The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the truest story about childhood I've read in a long time. It is a dark fairy tale, a story of monsters and magic, of wonder, and terrible powerlessness of childhood; a story about a time when magic is as likely as any other answer, before the hard edges of facts push the impossible out of the world. There is a scene early in the book when the little boy sits down to eat in the neighbors' farmhouse kitchen: "The daffodils sat like patches of sunlight, making that dark wooden kitchen even more cheerful. The floor was made of red and gray flagstones. The walls were whitewashed. The old woman gave me a lump of honeycomb, from the Hempstocks' own beehive, on a chipped saucer, and poured a little cream over it from a jug. I ate it with a spoon, chewing the wax like gum, letting the honey flow into my mouth, sweet and sticky with an aftertaste of wildflowers." And now, every time I think about pastries, about new recipes, and what I role I want sweets to play in the bakery, I remember that scene. That's what I want in a pastry: comfort, substance, and flavor, with the satisfaction and sensual pleasure of cream running down a honeycomb. I want pastries that belong in a kitchen full of daffodils and sunlight, with a pot simmering on the stove, and muck boots piled, muddy, outside the door. I want pastries for wet fields and mountains, for hard work in all weather, for children in the street on a summer evening, and winter evenings that smell of woodsmoke, for kitchen gardens and old apple trees and bumblebees in the lavender and hyssop. Does that make sense? I can see it all so clearly in my mind. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Wheat Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies Breakfast Scone (apple butter, raisins, hazelnuts, oats) Raspberry, Rhubarb, Buckwheat Scone Lemon Rhubarb Bar Shortbread PRE-ORDER for Wednesday 5/30 (place order by Sunday night for Wednesday pickup) Chocolate ($10) Mountain Rye ($7) Vollkornbrot ($8) On long days in the commissary kitchen, I daydream about my bakery. The fluorescent lights above me hum and flicker, casting my workbench sickly yellow against the tan and stainless steel of the windowless room. I daydream about light: The walls of my bakery, I decide, are warm white, catching light from the high windows even on rainy days. I can watch the sky lighten in the morning through those windows. I can watch the days pass, and the seasons change. There are no fluorescent lights. The kitchen I share smells of cooking meat, fish sauce, and bleach. I daydream about the smells of my bakery: Baking bread. Butter and chocolate. Coffee. A little wood smoke, as I dump the smoked rye berries into the batch of vollkornbrot in the mixer. And the front windows are open, letting in the sun-hot scent of lavender and rosemary from the brick planters of herbs just outside. One of the neighborhood kids pinches off a sprig of mint coming in the front door, and carries the bright scent with him as he meanders to the counter, crushing it, furtively, in his hand. Here, in the commissary kitchen, it’s always loud. The lights hum, water runs, the dishwasher whooshes, the fan in the convection oven whomp whomp whomps slightly off-center, pans clatter, the hood roars, and in the prep room, the restaurant cooks are blasting Journey so loud I can feel it through my whole body. I daydream about the sounds of my bakery: I get in early to begin the day’s bake alone. I have a few hours before anyone else arrives. Later, perhaps, we’ll put on music. The bakery will fill with voices as the benches of the long, battered wood table in front fill with customers sitting down together over coffee and pastries, as the regulars stand chatting in line, catching up on the neighborhood gossip, as we stand together over the mixer, talking about yesterday’s dough and troubleshooting the new batch of flour. But in the early morning I work in silence. The sun is just lightening the sky when I pull the first bread out of the oven. It’s so quiet in the bakery I can hear the crust sing. My days in the commissary kitchen are brutally long. I begin the day up to my elbows in rye, and end some 14 or 18 hours later as I pull the last batch of wheat bread out of the too-small convection oven. I daydream about the bakery’s equipment: We have a mixer, of course, to save hands and wrists from injury, and for the efficiency of large batches. The work benches are smooth maple, and long enough to hold all the shaping dough. And the oven: a real deck oven! With a loader! Perhaps it’s a Bassanina, fueled now by natural gas, but in a few years converted to wood when the mill starts making pressed sawdust blocks from their offcuts (what do the lumber mills do with their waste?). And by that point, we’ll have gotten a grant to put solar panels on the roof (can you get 3 phase out of small scale solar?). And between the waste-wood fueled oven, and the solar/hydro electricity, and our small fleet of delivery bikes and trailers, and our locally grown (with conservation ag practices?) and milled grain, our little bakery will be well on its way to carbon neutrality. Baking is hard, physical work, even with the help of the right equipment, but in my bakery daydream, our striving to become better bakers, better community members, better environmental stewards, keeps that work engaging. There is space for new dreams in the bakery: a new bread, evening baking classes, a cafe opened next door by a long-time employee. And no one working in the bakery goes hungry for lack of bread. We pay a living wage, from dishwasher to manager, with benefits. This is my daydream, after all. From where I’m standing, anything is possible. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Wheat + Garden Herb Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies Raspberry Jam & Oat Scone Sour Cherry & Buckwheat Scone Lemon Poppy Teacake Shortbread PRE-ORDER for Wednesday 5/9 (place order by Sunday night for Wednesday pickup) Toasted Sesame ($8) Mountain Rye ($7) Vollkornbrot ($8) Sometimes I find it useful to ask myself very obvious questions. The back of my kitchen notebook is full of scribbled answers. Where is home in five years? What's the purpose of this bakery? What do you want your bread to be? The answers to the first two were pages long and surprisingly soul-searching, but the answer to the third is straightforward enough: I want my bread to be beauty and function. To be just a little too dark, cracked from the heat, with a thick crust, brown-black to tan, and the alveoli opening like eyes in a moist, uneven crumb. I want table bread. Dinner bread. A loaf to drop in the middle of a family meal of crossing voices, reaching hands, and passed dishes. A loaf to wrap in brown paper and tuck into a pack, to eat fast on a windy ridgeline, or beside a snow-rimmed alpine lake. A loaf for cutting into sturdy slabs for a sandwich, for searing brown in a buttered skillet, for dipping in thick soup, or for wiping clean a plate. I want my bread to be satisfaction and flavor. I want my bread to be food. See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White, Mountain Rye, (Smoky!) Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies Orange Buckwheat Scones Black Sesame Buckwheat Scones (see above) Shortbread PRE-ORDER for 4/25 Blue Corn Nixtamal ($8) Mountain Rye ($7) Vollkornbrot ($8) POST SCRIPT
Sometime last year, two WWU students visited the kitchen and market to shoot some video and interview me for the student publication, The Planet. I didn't know they'd decided to use the material till one of them stopped by the market last Saturday. Check out the sweet VIDEO they made about the bakery! My favorite part is the stop motion bike trailer load/unload. 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 should refrain from poking at controversial ideas at this hour of the morning, in public, before I’m quite ready to be politic or polite. I should, I know. But oh, I am contrary as a cat, and do so enjoy swatting at the curtains. So, here it is: I am dumbfounded, disturbed, distraught by the pervasiveness of scientific illiteracy. I’m reminded of it weekly at the farmers market by the dietary lectures I receive from customers and passers by. No, I say calmly, wheat is not toxic. Actually, I cut in, rye and barley also have gluten. Yes, I’m serious. So do the ancient wheats like emmer, spelt, and einkorn. Well, I reply, smiling with all my teeth, mutation drives evolution, as well as plant breeding, so no, I don’t think it’s "unnatural." And no, plant breeding that induces mutation with radiation does not produce “bad” food. (And dammit, stop trying to hide your fears behind pseudoscience! I refrain from adding, because I do have some small sense of self-preservation). But while swallowing the snake oil of quacks like Dr. William Davis and Dr. David Perlmutter may cause harm to people’s pocketbooks, and, more troublingly, to their food traditions, it’s no skin off my nose. Eat whatever makes you feel healthy, or safe, or morally superior. The problem is, scientific illiteracy doesn’t stop with the eager embrace of the latest dietary prophet cloaking their food religion in scientific terms. Respectable, mainstream media outlets consistently confuse hypothesis with theory, ignoring the complexity and contradiction of real science in favor of the easy story. Environmental and political activists (including those I respect and with whom I agree) often so abuse statistics as to undermine their credibility (and the maddening thing is, the science is there! There’s no need to cherry pick data on climate change or the public health consequences of economic inequality). The reason all this matters, the reason I get worried when a customer proselytizes their Google-searched diet, or when I read yet another article twisting a single study into Scientific Truth, is that such a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific method and inability to distinguish science from pseudoscience leaves people vulnerable to truly dangerous anti-science campaigns like climate change denial and the anti-vax movement. The re-emergence of preventable diseases like rubella and diphtheria, and the lack of political will to reduce fossil fuel consumption even as we hurtle towards the apocalypse, are the inevitable consequence of such ignorance. Approach the world with curiosity and a critical eye. Ask questions. Challenge the orthodoxy of common wisdom. But oh, do so as an informed skeptic, and not as a dupe! All right. That’s enough damage done for one morning. If I’ve offended you, I hope you’ll challenge me rather than walking away. I don’t have time to debate with you at the farmers market, but send me an email, or invite me to coffee, and I’ll gladly engage! Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Black Sesame and Fennel Palmier Garden Pesto Twist Morning Bun Hazelnut Cake with Strawberries & Cream Granola Brown Butter Shortbread Wednesday Market Rosemary Sea Salt Mountain Rye Various pastries See you soon!
Sophie Owner | Baker Sometimes I'm dumbfounded by the ignorance and ego that let me start this little bakery with no professional experience. What on earth was I thinking, to begin so far from the beginning, without the traditional five or fifteen years of work under a master baker learning the ancient craft? I've made so many unnecessary mistakes, reinvented the wheel a half a dozen times, at least, when I could have simply learned from the wheelwright. But then, had I taken a more traditional path, I might have known too much. I might have known the ease of white flour and of yeast. I might have known the sales value of baguettes, airy levains, and pale, sweet pastries. I might have known where one should compromise ethics in favor of cost when sourcing ingredients. And knowning all that, I doubt I could have stumbled through the months and years of ugly wholemeal, sourdough bread. I would have turned away after the tenth or fiftieth bake of dense wheat bread, after the rye collapsed, yet again, and back to the safety of tradition. I would not be here, with wholemeal, sourdough loaves that are good and getting better, feeling my way, slowly, towards an understanding of bread that is beautiful and uncompromised. Today at Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Black & White Sandwich Cookies (nibby chocolate wafers with fresh vanilla marshmallow!) Raspberry & Rose Rolls Orange Cream Raisin Rolls and a few packages of Membrillo For Wednesday Pickup Red & White Mountain Rye Oats & Honey Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies There's time to sit back and contemplate the lightening sky while I drink one last cup of tea, and then I'm off to pack up and roll over to the market.
See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker I read an article in The New Yorker the other day about the Gig Economy. This is the world of techno-driven piecework born of rideshare apps and online freelance marketplaces. Though not directly analogous to the entrepreneurial community I inhabit—populated by farmers, artists, and craftspeople—the thesis of the article still applies: there is "a painful distance between the chipper narratives surrounding labor and success in America and the lived experience of workers." We often talk, in a tone halfway between jest and brag, about about the impossible and uncompensated hours we work, as if our scrambling, stumbling path through the maze of capitalism were a badge of honor. As if living inside an economic system that idolizes the bootstrapping entrepreneur but prioritizes price over quality, externalized costs over sustainability, GDP over equality and quality of life, has convinced us that hard and thoughtful work need not result in a living wage. Most of us accept, quietly, what compensation we can get, all the while thinking that if we just worked a little harder, a little smarter, we might reach that American promise of meritocratic success. "At the root of this [economic ideal] is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system." I am immensely grateful to all of you who support my work. That gratitude is not lessened by my understanding that it is improbable that I will ever achieve true economic security through a business that strives to internalize every cost, to give fair compensation down the supply chain, to produce whole and healthy food. As long as ethical production is considered a luxury, as long as the Free Market and the Farm Bill bracket our food system, as long as we live in a plutocracy, the gap between the stories we tell and the lives we live will persist. I want to end this dark turn of mind with some spark of hope, some nice, manageable action that you might take without disturbing the pattern of your days. You know, the way mainstream articles about climate change often end with a cute band aid, like, "the world is ending and it's our fault, but separate your recycling and we'll all be ok!" But I am neither smart enough nor naive enough to slap on some easy solution. Our economic system is huge and complicated and hurtful, and I have no idea what we do to make it better, except to vote with our ballots and dollars and feet, even when it feels like we're waving in the dark. With worry and improbable hope, Sophie The Spring Bread Subscription starts this Wednesday. You can still sign up, if it's somehow slipped your mind despite my many reminders, until tomorrow. You can also place individual orders on the website, as per usual, for Wednesday pickup. This week it's Red & White, Mountain Rye, Oats & Honey, and of course, Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies.
The weekly Bellingham Farmers Market starts up again next Saturday, April 1. Come on down to the Market Depot between ten and three to celebrate the beginning of the market's 25th year! Dear Bread Eaters, During the month of February (and perhaps beyond) a portion of my profits will go to community organizations working for justice and sustainability here in Bellingham. If you have thoughts about which organizations in our community are doing the best work, shoot me an email, or stop by to chat at the next Saturday Farmers Market on the 18th. If you're already signed up for a winter bread share, thank you! I'm so glad you're a part of this bread subscription experiment. You can, of course, still buy cookies, add bread to your order, or just come visit me at the market. And if you're not part of the winter bread subscription, order bread! Order your Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies for Valentines day! And definitely come to market on the third Saturday of the month. I am trying to make democracy a habit, like feeding my sourdough. You know, get up in the morning, put on the kettle for tea, brush my teeth, feed the sourdough, and call my representatives. Some days I do better than others. I have always read voraciously, though never fast enough. Books wash up against the shore of my bed in ever-growing drifts, even as I request others from the library and am drawn as inevitably as the tide into used bookstores to gather more. I stack articles and essays along the top of my web browsers in neat rows like offerings, like a wall to hold back the rushing media on the days when keeping up with the news feels like drowning. Because I read so much, and not enough, I have always understood the vast expanse of my ignorance. For most of my politically-aware life, from that Sunday in middle school when I cried while reading the double page spread in the Seattle PI on the invasion of Iraq to the uneasy year spent following our most recent presidential election, my ignorance has been my excuse to stay quiet. What could I say that hadn't already been said elsewhere and better? It is hard to break a long habit of silence, but I'm holding on to the hope that it will get easier. Calling my reps is still uncomfortable--I have to practice what I want to say in my head beforehand or I lose the thread of my thoughts entirely--but the discomfort is there and gone so quickly that the anticipation is worse than the reality. Speaking out through the platform of my business demands greater commitment because it invites conversation, praise, and some very pointed condemnation. But as I told one former customer who wrote to express her disgust at my mixing of bread and politics, this business has always been political. My commitment to biking, to sourcing ethical ingredients, to minimizing packaging, to taking the long way even when shortcuts beckon, these are moral and political decisions. Stenciling vulvas, or anarcho-feminist fists, or Bread Without Borders on my loaves is just a more overt expression of those quieter values. Thank you for supporting me as I continue to define the shape of this business. I hope you will continue to come for the bread and stay for conversation. Tell me what you like. Tell me when you disagree. I may not change my mind, but I will listen.
Sophie Owner | Baker |
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