When I was born, my parents planted a tree. It was a leggy little Macoun scion on semi-dwarf rootstock, and they stuck it into the summer lawn of dandelions and dry grass, back by the chain link fence that separated our house from the neighbors'. Remarkably, it thrived. All the years of my childhood, as I tended vegetable beds and imaginary worlds in the back yard, it stood over me. In the summer, I picked the hard, green apples and carved them into tiny bowls for my fairy feasts, setting them alongside raspberry goblets and plates made of leaves. In the early fall, I scrambled up the tree to pick under-ripe apples, and weeks later, returned to gather wormy windfalls. These I dissected for my father's pies, carefully scooping out the bruises with the curved end of a potato peeler, before cutting out their rotten hearts. The Macoun has become my Platonic apple ideal. It is a beautiful apple, blushed dusky purple over green, with dense, white flesh. It fits comfortably in hand, and has a satisfyingly tangy-sweet crunch. It makes good pies. When I look for apples for the bakery, weighing their density in my palm, pressing to feel for firmness or give, tasting for a little sour and bitter beneath the sweet, the Macoun, or perhaps my memory of it, is my guide. The back fence is now wood, and half hidden by a riot of dark-leafed perennials. The rest of the seedy lawn was long ago paved over with a patio, or turned to make way for more vegetable beds. The trees in the neighbors' yards have grown, as trees do, making a living wall to either side and giving the garden something of the feel of a forest glade, hidden away from the concrete and sirens of the city. And at the center, despite years of alternating neglect and over-pruning, my Macoun still stands, reaching its watersprouts towards the retreating sun. I have a limited market lineup today because I figured a lot of you are probably still too full from Thanksgiving to think about baked goods. If you've recovered from your tryptophan-induced stupor, come early to get your bread and pastry before they sell out! Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Gingerbread Shortbread Granola Wednesday Preorder Wild & Seedy (again- because it's my favorite) Mountain Rye Shortbread Gingerbread See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker POSTSCRIPT: I went to see Dave Montgomery speak at Village Books last month. He's a UW geomorphologist and who looks like The Dude and won a MacArthur for his side project writing about ag soils. His latest book, Growing the Revolution, falls in scope between Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, which took a birds eye view of agricultural erosion over millennia, and The Hidden Half of Nature, which started an exploration of soil microbiology in his Seattle yard. Growing the Revolution makes a compelling case for conservation agriculture and for using soil health as the metric by which we measure good farming. His case studies span the globe and farming practices, from Kansas cash-cropping to Ghanaian slash and burn subsistance farming. And if that isn't enough to catch your interest, how about the fact that this is an optimistic book about the environment? You heard me right. I just used optimistic and environment in the same sentence without irony. Read it.
Do you know how many recipes there are on the internet for The Perfect Pie Crust? A LOT! I've been skimming them all week, in the rare moments of calm between mad baking preperation. Pâte brisée, rather like sourdough bread, looks deceptively simple on the page. Flour, water, butter, salt. Mix, roll, fill, bake. Or mix, chill, roll, fill, bake. Or mix, roll, chill, bake, fill... The problems are these: 1. my father, the pie master of our house, set a very high pie bar; and 2. scaling up from my home kitchen to commercial production never goes quite as smoothly as I hope. For the sake of efficiency, I've been tweaking techniques with varying degrees of success. The food processor and I are still negotiating. In the meantime, I've been eating a lot of crust. The things I do for the sake of a good pie! You can order your PNW born and bred Pumpkin Pie on the website or at market today. The pumpkin is shorthand: they'll actually be made with Baby Blue Hubbards and Red Kuri from Springtime Farm, as well as eggs from Broad Leaf, cream from Fresh Breeze, and flour from Fairhaven Mills. We have a lot of local food worth celebrating this feasting season! Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot Rosemary Rolls Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Baby Blue & Caramel Pie Gingerbread Shortbread Granola Wednesday (THANKSGIVING!) Preorder Rosemary Sea Salt (batard or rolls) Mountain Rye Burnt Sugar Pumpkin Pie Gingerbread Bundt Cake See you soon!
Sophie Owner | Baker I walked out to the garden last night in the dark, finding my way by memory and the faint light of the neighbor's porch light. The ground beneath my boots had the springy feel of wet and well-aggregated soil. Crouching between the beds, I felt my way along the rows of carrots and beets for the biggest roots. They came out easily, with just a gentle tug at the base of the leaves, and I added them to my dinner basket, leaving the tops behind to mulch the cold ground. This morning I woke to the memory of a poem about moles by William Stafford, skimming just out of reach around the edges of my mind. I grasped at it for a while, but though I could remember the recognition and mild distaste I felt when I first read it as a child, I could find nothing of its shape or cadence. (Recognition, because Stafford has always spoken to me; distaste because moles are not especially romantic creatures. If I were to image myself an animal—and since I had not yet unlearned magic, this seemed a reasonable thing to do—I would rather it have been an elephant, or an owl). Eventually I got up from my warm nest of blankets and crossed to the bookshelf. And there it was: "Love the earth like a mole, / fur-near. Nearsighted." I was still smiling when I walked downstairs and out the back door to stand in the dark, breathing in the wet-earth smell at the beginning of a new day. "...each day nuzzle your way. Tomorrow the world." Saturday Market Red & White, Cinnamon Raisin, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Black Sesame Pear Cake Gingerbread Shortbread + Granola Wednesday Preorder Red, White, & Blue Corn Nixtamal Mountain Rye Gingerbread Shortbread THANKSGIVING ORDER Rosemary Sea Salt loaves + rolls Burnt Sugar Pumpkin Pie Gingerbread Bundt Thanksgiving specials are up on the online store, and I'll have order sheets today at market. Let the feasting season begin! See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker POSTSCRIPT: Overheard
Honestly, I wanted this post on the Shocking Revelations! about sexual misconduct by powerful men to have more snark, and it's pretty damn snarky already. Still, it does a better job then most of the mainstream coverage at capturing the frustrated rage I feel every time I read another expression of outraged surprise that such behavior was known and abided. Because seriously, surprise? What misogynistic rock have these pundits been living under to miss the fact that womxn face violence and intimidation and harassment by men with grabby little hands ALL THE FUCKING TIME? "But you are bakers, not scientists," Thomas reminded us as he finished explaining a graph of amylase activity and temperature. The whiteboard was covered with such graphs, as was the easel to its right. This science, he wanted us to remember, was a tool to add to our baking arsenal, alongside taste, smell, memory, and tradition. It could not define our work. At this point in the march of knowledge, a master baker still knows more with his hands about making good bread than do all the scientific publications combined. We were midway through a weeklong course titled Modern Bread Theory: A Scientific Focus, but because we were bakers, not scientists, we spent most of our days in the San Francisco Baking Institute's sprawling warehouse bakery, putting those classroom lectures into practice. I was lured by the science's apparent clarity. This view of wild fermentation, defined in pH, temperature, and well-understood enzymatic reactions, felt so readily masterable. I know, after all, now to read and synthesize scientific literature. It's what I was academically trained to do. But again and again, I watched Thomas put his hands on (or in) the dough to asses it's molecular workings through touch. "It's ready," he might tell us, "hurry." Or, "Turn the mixer up to second for a few minutes." Those hands, with their twenty years of baking practice, knew things I would never learn by reading. And besides, I'm not a scientist anymore. I'm a baker. Science, now, is not the end in and of itself, but a tool to better understand the practical workings of the world. Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Apple Cake Gingerbread Shortbread Wednesday Preorder WILD & SEEDY! Mountain Rye Shortbread Gingerbread See you soon!
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