 “Why do you bike?” she asked me. The question shouldn’t have taken me by surprise, but it did. “Because I like to,” I replied, reaching out for more words and coming back empty-handed. The conversation moved on. As answers go, it was true enough, but thoroughly inadequate. Never mind noise and air pollution, never mind the costs of transit infrastructure and public health, never mind livable cities and public safety, never mind geopolitics and oil. Those are all good stories, true stories. I could have told any of them. Or I could have finished the story I’d begun, had I not gone mind-empty and tongue-tied. Here is the story: I like to bicycle. I like having half an hour inside the world and its weather, with the wind and sunshine and the driving rain against my face, with the sky opening above me and the smells of the city—woodsmoke, the chemical choke of fabric softener from a dryer vent, petrichor, cut grass, the bloom of night flowers, the secret wilderness of water and forest under the Dupont bridge—blowing by, even if I spend the rest of the day shut up inside a wood and concrete box. And I like the mechanical efficiency of cycling: the way muscle translates so effortlessly into speed. I like the freedom a bicycle’s speed and size gives me to explore off the city’s arteries and into the winding capillaries of the neighborhoods, with an eye out for pocket parks and abandoned fruit trees. I like the rush of descent, crouched low, waiting, waiting, waiting, faster, and braking just in time for the intersection. I like bicycling as a small, daily act of thanksgiving: for a body that is strong and capable, for the day, for the city, for the minutes between one task and another, when all I need to do is pedal and breath and watch out for homicidal drivers. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Herb & Olive Oil Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Shortbread Strawberry Rhubarb Slab Pie Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: SPICED RING RYE!  It took years, but eventually bread killed my bike. Ok, that’s exaggeration. But bread lamed my bike badly. I was riding my work bike a few months ago—the one I use to haul those ridiculous trailer loads to market—and looked down to see a distinct wobble in my back wheel. Being an indifferent bike mechanic, and a busy baker, I dropped the bike off at the bicycle cafe for a truing. But by mid-afternoon, Andrew, the mechanic, had called to say the wheel was a loss. The metal of those shiny aluminum spoke nipples, once the height of bicycle fashion, was too soft to turn. There was no righting this wheel. I’d have to buy another. So of course, I rode away and forgot about my wonky wheel, except on Saturday mornings when I loaded up the market trailer, and would glance down with apprehension, imagining it flattening suddenly under the weight of all that bread. A foolish imagining, but I couldn't shake it. (Though I’ve started breaking the market load into two trips, until recently I hauled it all in one precarious load, with a trailer weight of approximately 345 lbs. When you add me into the equation, that means my little bicycle was carrying the equivalent of 3.5 bakers, or 214 large loaves of bread). Eventually, though, that weekly anxiety added up to a return trip to the bicycle cafe, this time for a new rear wheel. I pedaled over from the bakery on my road bike to pick up the work bike yesterday afternoon, while the oven was reheating between loads of bread. When I walked in, Andrew called me over eagerly. “Let me show you your old wheel!” He held it up, triumphant. “I’ve only seen this once before,” he told me, tracing a thin crack all the way around the inside of the rim. “Look!” he pointed to places where the crack had widened, whole chips of rim missing. When he spun the wheel, I could hear them rattling around inside. “It’s a good thing you got a new one! This one could have collapsed at any time.”  See you soon. Sophie TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Oat & Honey Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies Oatmeal + Red Berry Scone Buckwheat + Plum Scone Plum Cake Shortbread WEDNESDAY BREAD SUBSCRIPTION Wild & Seedy Mountain Rye When the mixing and shaping are done for the day, when the bread is rising, and the cookies and scones are lined up in orderly rows up and down the sheet pans, then the real work is finished. Still, hours remain. Still there is the baking, the oven loaded and unloaded and loaded again, the proofing baskets to scrub, dishes to wash, cooled loaves to stack in their stacks of boxes, walls to wipe down, the floor to sweep and mop. It is late morning on a day that started well before sunrise, and the work is not even half done. So I make a cup of coffee, milky and strong, and sit out back where I can see the alley and a ribbon of sky through the window. I open the library’s collection of digital books on my phone, and go in search of someone to read me a story. It has to be the right story. A real sweep-you-up, fast-paced, wild rumpus of a story. A story to lift me off my aching feet, above my stiff knees, away from the sweat and flour grit and my tired-sticky eyes. A story to carry me through the late morning, over the afternoon, and deep into the evening. It is a wonderful and disconcerting thing, to lose myself so completely in a book. When I am reading, or being read to, I no longer hear the world clattering around me or notice the passing of time. It has always been this way. Theoretically, I believe in being fully attentive to my work. After all, I spend most of my days working. If I don’t pay attention to the working hours, I could lose the greater part of my adult life. But in practice, my baking days are too long, the kitchen too loud and poorly lit. My body tolerates more than my mind, so I let the stories carry my mind away while my body moves steadily on through the familiar motions. It is the bike ride home that brings me back. After hours of living divided, the steady pump of tired legs, the air moving over my skin, the smells of the night, hook my mind and pull it inside my body. Afterward, if I have the energy and the light, I’ll run down to the water. Standing on the broken willow at the path’s edge, looking out at the ocean and sky through its branches, I’ll listen to the waves wash their steady beat against the shore. Each wave is like a breath. Each breath pulls me farther inside my skin, till my mind stills, and I am whole again. TODAY AT MARKET Red & White + The Whole Garden Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies Oatmeal Marmalade Scone Strawberry Buckwheat Scone Sweet & Sour Cherry Galette Sour Cherry & Hazelnut Tart Shortbread WEDNESDAY MARKET Red & White Country Rye Mountain Rye Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies Scone, Shortbread, etc. See you soon.
Sophie Owner | Baker Can you ever be all the way outside in the city? Can you be outside when you stand on a concrete floor, walled in by buildings, with the roar of traffic ebbing and flooding like the tide, changing birdsong and your brain, and the the petro-smell of too many cars rising up from the roads with every warm rain? , Last night I rode home under a hot pink sunset, keeping one eye on the sky, the other on the cars and the boozy sidewalk crowds. The night was sound and color around me. I remembered other night rides. I remembered riding through the country night and feeling the air change. The hollows were cool damp, already collecting mist, and the night smells were as loud as the frog choruses: forest mulch and fir, nootka rose, dust, flowering clover and meadow grass, and the warm smell of the cattle. It made me feel so wildly alive, pedaling through the complicated dark, with only the shadows of the hedgerows to mark the road, and not a single headlight to break the night all the way home. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies Oatmeal Marmalade Scone Buckwheat Strawberry Scone Rhubarb Strawberry Galette Shortbread WEDNESDAY MARKET Red & White Toasted Sesame Mountain Rye Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies Scone, Shortbread, Galette 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 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 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 I left the bakery late the other night to spitting rain and quiet streets. The day had been brilliantly clear, and now, in the dark, the rain released the city's sun-warmed petrichor in a bold rush. The roads smelled of summer, of asphalt and tires and walking down to the lake through the heat of some long-ago August night to go skinny dipping in the inky water. As I rode across the bridge on Dupont, the smell of the creek rose up, cool and wet, throwing me back, for a brief, unexpected moment, to that first climbing trip in Squamish: eleven or twelve, looking up at the rock through forest-dappled sunlight and knowing the power of my body. Farther along I passed a breath of unidentifiable flowers, dark and honey-sweet, like the depth of a jungle night, and then some exotic woodsmoke that reminded me of distant mountains, of the stone-walled barley fields and honeycomb houses of Ladakh, or maybe the cinderblocks and eroded milpas of a half abandoned village, high in the Mixe. The road was empty, and I was full of sense-memories, there and gone again, quick as the passing cross streets as I rode on towards home. How beautiful the night. How beautiful the strange workings of our minds. At Market Today Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Chocolate & Hazelnut Sandwich Cookies Rhubarb & Rose Rolls Cardamom Rolls Rhubarb Bread Pudding Preorder Wednesday Pickup Red & White Mountain Rye Rosemary Sea Salt Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies   Test 1 (currently called Country Rye, because it looks like it belongs on a farmhouse table) is 85% rye and 15% wheat, leavened by both a three stage rye starter and wheat starter. I'm hoping to build a loaf with a smooth, open crumb, a little lighter than the tinned ryes, that can be plain or seeded, mixed with dried fruit or nuts, or scented with bread spice or blue fenugreek, depending on the season.
Come give it a try and tell me what you think! See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker Biking in this weather makes me feel decidedly vulnerable, like a molted arthropod, naked among the hard shells and snapping claws of the cars. It requires trusting to a greater degree than usual that everyone else on the road is paying attention, and given how inattentive most cell phone zombies are, this is a foolish hope. It's time to buy a car and climb back into my own protective shell.
For the time being, however, I'll load up my trailer and ride (on the sidewalk) over to market. Among todays offerings is Honey Hazelnut Oat bread, the coziest loaf I could dream up to under the threat of freezing rain. Toast up a slice with your hot tea/coffee/chocolate this afternoon to eat while you sit snug inside, watching the rain fall. Also in the boxes: Red & White, Mountain Rye, and Smoky Vollkornbrot. If you want bread to hold you over for the month between the last farmers market (next Saturday) and the beginning of the Winter Bread Subscription, I recommend stocking up on rye bread and keeping it sealed up and cold (in a ziplock in the refrigerator works, though in this weather a box on the back porch would do just as well). The bread will easily keep till January, changing and, I think, improving with the keeping as the flavors mellow and the texture firms. If you want to buy a whole, uncut Mountain Rye or Smoky Vollkornbrot at the last market, send me a note this week. It's time to place your Holiday Orders! You can do so in person at the market today, or online. Holiday breads are: Challah, Chocolate Hazelnut Babka, and Pane Primitivo, a rustic celebration bread with earthy buckwheat, sweet sour dried apricots, and toasted hazelnuts. Also on offer are all four shortbreads: Brown Butter, Toasted Hazelnut & Molasses, Nibby Buckwheat, and Orange Cardamom Rye. Come sample the shortbread and the babka today, and then order one of everything! Or just one special treat. Be safe on the roads, whether on two feet, two wheels, or four wheels. See you soon! Sophie |