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BREAD MATTERS: The SPRING BREAD SUBSCRIPTION starts Wednesday. This is your last chance to sign up! BAKER's CHOICE subscription ($72) MOUNTAIN RYE subscription ($63) VOLLKORNBROT subscription ($63) Available by pre-order for Wednesday, 4/4: WILD & SEEDY ($8) MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) And Raven Breads will be back at the FARMERS MARKET every weekend, starting next Saturday! NOTES FROM MOROCCO:
We came down from the mountains fast. Hassan drove the taxi with focus and deliberation, both hands heavy on the wheel. He didn’t slow for school children or blind, cliff-side corners. He played chicken with donkey carts and heavily loaded trucks, and won. The High Atlas were austere and very beautiful. I wanted to linger over the flash-flood gorges cutting deep and rust-red into yellow hillsides, the steep, diagonal bands of uplifted sedimentary rock, the almond orchards blooming fresh pink against rocky fields, and the brilliant green of the terraces, but each time I thought to ask Hassan to slow I hesitated, nervous to disturb his concentration, and the scene was gone. The villages we flew past were the same and different. This high, all were built in the traditional boxy style: tall earth and stone walls, white-washed windows, flat roofs with dry plant fringes to wick away the rain. And each was entirely of its place, the houses built from the rock and dirt excavated to make their foundations. Villages built on red earth had rammed, red earth walls and flat, red earth roofs, villages on grey-green hillsides were laid with tight-fitted, grey-green slate, yellow hillsides made yellow houses, grey made grey, orange made orange. Once, we passed a village straddling geographic time, and it was striped, pink houses on bottom, yellow on top, just like the sedimentary layers below. We drove by riverside villages with fields terraced, precariously, directly into the floodplain, and ridgeline villages with fields walled into the steep hills below. We drove along the top of a fairy-tale gorge that plunged down to our right, deep and deeper to an unseen river. The village sat high on the valley wall, a honeycomb of tan houses against tan rock and a few, tough junipers. Below the village, the grain terraces fell down down down, all the way to the gorge bottom, glowing heart-stopping green, like tiny, emerald scales. We drove below a rust-red village on a rust-red hill, growing up out of a forest of huge prickly pear, below the deep, blue sky. The combination reminded me, strongly and disorientingly, of the American Southwest. We drove through villages with empty streets, streets filled with children just out of school, streets blocked by flocks of sheep and goats, unperturbed by the impatient taxi inching too-close behind. We drove through villages with men lounging in doorways, men slumped together on steps, gossiping, men leaning together against sunny walls, the pointed hoods of their djellabas raised against the wind. We drove through games of street football, the boys scattering before Hassan’s horn. We drove past women and girls hauling water, carrying brush, tugging along reluctant children and donkeys, and crouched by cold creeks washing laundry and beating rugs. We drove till the hills gentled, the fields grew wider and more casually terraced, cinder-block and concrete replaced rammed-earth and stone, and we could see the central plain stretching out into city smog below. We drove out of the mountains, and their harsh and wild beauty. I wasn’t ready. I wanted to turn back. But already the road was straightening and widening, and Hassan was picking up speed. Sophie Owner | Baker BREAD MATTERS: Wednesday 3/14 CINNAMON TWIST ($8) Because who didn't love cinnamon sugar toast as a child? MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) There will be NO BREAD available between 3/14 and 4/4, when the SPRING BREAD SUBSCRIPTION starts. The SPRING BREAD SUBSCRIPTION runs April - May. You can sign up ONLINEor download this FORM and mail it back with a check. BAKER's CHOICE subscription ($72) MOUNTAIN RYE subscription ($63) VOLLKORNBROT subscription ($63) Raven Breads will be back at the SATURDAY FARMERS MARKET every weekend starting 4/7! And so the season ends. I'll be baking one last round of winter bread next week for pre-order and pickup, and then I'm taking off for a few weeks, before the market season and the next Bread Subscription begin. Throughout my early twenties, winter was my wandering season. For a month or three I'd travel the states by bike or plane, or I'd move to a foreign city and settle in to explore. That season, too, has ended. This bakery demands too much of my time to allow such wide wanderings. But a few weeks I can manage. I'll be back at the beginning of April, tired from being always an outsider in a foreign culture, but reluctant still to return to the comfort and easy familiarity of the Northwest. And that's the conundrum of travel, is it not? The farther you go, the stranger and more wonderful it is to come home. Until next month,
Sophie Owner | Baker BREAD MATTERS: Wednesday 3/7 MÉTEIL ($8) A beautifully crackled rye/wheat country bread, spiced with trigonella (a blue fenugreek that smells like fresh cut grass and maple syrup, traditionally used in alpine rye breads, and grown by the owners of Cafe Vavilov for just this purpose!) MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Wednesday 3/14 CINNAMON TWIST ($8) Because who didn't love cinnamon sugar toast as a child? MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) There will be NO BREAD available between 3/14 and 4/4, when the SPRING BREAD SUBSCRIPTION starts. The SPRING BREAD SUBSCRIPTION runs April - May. You can sign up ONLINEor download this FORM and mail it back with a check. BAKER's CHOICE subscription ($72) MOUNTAIN RYE subscription ($63) VOLLKORNBROT subscription ($63) Raven Breads will be back at the SATURDAY FARMERS MARKET every weekend starting 4/7! That's all for now, folks.The sun is shining and we're off to load the truck with manure for the garden. Then there are seeds to inventory and seed orders to place, a sunroom to set up for starts, old pots that need sterilizing, and potting soil to mix. Perhaps we'll even plant the first peas today! The garden is all wet earth and possibility.
Happy Saturday! Sophie Owner | Baker My year is like a mountain. In the fall, I climb, up and up towards that last, tired scramble through the holiday scree. Here, in winter, I stop to rest at the peak, catching my breath and admiring the view stretching out in all directions. Through spring and summer I descend, running faster and faster, limbs loose, feet skidding as I pick up momentum, all my attention focused on the path just ahead. Taking in the winter view, to stretch the simile, I look out over the past year's business, and ahead to the coming years'. I spend more time writing, number crunching, and dreaming. I visit other bakeries for ideas and inspiration, and for the pleasure of talking to people who share my peculiar passion for fermenting flour. These past few days, I've been driving down the I-5 corridor, stopping along the way to talk and watch and, occassionally, help to bake bread. The glimpses into different approaches to baking and business are galvanizing. The friendships with other bakers give me hope. And each stop sharpens my vision of my own bakery's future, filling in details I didn't know were missing, and brightening the colors. Tomorrow I'll drive back to Bellingham (in my new/old truck!) to bake your bread and translate what I've learned on this quick trip into the business plan I'm writing for the next iteration of Raven Breads. On the menu for the coming weeks are: Wednesday 2/28 OAT & HONEY ($8) Sweet, tender, and perfect for toast. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Wednesday 3/7 MÉTEIL ($8) A beautifully crackled rye/wheat country bread. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Wednesday 3/14 CINNAMON TWIST ($8) Because who didn't love cinnamon sugar toast as a child? MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Sophie
Owner | Baker I used to build forts in these woods. Sometimes, they were only sketches: this stump is the table; that red cedar is the wall; the front door is here, between two stones; those bits of sea glass, smooth beach rocks veined with pink and green, feathers, and drying seed pods lined up along the log are my treasures. I always walked in the front door. Other times the forts were more solid, like the lean-to I built against the upended roots of a toppled fir. I stole sheets of moss from the forest floor, and laid them over the slanted roof, hoping they would grow over the whole structure.  The problem with forts, whether built in the forest, or in the living room, with curtains and couch pillows, or piled from driftwood, or tunneled into deep snow, is that all the pleasure is in the building. Once you’re done, you have a dark cave of some sort. Often, it’s rather damp, and maybe your knees are wet from kneeling to line up stones along the invisible interior walls, and it’s probably raining (in my memory of childhood summers, it always rained through the 4th of July), and breakfast was a long time ago. For hours and hours you’ve worked with intense, imagination-fueled focus, unheeding of the damp creeping up from the wet hems of your sleeves, caught up fully in the wonder of your creation. Only now, with the construction complete, does your concentration waver. Maybe you crawl inside the lean-to and sit for a minute, looking around in the dim light at the mud and sticks, and the little treasures tucked into the tree roots' crooked fingers, while the wet drips down your hair and inside your shirt collar. Maybe you fuss for a minute more, moving things just so, but the purpose is gone. So you crawl out again, and thrash your way back through the woods, and home for lunch. Wednesday 2/21 TOASTED SESAME ($8) Umami and crunch. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Wednesday 2/28 OAT & HONEY ($8) Sweet, tender, and perfect for toast. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Wednesday 3/7 MÉTEIL ($8) A beautifully crackled rye/wheat country bread. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Sophie Owner | Baker P.S. The monthly winter farmers market is today! Raven Breads won't be there, but you should still go and wander through the Market Depot, if only to give yourself a good reason to leave the house on this rather damp Saturday.
Already, I can feel the earth tilting towards summer. All across the lawn, the crocuses are punching up through the moss and grass, opening the closed fists of their flowers to the sun. Through the leaf mulch and dead stalks of cover crop, the first fava beans are uncurling in the garden. Soon, the daffodils will follow. When I walk the between the vegetable beds, mapping imagined crops with my stride, I daydream of delicate cotyledon and the first true leaves, of muddy knees and muddier boots, of weeds and rain and a riot of new-green growing up from the wet earth. No matter that yesterday I passed children skipping ice shards across frozen puddles as I walked downtown, my jacket zipped all the way to my throat, and my hands held close in my pockets. No matter that we still face five more months of rain. It’s almost time to plant the first peas and greens, to scatter poppy seeds, and tuck sweetpeas in along the fence line. The calendar may call this the depth of winter, but for me, February has always marked the beginning of spring.  Wednesday 2/14 CHOCOLATE ($10) A bittersweet black bread, with dark cocoa, Theo milk chocolate chunks, and candied orange peel. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Wednesday 2/21 TOASTED SESAME ($8) Umami and crunch. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Wednesday 2/28 OAT & HONEY ($8) Sweet, tender, and perfect for toast. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) See you soon!
Sophie Owner | Baker I collect books from library the way some people buy clothes. Compulsively. Obsessively. With a thrill of new ownership that all too often fades once the books are in my possession. Every time I bike by the library, I feel the inexorable pull. All those unread books. All those beautiful words. All those stories, waiting for me! When she was little, my sister would heap her plate with food at the dinner table, insistent of her hunger. Once the plate was in front of her, though, she would hardly touch it. “My eyes were bigger than my stomach,” she would explain, apologetically. At the library, my eyes are bigger than my stomach. Or maybe my imagination is bigger than the hours of the day? I collect armfuls of books, overloading my bike panniers and strapping extras to the back rack. When I’m inside the stacks, I never think of the books by my bed, half-read, or of the unread books on my bookshelf. The pull of possibility inside those uncracked spines is too strong. I never read all the books I check out, just as I never read all the books I buy. I sometimes wish, whimsically, that I could shut myself up in my house for a week and read a stack from top to bottom and bookend to bookend, but of course, life intrudes. And besides, the library is calling. There are so many books yet to explore.  Wednesday 2/7 WINTER GARDEN ($8) A celebration of all the green herbs in the winter garden. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Wednesday 2/14 CHOCOLATE ($10) A bittersweet black bread, with dark cocoa, dark chocolate chunks, and candied orange peel. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Wednesday 2/21 SPROUTED EINKORN ($8) This ancient wheat is grassy and sweet. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Sophie
Owner | Baker I got on the eastbound ferry just before sunset yesterday afternoon. The wind, which that morning had sent me flying west on my bicycle, had died down to a stiff breeze. Beneath me the boat rumbled. I sat, brooding and watching the road of wake running back toward a bank of candy-colored clouds, and thinking about choice and necessity and compromise and the beauty of the sunset. I had gone to the islands to buy a truck, and now, after years of bicycles, buses, and borrowed cars, I was driving it home. How do you choose your ethical compromises? What are your hard lines? I think a lot about consumption: the what and why and how much of it. It is not a comfortable compulsion, to imagine the before and after of everything I buy. I mean, it would be nice, at the end of a long, hungry day, to look at a slice of pizza from the place on the corner and see dinner, rather than CAFOs, or the desolation of industrial agriculture in Northern Mexico, or the garbage islands clogging up our ocean gyres. Sometimes I wonder if the deep thought I put into even small acts of consumption is really just a bunch of self-indulgent navel gazing, or, worse yet, an outward facing expression of the same self-martyring impulse that drives our ascetic diet culture. Other times I worry that not buying the slice of pizza, or choosing to ride my bike instead of driving, or any of the other dozens of choices I make in the course of a day, are really just internal greenwashing. Like, how many ethical carrots would I actually need to eat in order to morally balance the savings I put in an unexamined, high-return mutual fund? How many miles would I have to bicycle to make up for the times I travel by air? But looking back at the darkening clouds, I decided that, at least for now, I can live with some imperfection and hypocrisy. Better, I think, to choose eyes open than to give in to paralyzing indecision, or to give up and sink blindly into a culture of endless consumption. Wednesday 1/31 BLUE CORN NIXTAMAL ($8) European bread meets Mesoamerican maize. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Wednesday 2/7 WINTER GARDEN ($8) A celebration of all the green herbs in the winter garden. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Wednesday 2/14 CHOCOLATE ($10) A bittersweet black bread, with dark cocoa, dark chocolate chunks, and candied orange peel. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Happy eating!
Sophie Owner | Baker What is the shape of your best day? Mine starts on the dark side of 5 am, when I wake, look at my watch, and decide go back to sleep. Hours later, in the gray gloaming, I wake again, and reach for my book. There is no hurry. Breakfast will wait. When I get up on my best day, I put on water for tea and turn on the oven. I mix eggs, milk, and flour. I melt half a stick of butter in a skillet and pour in the batter. While the pancake rises, I sauté sliced apples in butter. I only burn a few. On my best day, I go back to bed after breakfast. I curl up by the window and read until noon. I finish one book and start another. The clouds thin to pale blue. The sunshine climbs over me till I’m all in light. Later, I go for a long walk. The snow is soft and reaches a few inches shy of my boot tops. I walk along the river, under black cottonwoods and alders, and the occasional ponderosa. The willow thickets are deep red. I listen to the water and watch my feet. There are tracks crisscrossing the snow in all directions. I follow a river otter’s tracks for a while till I come out onto the cobbled riverbank. Then I follow a deer. I see neither otter nor deer, but many birds. The great horned owl is asleep in her cottonwood snag, or at least, I think she’s asleep. She is exactly the same brown-gray as the bark, and I see no hint of yellow eyes. On my best day I make hot chocolate and take my mug and a book out onto the porch to catch the last of the light. I fold a blanket around my legs, like an invalid in one of the old, upright British novels I used to love so well. I read until the light begins to fade. Or maybe I just sit and watch the trees and the whitening sky. It doesn’t matter. This is my day to do with as I please. When darkness folds around the house at the end of my best day, I am inside where it is warm and bright. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will think of obligations, but tonight I am full on stories and sunshine and good food. There is no space left for work or worries. Steam rises from the mug in my hand, smelling of mint and chamomile. I sit back to watch the fire. This is the shape of my best day.  Winter Bread Subscription Today is the LAST DAY to sign up! BAKER's CHOICE subscription MOUNTAIN RYE subscription VOLLKORNBROT subscription Wednesday Preorder Wild & Seedy Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot I'll be back on the west side and delivering the first of the Winter Bread Subscription this Wednesday to Birchwood, downtown, and Fairhaven.
Happy eating! Sophie Owner | Baker How do you measure a year? Is it in friends made? Dollars earned? Mountains climbed? The following are my attempt to sum up 2017 for Raven Breads, and, by extension, myself. These two short lists do not, of course, tell the whole story, but I think they at least offer a decent summary. 2017 IN (approximate) NUMBERS 1. Loaves of bread baked: 7200 2. Pounds of butter consumed: 384 3. Miles bicycled for work: 1200 4. Money spent on bicycles: $311 5. Hypothetical cost of equivalent car ownership + travel: $2900 6. Sales increase from 2016: 50% 7. Annual sales donated: 1%* 8. Hours of continuing education: 80 9. Longest bake day: 21 hours 10. Shortest bake day: 10 hours 2017 IN WORDS Writing the weekly newsletter in the early hours before market, and after a long Friday bake, is not particularly conducive to deep thinking or copy editing. Some mornings I get lucky and have an idea that has already fermented to ripeness while I bicycled or baked, and needs only to be written down. Other mornings I sit staring at my computer, mind blank as the screen in front of me. The following are a few of my favorite early morning writings from the past year. Perhaps next year I’ll compose my newsletters earlier in the week so I can sleep in and still have time to edit on Saturday mornings. But probably not. 1. The Soundtrack: Noise and Quiet in the Kitchen 2. A Road Less Traveled 3. Sense Memory 4. Lost Magic 5. Dreaming Up 6. Urban Harvest 7. A Story for Every Hour 8. Golden Days 9. Morning Ritual 10. How to Love the Sky in Winter During the winter months, bread will only be available by pre-order. Sign up for the ten week bread subscription to pick up a loaf every Wednesday, January 10—March 16, in Birchwood, downtown, or in Fairhaven. WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION BAKER's CHOICE subscription: a new wheat bread every week. MOUNTAIN RYE subscription: the market favorite. VOLLKORNBROT subscription: all rye all the time. THE COMING YEAR I’m grateful and amazed by all the support and enthusiasm and undeserved patience you’ve given me over the past four years. This little business is growing beyond the capacity of a single baker in a shared kitchen. It’s time to step (or stumble) forward into the next iteration of Raven Breads. Plus, I miss seeing the sky every day. I want to work behind windows! Where that next step will land me, I don’t yet know, but I plan to spend the coming months working my way through recipes, reading lists, and business plans. And, of course baking bread! Food businesses are not known for their high rate of success. A food business burdened by as much hope and idealism as Raven Breads faces greater challenges still. A number of you have generously offered to look over my plans once I have them in order, but more business mentors are always welcome! For all the hours I spend working alone, this little bakery owes its success as much to all of you as it does to any skill or stubbornness of mine. Thank you for a wonderful year of bread and learning. I’ll see you in 2018! Sophie Owner | Baker * 2017 cash and in kind donations went to the following:
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