and a fig tree espaliered against the sunny northern wall. But these aren’t answers either. These aren’t paint colors or building plans. I’m not sure they’re even a cohesive aesthetic. So, how do I want the retail bakery to look? What trims do I want? I couldn’t tell you. But maybe if you come across a pallet of salvaged brick, or reclaimed lumber with stories written across its grain, or wallpaper inspired by resist dyed textile, give me a call. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Rosemary Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Hazelnut Crumb Cake Shortbread ORDER ONLINE: Wednesday's BAKER's CHOICE: Wild & Seedy Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription, June 12- July 31 |