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I would like to keep this time, when the house is quiet, and I sit by the window looking out at the flowering quince and the witch hazel, both long past their bloom, at our neighbor's tidy roofline, and at the morning light rising through the trees as the steam rises from the mug in my hands. I would like to keep it with me. I would like to fold it up as neat as a letter and put it in my pocket, to take out and read over when the world gets loud. Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot The last Country Rye (probably) Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Black Sesame & Fennel Palmier Cardamom Apple Tart Plum Kuchen Shortbread Granola Wednesday Preorder Wild & Seedy! Mountain Rye Shortbread Good morning. See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker POSTSCRIPT: OVERHEARD
Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a cover story for The Atlantic this week on our white president. It is, like everything he writes, thoughtful and thought provoking. It started with a bread lesson. "Will you teach me to make bread?" one of my housemates asked. "Yes," I said. And then, after a pause, added slyly, "if teach me to use the sewing machine." And so the house skillshare, scheduled for an unspecified day in the dark of winter, was born. Now every time one of us demonstrates an interesting talent, that too is added to the list. Mixing craft cocktails. Speaking French. We have rather a lot of odd knowledge bumping around our collective heads. By the time winter comes, we may have to establish a school. Thinking about what parts of this craft are most essential to a home baker has been rather like pruning a knowledge tree. Each twig is budding with possibility, but to see the scaffolding of sturdy branches underneath, one must cut away the small wood. Only, how small is too small? What if the twig is especially lovely? I spend so much of my life looking out from between the branches that I've rather lost perspective. Out of this pruning and practice, I hope to emerge with some better sense of how to communicate the making of bread, or at least, the making of my bread. It is a specific variety, this tree of mine. A gnarly, russeted, late fall apple, perhaps, rather than a tidy dwarf tree with easy, smooth fruit. Or maybe I flatter myself. My bread is no Karmijn de Sonnaville. At least, not yet. Anyways, I think, after I get over my old terror of standing in front of the class (and standing around my kitchen with friends should be a good start), I would like to teach some bread classes. It is all very well to tell you what goes into my loaves, but even better to show you. What do you think? Would you like to learn something more of wholegrain sourdough? Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Black Sesame & Fennel Palmier Croissant Cinnamon Twist Granola + Shortbread Wednesday Order (due by Sunday night) Cinnamon Raisin Mountain Rye Brown Butter Shortbread See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker POSTSCRIPT: OVERHEARD
Need one last push to get you off Facebook? Read this rather terrifying piece from the LRB. It's another glorious blue day, the market breads and pastries are exceptionally handsome, I'm headed to the mountains tomorrow with friends to eat huckleberries and swim in icy alpine lakes, my tea is steeped and steaming, and oh, I'm glad to be here! Unfortunately, there's no time to sit and revel in weekend anticipation because I need to go set up the market stand, so, down to business: The Fall Bread Subscription starts up this coming Wednesday! You can sign up at market today or online until tomorrow. Don't forget! The first bread in the Baker's Choice lineup is a celebration of the late summer harvest, with herbs and caramelized onions. Later in September you'll get Wild & Seedy, Oat & Honey, and Cinnamon Raisin. And who knows what wonders await you in October! Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Croissant, Danish, Cinnamon Sugar Twist Black Sesame Palmier Shortbread Granola Wednesday Pickup Garden Bread: Herb + Onion Red & White Mountain Rye Shortbread See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker POSTSCRIPT: OVERHEARD(I’m introducing a new postscript to my weekly newsletter with the best of what I’ve read or listened to in the past week(ish). As with most of what I write here, this is only tangentially connected to baking, in that I listen to dozens of hours of podcasts and audiobooks every week to turn off the anxiety-inducing white roar of the commissary kitchen, and for the pure pleasure of having someone tell me stories.)
Were I to write a book, I would want to write a book such as this: On Immunity is the perfect interweaving of personal and political, of narrative and fact. Whatever you think of vaccines (you can guess, I'm sure, where I stand on the matter), it is a beautiful book. On the corner, the ground around the old apple tree is littered with fruit. The apples are a freckled yellow, and so mealy-soft they smear beneath my boots. Back home I cut out the bruises and toss the them into a saucepan, where they dissolve into a pale, pink sauce that I will use in the Country Rye. The Italian plums are darkening purple, and the sun-baked scent of blackberries rises like a memory of my childhood summers from the thickets along the roadside. They smell like walking barefoot over the cracked city sidewalk, like lake swimming, like the Pop Goes the Weasel jangle of the ice cream truck weaving harmonies with police sirens, like scratched arms and sticky hands and pie for breakfast. These golden days are ripe to bursting, the city and fields pregnant with summer sun, even as the nights cool and the light gentles. The rain has not yet returned. It is my favorite time of year. Today is my birthday, and like every saturday, I’ll spend it selling bread at the market and admiring the sky. Come by for a loaf, or to sign up for the Fall Bread Subscription that starts up in a week and a half. Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Croissant, Cinnamon Roll, Danish Shortbread Granola LAST Wednesday Market Red, White, & Blue Cornbread Mountain Rye See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker POSTSCRIPT: OVERHEARD(I’m introducing a new postscript to my weekly newsletter with the best of what I’ve read or listened to in the past week(ish). As with most of what I write here, this is only tangentially connected to baking, in that I listen to dozens of hours of podcasts and audiobooks every week to turn off the anxiety-inducing white roar of the commissary kitchen, and for the pure pleasure of having someone tell me stories.)
Whether or not you've done a cleanse. or a taken diet advice from Instagram, this smart disection of Clean Eating from The Gaurdian is worth your time. You already know how I feel about fad diets, so the fact that I'm skepticle of this one will come as no surprise, but even I, a born and bred contrarian, had to acknowledge as I read that I've unthinkingly adopted any number of ideas from our latest dietary obsession. By chance and the circumstance of my interests, I’ve read a pile of books and articles recently on the costs of capitalism, from science fiction, to business, to investigative reporting and white papers. I had thought that this week I might throw my own small stones against the wall of our peculiar economic institution. A brief elaboration of my anti-consumerism philosophy, perhaps, laid out in a bullet-pointed list, with witty caveats and sly asides. People are so fond of clever listicles, especially when the alternative is real and dark emotion. But I have always been too shy and earnest to play the class clown, and besides, the rules I try to live by are so simple they hardly deserve a list: don’t buy things you don’t need; if you need things, buy them used; and if they must be new, buy goods that are well-made and expensive. You know all that already. It is no great insight of mine that our blind and unquenchable hunger is consuming the world. On the bookshelf outside my childhood bedroom was a row of books by Adrienne Rich, and tucked inside The Dream of a Common Language was an event bill for a reading at Temple University in 1976, with the poem Power on one side, and on the other, a note to my mother in Mormor’s scratchy hand: And I sat and listened and wept silently, self conscious about my middle-aged maudlinity until I realized that the 20 year old sitting next to me had tears running down her cheeks. Thank you for introducing me to Adrienne Rich. - B I still remember my grandmother—molecular biologist, single mother, civil rights activist, a woman too big in both mind and body for the space society gave her—every time I read the poem. It is one of my favorites. I thought of it again as I finished reading yet another great tragedy of the Anthropocene, grief and anger closed like a hand around my throat. I thought of it because Marie Curie is a perfect allegory for our civilization, because we are brilliant and beautiful, curious and endlessly inventive, willingly blind and willfully denying to the end our wounds, “denying [our] wounds came from the same source as [our] power." POWER by Adrienne Rich Living in the earth-depositis of our history Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old cure for fever or melancholy a tonic for living on this earth in the winters of this climate Today I was reading about Marie Curie: she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness her body bombarded for years by the element she had purified It seems she denied to the end the source of the cataracts on her eyes the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil She died a famous woman denying her wounds denying her wounds came from the same source as her power Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate + Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Croissant Palmier Buckwheat Tart Shortbread + Granola Wednesday Market Red & White Mountain Rye Sweets And on a less woefully serious note, it's almost fall! Sign up for the first eight weeks of the FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION on the website or at market for weekly Wednesday pickups in Birchwood, downtown, or in Fairhaven. But if you want to sign up with a credit card online, you have to wait till tonight, because I'm once again running late, and out of time to update the website!
See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker I am rarely alone while baking. All day and into the night I listen. The words keep me company through hours that can be achingly long, and block out some of the noise and chaos of the kitchen I share with a half dozen other businesses. I often start the day with news podcasts (oh, for a radio tuned to the gentle repetition of NPR, as in the kitchens of my childhood!). I listen to The Takeaway or Up First for the headlines, NPR Politics for the view inside the Beltway, Intercepted for a more cynical twist on the same, KUOW for happenings around the Sound. I am usually still alone in the kitchen at this point, the first desperate rush of mixing and shaping over, settled into the steadier rhythms of fermentation. I am moving fast and sure-handed. I reach for words as deep as still water, for ideas that will carry me like a river. Thich Nhat Hanh on mindfulness, or Atul Gawande on death. I am invigorated by the work and by the words. I am all possibility and hunger. The day crests, doughs mixed, temperature climbing despite the open door to the alley, oven on a continuous burn. I begin to tire. Just slightly. Not physically, yet, but my mind slows and my ambition flags. I focus on one step and then the next. There is no room anymore for philosophy, or natural history, or cultural criticism. I reach instead for a story, a bold narrative to carry me on. This week it was The Dispossessed. Another week Americanah, or All the Light We Cannot See: novels carried as much by the power of their story as by their writing. Around the twelfth or fourteenth hour I begin to fall. My feet ache, and my knees. My eyes are gritty. I am sticky with sweat and flour. The work has been going well, but it is far from over, and I want only to sit down. To lie down. To close my eyes, just for a little while. This is when I turn to the kind of books I might be embarrassed to read in public. Romances, thrillers, young adult novels: the books you might pass in the window of an airport book shop, or see stacked on the sidewalk outside a used book store for a dollar. I do not care anymore about the quality of the writing, as long as it isn’t distractingly bad. I don’t care about character development, or research quality. I am uncultured and exhausted. I want witty dialog, action, and a tidy happily-ever-after. These books are like junk food: immediately satisfying, distractingly salty-sweet, easily over-indulged, empty. But usually they are just enough to get me through the last hours and home to bed. Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies (Exploded) Croissant + Pain au Chocolat Fig Danish Shortbread Granola Wednesday Market Rosemary Sea Salt Mountain Rye Sweets See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker POSTSCRIPT: OVERHEARD
(I’m introducing a new postscript to my weekly newsletter with the best of what I’ve read or listened to in the past week(ish). As with most of what I write here, this is only tangentially connected to baking, in that I listen to dozens of hours of podcasts and audiobooks every week to turn off the anxiety-inducing white roar of the commissary kitchen, and for the pure pleasure of having someone tell me stories.) I've been thinking about this UNEP report on sustainable lifestyles, and the Quartz article on conscious consumerism that led me to it, all week. They will likely shape next week's newsletter, so, you know, if you want to do your homework, you could read them before hand... Ok, the quart of afternoon iced tea, after the quart of cold morning coffee, was a tactical error. It didn't seem so at the time, somewhere on the hot and sticky downslope of a long day of baking. In fact, at the time it seemed like not only a good idea but a necessary one. But that was when I was standing. When I was lying in bed, hours later, my mind still spinning and spinning on nothing in particular, I realized that I'd misjudged my dosage. This is my round-about way of saying that while my hands yesterday were insightful and decisive, my head this morning is empty. The bread is on point. The croissants might just be my best yet. For now, I'm going to have to let them do the talking. Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Blackberry and Peach Danish Croissant Granola Shorties Wednesday Market Oats & Honey Mountain Rye Cookies, etc. See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker POSTSCRIPT: OVERHEARD
(I’m introducing a new postscript to my weekly newsletter with the best of what I’ve read or listened to in the past week(ish). As with most of what I write here, this is only tangentially connected to baking, in that I listen to dozens of hours of podcasts and audiobooks every week to turn off the anxiety-inducing white roar of the commissary kitchen, and for the pure pleasure of having someone tell me stories.) The newest Radiotopia podcast, Ways of Hearing, explores how the digital age has reshaped our soundscapes. Episode 1: how the shift from analog to digital changed recorded sound. It is fascinating. Riding down alleys and along side streets, cutting across parking lots and over sidewalks, I learn the city's bounty. All year I scout the possibilities along my bicycle lines, and come summer, I'm knocking on doors and scrambling up trees, chasing the harvest. The unfortunate but useful truth is that most people have no knowledge of or interest in food preservation. Even a dwarf tree can produce more fruit than a family can eat out of hand, without the season extending help of canning, drying, freezing, or pressing into cider. Perhaps they take a bowl of cherries to the office, or make a few apple pies, but most of the harvest is left to fall. As the year turns, the sidewalks and alleys are smeared with plums and bruised apples; figs split open in the sun, swarming with wasps; squirrels secret away the green nuts. These streets hold such an uncelebrated abundance. There are the unharvested trees in people’s yards, of course, but also the last remnants of century-old orchards in the forgotten corners of housing developments and in city parks, fruit trees planted into the landscaping along parking strips, and thorny banks of Himalayan blackberries overrunning every open and disturbed piece of ground. There is enough here to fill a pantry, and I do: apples pressed into cider and cooked into sauce, plums and figs dried, pears poached and tucked into jars, quince slow-roasted to jewel-toned membrillo. The task of saving a city’s worth of fruit is overwhelming and, of course, impossible, but still, each year I try, loading the back of my bicycle with boxes of sticky gleanings and staying up late into the night, saving the season. *** I will be MISSING SATURDAY MARKET next weekend, July 29, to attend the Grain Gathering. You can order MOUNTAIN RYE, RED & WHITE, CINNAMON RAISIN, or COOKIES for Wednesday pickup at Cafe Velo between 8 am and 7 pm, or at the Fairhaven Farmers Market between 12 pm and 5 pm HERE or in person today at the market. Orders are due by 8 am Monday morning.*** Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Apple Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Honey Labneh + Peach Tart Savory Plum Tart Plum Anise Torte Shorties & Granola Wednesday Market Red & White Cinnamon Raisin Mountain Rye Cookies See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker POSTSCRIPT: OVERHEARD
(I’m introducing a new postscript to my weekly newsletter with the best of what I’ve read or listened to in the past week(ish). As with most of what I write here, this is only tangentially connected to baking, in that I listen to dozens of hours of podcasts and audiobooks every week to turn off the anxiety-inducing white roar of the commissary kitchen, and for the pure pleasure of having someone tell me stories.) As the last chapter of When Breath Becomes Air came to a close, I stepped out of the book's hold to realize I’d been standing still in the center of an empty kitchen, mop and dishes forgotten, listening with my whole body. I was crying, and grateful that no one else was there to witness my inexplicable emotion. Paul Kalanithi's memoir at the moment defies my search for adjectives, but the last book that so thoroughly broke my heart, and then put it back together, was Mark Doty’s memoir Heaven’s Coast. Reading those two devastating memoirs in succession might be too much. Better to pair Kalanithi with the pragmatic hope of Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal for a powerful exploration of death and medicine. I rode home from the kitchen last night chasing the edge of light. In front of me was a stripe of fading orange sky and the clouds were top lit, though their bellies were heavy with night. Behind me the clouds marched off in orderly rows into the dark. I felt like I might catch the sun, if only I rode a little faster. I was so busy looking up I nearly ran into the curb. Clouds can be dangerous that way. Today the sky is bright and empty, so perhaps I'll manage to keep my eyes on the road. Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot Country Rye with brotgewürz, apples, and whey Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Raspberry Lebni Tart Cardamom Roll Garden Pesto Twist Brown Butter Shortbread Granola Wednesday Market Red & White Mountain Rye Various Sweets See you soon!
Sophie Owner | Baker Before Raven Breads, there was relatively little of me, Sophie Williams, on the internet. A smattering of archived high school sports stats (none particularly impressive), my undergraduate thesis (prairie soil recovery from monocropping, results insignificant), some pictures with friends on Facebook, and... that was about it. Well, that and whatever cyber-tracks I left behind me as I bumbled, heedless, through the web. But Raven Breads was different than anything I had done before. It was mine. And without consciously deciding to do so, I threw my inner self into the business alongside my outer. What does it mean, now, to have so much of myself laid out on the open net? This is not a rhetorical question: I am curious, if still less concerned than perhaps I should be. It is not so much the lack of personal privacy that bothers me, though I am startled when relative strangers ask me, offhand, about my inner thoughts and fears, but after listening yesterday to an interview with the founder of the Library Freedom Project, I wonder if I have, all unthinking, and likely alongside millions of others, given away too much to the dark mind. (What does one call the private deep state without sounding like a conspiracy nut? Can one even be a conspiracy nut, given the stranger-than-fiction realities of our Orwellian world?). It is time, I suppose, to go online and start reading up on cybersecurity and democracy (oh, the irony!). But first, I have a farmers market to attend! Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Strawberry Rhubarb Galette Garden Pesto Twist Croissant (exploded) Granola Wednesday Market Polenta Mountain Rye various pastries See you soon!
Sophie Owner | Baker |
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