When I was a child I built forts. I built forts with curtains and couch pillows, with driftwood, within the branches of my favorite climbing trees. I tunneled into deep snow and nested under bushes. Sometimes the forts were only sketches: this stump is the table; that red cedar 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. Other times the forts were solid, like the one I built in the woods behind my mormor’s house with cedar branches, sheets of moss, and the upended roots of a toppled fir. A few years ago I went walking through those woods and found the lean-to’s remains. Its roof was collapsed and mossy, the stones marking its door unmoved.

Over the years of searching for a bakery space I’ve found many nonstarters—spaces too small, too inaccessible, too contaminated, too expensive—and a few possibilities. For each possibility I sketch out floor plans. As a child I walked and climbed and crawled through my creations. Now I trace my way across the screen from sink to mixer, mixer to table, table to rack, rack to oven. Drawing a floor plan, it turns out, feels a lot like building a fort: you make an abstract representation of a space, whether from rocks and branches or lines on a page, and fill in the details with your imagination.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Last week I wrote about my years long search for a bakery space and my dream of a neighborhood bakery in the Fountain District. Writing stories is the best way I know to imagine the future. Not stories in numbers, not projected profit and loss or build-out budgets, though those are useful and necessary, but word stories. Here is a story of a walkable neighborhood bakery. On my task list for tomorrow is taking some quiet hours to write new bakery stories: a retail bakery downtown or east of the freeway; a wholesale bakery in an industrial park; a farmers market bakery that trades bicycles for trucks and sells down the I-5 corridor.

A Fountain District Bakery
It’s raining again, a steady, cold drizzle, but inside the bakery is bright and warm. The walls are the colors of iron-rich earth: ochre, sienna, umber. The knotty pine of the front counter, the tables, and shelves glows dull yellow. The floor is scarred with age. The chairs don't match, nor do the sturdy, hand-thrown clay mugs. The air smells like bread and butter and the rosemary a boy is crushing between his fingers, pinched from one of the big terracotta pots by the front door.

Behind the counter, yesterday's rye is stacked in long loaves above the slicer and scale and the wheat breads are cooling on the wood rack that half obscures the kitchen from the front. The pastries are lined up neatly behind a thick pane of glass that turns half of the front counter into a pastry case. The coffee carafe is full. At the narrow counter along the front windows, neighbors sit alone or in pairs with their coffee and morning pastry, watching the rain or the screens of their phones. Two families have claimed the long wood table, kids kneeling on the benches to reach for plates, their elbows bumping forgotten mugs of hot chocolate and each other. The line curves around the table to the door.

We two early morning bakers are taking a break, drinking coffee and eating yesterday's apple tarts, sitting on the bench against the back office wall. Back here, too, is a mix-up of new and old: new vinyl floors, ugly but easy to clean, a new compressor in the old walk-in cooler, the sturdy old mixers, and the long, battered work bench I bought last year from a closing bakery, most of the scratches sanded out and its surface gleaming from a recent oiling. Next to the bench are dough tubs with the morning’s mix, stacked high on dollies. And at the heart of the kitchen our new oven, massive and beautiful, bright steel and the clear glass not yet clouded by smoke.

We finish our breakfast just as the oven timer goes off. That’s one more batch of tarts for the hoard out front. While the dough rises, we pack up the morning’s orders on the two cargo bikes parked by the back rollup door, trade our sneakers for boots, layer up in wool and rain gear and ride out on morning deliveries.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

I mix all the bread and pastry by hand, or, occasionally, with the dubious help of a home stand mixer. I’m good at mixing. My hands are paddles at the ends of my arms. My fingers squeeze. My back stays straight, my wrists rigid. I can mix hundreds of kilos without injury, week after week. I know the touch of every dough and batter intimately, all the way to my elbows.

I like hand mixing the wheat doughs, judging their strength and hydration as I fold and squeeze. I don’t mind mixing the ryes, though they’re so sticky I have to scrape them off my arms and from between my fingers with a plastic rib and then scrub with the rough side of the dish sponge. Only the chocolate chip cookie dough truly makes me wish for a mechanical mixer. It’s thick and inelastic and I jam my fingers on chocolate disks. The thing is, I have a mechanical mixer. Soon I’ll have two! I just need to build a bakery to put them in. There’s an old workhorse of a Kemper spiral mixer that I picked up from a closing bakery packed away in E’s barn because it’s too big for the restaurant kitchen where I bake. And even now a Hobart planetary mixer, fully refurbished and painted a brilliant blue, is getting packed on a pallet to be shipped west. Where I’ll put it I don’t yet know.

I’ve been watching the Fountain District, my favorite of the commercial districts and the only one in central Bellingham without a bakery, for three years, hoping to find a space. So far nothing, or at least nothing that could be built out on any kind of sane budget, has opened up. So I’ll look towards Sunnyland, towards the CBD, towards Sehome or Roosevelt, towards the industrial parks at the edges of town. Retail bakery, wholesale bakery, commissary kitchen? I’ve written the story of a neighborhood bakery/cafe in the Fountain District so many times I know it by heart; it’s time to revise the plot, or perhaps rewrite it entirely. If nothing else, I need a place to put these large and lovely machines.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

A bakery in Southeast Idaho was giving away their deck oven. “Free to a good home,” read the email’s subject line. They had to be out of their space in two weeks; they needed it gone. “Holy shit!” I thought. “A free oven!” And then, “Could I do it?” Could I close down the bakery and rent a truck, disassemble six tons of metal and concrete, of gas and electrical lines, load and secure it all, and drive back across two states and over the Cascades in early November? Or maybe I could hire a driver? Hire a crew to break down and crate? The possibilities flailed in my head. I emailed the bakery. I called my dad to talk it over. I texted friends and acquaintances, bakers, millers, and farmers, asking, How? and, What if? and, Is this crazy?

The deal was so good it dazzled me. An oven is the most expensive tool in most bakeries. A free oven, or even an oven that cost $5,000 or $10,000 to disassemble, move, store, and reassemble would completely change the startup budget of the bakery caught half way between dream and plan in my mind. But. There was no bakery yet. There wasn’t even a location for a bakery. And this oven was big, with over twice the capacity I’d planned for even in my most ambitious projections. It was an oven for a wholesale operation, not a bicycle-based, neighborhood bakery. I spun and spun, caught in anticipation and indecision. I went to bed exhausted and wide awake, feeling like I used to after a day of rock climbing and the constant push-pull of fear and exhilaration.

In the morning, instead of stuffing food, sneakers, and headphones into my panniers and hurrying to the kitchen to start the day’s mix, I made coffee and toast and sat down to think some more. I sat for a long time. When I finally rode to work I was hours late and settled. It was the wrong oven. Even free, it was the wrong oven. I let it go.

The day of undeciding left me clumsy-tired in the bakery, and certain of two things: 1. It was time and past to become machine literate, or at least machine conversational, to get comfortable tinkering, fixing, taking apart, and reassembling equipment (other than my bicycle) so that the next time some large and unwieldy baking tool became urgently available, I would be more prepared, and 2. I have an unexpectedly strong network of people skilled in business, in machines and electrical work, in logistics and planning, who, when I ask, will answer with advice, probing questions, and, “How can I help?”

I often worry that I’ve isolated myself with this business, with it’s unreasonable hours and endless demands. I miss more friend gatherings than I make, and when I do show up there’s a good chance I’ll leave early or fall asleep in the armchair in the corner. I haven’t made time for major community involvement in years. But when I reached out Monday, people reached back. I have a community despite myself. Thank you.
Sophie
Owner | Baker

THANKSGIVING ORDERS are up! (or they will be shortly. Give me a few minutes to update the online store.)
Order online with a credit card or at the market with cash or check
Pickup Wednesday, Nov. 27, downtown (exact location TBD)

Sweets:
Apple Cake - because it's my favorite and should be yours, too. Rye, buckwheat, and heirloom apples. 78% Whatcom grown by weight.
Gingerbread Bundt - in all its dark and sticky glory.

Breads:
Rosemary Rolls - with a little toasted corn & olive oil
Red & White - for a large or larger table bread
Roasted Potato & Garlic - 100% Washington grown (except the salt)
Harvest Miche - of wheat, rye, buckwheat, & corn

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Oat & Honey
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap Cookie
Apple Oat Scone (with or without marmalade)
Gingerbread Cake
Apple Cake with Cultured Cream
Orange Cardamom Bread Pudding
Shortbread
Buckwheat Crisps

FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
6 weeks remaining
Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18
Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven
This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, WILD & SEEDY

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

When the last of the loaves were cooled and packed away, when the floors were mopped, the tables wiped down, the dishes cleared from the rack, I biked home. I was tired, footsore, worrying about the work still undone and the weekend’s weather report. To the east clouds crowded against the foothills. To the west the sky opened. The light was low and warm, setting the firs and the bare branches of the maples aglow against the rain-dark sky. Colors swelled around me, pulling my out of my head and into the world: grape hyacinth blue as the cloak on a Renaissance Madonna, the exuberant green of unfolding leaves, silver bark, the cream white of a wildly blooming magnolia, the crows on the power line so black they could have been cut from the sky. There is a time late in the day that painters and photographers call the Golden Hour, when the colors are so true they feel like “some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light.” If I could go out walking every morning and evening to catch that perfect light I would, but I’d settle for watching the day change through big windows.

I haven’t yet found any promising spaces for a bakery, and the dearth of options is a sliver of panic through my daydreams and plans. Keep an eye out for me, will you? Big windows, a walkable neighborhood, three phase, gas, and venting, room to grow, a good landlord: all of those would be nice, but I’d make due with one or two.

​After last weekend’s warm sunshine today’s weather is looking decidedly unfavorable, but come down to the first farmers market of the season to say hello anyway. It’s spring in the Pacific Northwest, after all. Rain is to be expected.

See you soon.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

I spent last weekend in Olympia at the Cascadia Grains conference, talking with farmers and bakers and listening to talks on subjects ranging from business finance to climate change, crop rotations, and the centers of origin for the world’s grains. I came home, as I always do from these industry events, fizzy with anticipation and nerves, invigorated by the in person connections in a way I never am by interactions on social media. I want to build this bakery dream into reality. I want so much more than this little market business can hold.

I’ve been deep in the numbers all week, building foolishly complicated spreadsheets, researching costs, working out financial projections. Next up: financing, real estate, incorporation, interviewing contractors and designers and accountants and attorneys. When I think about all the steps between here and my cheerful, light-filled bakery, I want to climb back into the dough tub (metaphorically) and just hang out with the bread. Bread is so wonderfully complex, but also simple, you know? Tangible. Immediate and satisfying in a way the business planning is not. To fight the paralyzing size of this new project, I make task lists. Lots of them. In notebooks, in spreadsheets, on loose scraps of paper. I make task lists for making more task lists. That way, I have one step to take, and then the next. And when the nerves overwhelm the anticipation, I have the stories I’ve written to myself about the bakery. Dozens of little stories, each a window into the dream bakery, to remind me that at the end of the lists is a business as tangible and immediate as the bread it will produce. But bigger. And not at all simple.

​Sophie
Owner | Baker

​THIS WEEK's WEDNESDAY BREAD
Order by Sunday night to pick up Wednesday, Jan 30
Red & White
Mountain Rye
Baker's Choice: Farmer's Bread 1.0 - a crusty rye & wheat boule, inspired by the Austrian Bauernlaib. Eventually, I'd like to add a rye boule like this to my weekly bread lineup. Help me develop the recipe by letting me know what you think of the sour balance (lactic/acetic), the spice mix and strength (currently a little fennel, caraway, and blue fenugreek), the texture (moisture, density), the keeping quality, and anything else you think is important in your daily bread.

NEXT WEEK's WEDNESDAY BREAD
Order this week for pickup Wednesday, Feb 6
Red & White
Mountain Rye
Baker's Choice: Farmer's Bread 2.0

WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
6 weeks left!
RED & WHITE subscription
MOUNTAIN RYE subscription
BAKER's CHOICE subscription: a new rye every week

Order ONLINE and pickup on Wednesdays from:
Downtown: Cafe Velo, 120 Prospect, 9am - 7pm
Fairhaven: Shirlee Bird Cafe, 1200 Harris, 7:30am - 5pm
Birchwood: the front step, 8am - 8pm

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)

Customers ask me all the time at market if I bake in a wood fired oven. Maybe this is because my breads are large and rustic, but I like to think it's because I look like the kind of baker who would work with masonry and fire. “No,” I reply, shaking my head and grimace-smiling. “I don’t have a wood fired oven.”

What I have is a slightly run down commissary kitchen in downtown Bellingham that I share with two restaurants and a handful of other food businesses. On a winter night the kitchen temperature might dip to 45 °F  (I keep my sourdough buckets on a plant heating mat); in the summer, temperatures rise to 95 °F , even with the hood on. There’s no proofer to rise the bread, no walk-in cooler space to hold the dough cold, no mixer, and certainly no bread oven. But it’s affordable, and has approval from the various goverment agencies that have to approve such things. It’s a few blocks from the Saturday market, and within a 15 minute ride of most of my wholesale customers. It’s been my incubator: a safe place to learn and grow as I’ve felt my tentative way into this business.

I’m immensely grateful to have had the opportunity to build Raven Breads to this point on a shoestring budget, and without debt. The commissary has made that possible. But there’s only so much bread I can shove through its little convection oven, and only so many hours I can bake in a day. Now (or at least soon) it’s time to move on. Bakers and business owners, if you have advice on growth and finance, old business plans to look over, opinions about local real estate and contractors, or even if you just want to kvetch about the struggles of bread and business, I'd love to talk to you.

Next week, I'll tell you about my dream for the new bakery.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White + Garden Herb Explosion!
Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot
Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies
Oatmeal Marmalade Scone
Buckwheat Rhubarb Scone
Breakfast Scone (oat + fig + hazelnut)
Lemon Poppy Berry Tea Cake
Shortbread

PRE-ORDER for Wednesday 5/16
(place order by Sunday night for Wednesday pickup)
Polenta ($8)
Mountain Rye ($7)
Vollkornbrot ($8)