Sometimes it all goes right. Shape, color, texture, finish, the weight in my hand: all just the way I want them. But perfect bakes are rare. More often the tops are too dark, the bottoms too light. Or the loaves curl up high and tight in the unsteamed oven and blow out their sides. Or there’s a hole through the center, so that if you cut off the ends and hold a loaf to your eye you can peer down it like a spyglass. Or the rye gaps. Or the skin of the wheat tears as it rises. There are a dozen mistakes to make, a hundred, a new mistake for every day and every bake.

Back when I was young and just beginning, the ugly loaves were a personal shame. Someone, or everyone, had convinced me that results, and not effort, were the measure of one’s worth; mistakes were to be feared and avoided. This is a stupid way to live in the world. I’m still working to unlearn it.

These days I note the imperfections in my bakes with curiosity and the occasional pinch of annoyance for a mistake I should have known better than to repeat. I discount the ugly loaves and send the lot off to be eaten. Maybe with a deck oven and a mixer, or with another decade to master my craft, every bake will be beautiful. Maybe. Probably not. The grain changes with the harvest. The weather changes with the season. The sourdough changes, or the baker. Or nothing big changes and still the bread is different because even the most domesticated sourdough is still a little wild.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

I’m learning how to darn. So far I’ve inexpertly managed a few flat mends; I have yet to attempt anything advanced like sock heels or cuffs. My foray into darning was inspired by a book I picked up a few months ago from the library--Mending Life, by sisters Sonya and Nina Montenegro—which is both a practical introduction to mending clothes and an exploration of mending as a practice of healing and restoration. I returned the book weeks ago, but both its simple darning instructions and the idea that mending clothes could be an expression of a larger ethic have stuck in my mind.

What if caring for everyday objects, for people, for our communities, for land and water here and everywhere are tangled vines growing from the same roots? “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote. “What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” I don’t think darning a hole in a sweater takes the place of political action, or that individual action can change systemic problems, but maybe caring for household goods is one way to appreciate the material gifts of our daily lives—the food, clothing, and objects—and our responsibility to them. Maybe mending can be a small medicine for the large hurt of living in a culture of extraction and consumption.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

I make a lot of lists. Every morning I make a task list for the day. Sometimes I add tasks after the fact just so I can cross them off. I make prep lists for the bakery, and when the days get really long I make detailed action lists so that I can tumble my tired body from one check mark to the next without thought: wipe table, stamp bags, cut labels, wash hands & glove, cut/bag bread, pack bread, wipe table, sweep, etc. But I make less practical lists, too. Things I’m Grateful For lists, Aimless Love lists, Good Things lists, like this:

Some good things this week:
After a late night baking and an early morning biking deliveries across town, a long nap under the pine tree in the backyard, body warm in the sunshine, face turned to the tree’s shadow.
Gathering nettles, fiddleheads, and horsetails in the parks, because even here in the city our land is abundant.
Sitting on a sandstone outcrop at the top of the valley, listening to the wind come hurrying through the treetops and E, reading me Mink River till his voice gives out.
Raven call.
Racing seagulls down Northwest on my bike. The seagulls always win.

You might try it, if you don't already.

See you at market in a few hours.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET and NEXT WEEK FOR PREORDER
10am – 3pm, 1100 Railroad Ave

BREAD:
Red & White ($7.50 / 720g)
Mountain Rye ($7.50 / 750g)
Vollkornbrot ($8 / 750g)
Seedy Buckwheat ($8 / 420g)

SWEETS:
Gingersnap Cookies ($2.5 / ea)
Milk Chocolate Chip & Hazelnut Cookies ($2.5 / ea)
Oat Scones ($4.50 / ea)
Brown Butter Shortbread ($9 / half dz)
Ginger Tea Cake ($4.5 / slice)

WEDNESDAY PICKUP
Self-serve pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, and Fairhaven.
Address and directions with your pickup reminder email Wednesday morning.

Order by Sunday night.

THIS WEEK'S BAKE:
Red & White
Mountain Rye
Toast: Buckwheat & Molasses
Sweets: Goodbye Winter Parsnip Cake + Hazelnut Shortbread

We are creatures of habit, and often this is a good thing. When the daily acts that make us happy—cooking, eating together, biking in all weather, reading, to name a few of mine—are habit, we do them day after day, regardless of our moods and distractions (though, off course, the same is true of unhappy acts, like my picking up my phone an average of 44 times a day).

Habit carries me through my baking days, through the mixing, the shaping, the tasting and touching. Habit has me lining up my tools before every task, has me stacking dishes just so (nested, utensils on the side, lids on so the rye doesn’t dry into cement), has me shaping the first loaf and the fiftieth with the same sure touch. These habits, these ways my body knows what to do whether my mind is centered on the dough or wandering off in other directions, are part of my pleasure in the physical work.

But habit is, by its nature, thoughtless. I change a recipe for an immediate reason—adding salt to the preferment in the heat of summer, let’s say—and then that change becomes routine and I carry it on indefinitely—there’s still salt in my preferments, despite the fact that it’s currently 60ºF in the commissary—or until some other circumstance forces me to adjust again.

One of the best things about my winter breaks, about breaking the habits that shape my days for 11/12ths of the year, is that I come back asking, Why? Why this ratio of flour to seeds? Why Red & White wheat, rather then all hard red or all hard white? Why do I take ingredients off the pallet, stack them on a cart, roll them into the kitchen, use them, restack them on the cart, roll them back to the storage area, and return them to their pallet, rather than storing them on wheels in the first place? Why don't I schedule breaks into my bake days? Why am I still working in this windowless room? Why haven’t I built my own bakery yet?

Maybe this will be my spring resolution: make good habits, as many as possible, at home and at work, and then make time to break them.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Did you know you can still sign up for the WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION? It runs through March 25, with pickup every Wednesday in Birchwood (the front step), Downtown (Cafe Velo), or in Fairhaven (Shirlee Bird Cafe).

Sign up or order a single loaf for the week ONLINE.

Along with Red & White and Mountain Rye, each week I make a different Baker's Choice bread. My choices this winter are:

Jan 22: Rugbrod
Jan 29: Ring Rye
Feb 5: Apple Rye
Feb 12: Harvest Miche 1
Feb 19: Harvest Miche 2
Feb 26: Black Bread
March 4: Alpine Spice Rye
March 11: Rye & Oat
March 18: Korn Rye or Corn Rye??
March 25: Westphalian Pumpernickel!

There are 3 spots left in our March class!
Sign up through the Guild website.

Start Where You Are:
Using & Troubleshooting Local Grain
Instructors: Mel Darbyshire & Sophie Williams

Come learn tools for assessing, baking with, and troubleshooting local whole grains. Leaving the commodity market to support local farms and mills often means dealing with grains that vary from field to field, farm to farm, and harvest to harvest.

In this class we’ll bake with wheat and rye flours of variable quality, using sensory evaluation and the batch specs to choose products and adapt formulas to best suit our grain. We’ll talk about how growing conditions effect grain quality, how grain quality effects baking properties, and what to do with a bad harvest.

March 5-6, 2020
Thursday 12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Friday 9 am - 4:00 pm

The Bread Lab
11768 Westar Lane - Burlington, WA 98233
Registration Deadline:  Sunday, March 1st
Skill Level:  Intermediate to Advanced

I called the city with a business tax question. “All of our representatives are currently serving other customers,” a recording informed me. Customers? I thought, incredulous. Customers? I hung up and called back to listen again. “All of our representatives are currently serving other customers,” the calm, male voice said again. I hung up a second time.

This was an honest misspeak, a habit of phrase. I probably wouldn’t have noticed were it not for Citizens United, the upcoming election, and the works I’ve read recently by Robert Macfarlane on the intimate relationship between how we live on the land and our landscape vocabulary, and Robin Wall Kimmerer on the grammar of animacy and how language defines the boundaries of our knowing. Words are not passive. Language shapes our understanding of the world as much as the world we live in shapes our language. “Customers” caught my attention and held it because it is so easy to imagine citizens of a democracy becoming customers of plutocracy. Sometimes it feels like we already are.

VOTE. The General Election is this Tuesday. Read voters’ guides. Read the newspaper. Talk to your friends and neighbors. Fill out your ballot and post it or drop it in one of the ballot boxes. Whatever you think of our national politics, local politics matter, and here YOUR VOTE COUNTS.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

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

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap
Oat Scone
Gingerbread Cake
Apple Cake with Cultured Cream
Orange Cardamom Bread Pudding
Shortbread
Buckwheat Crisps

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

My life is not righteous. I do unnecessary harm daily through thoughtlessness or laziness or ignorance. I know this to be true. But have you noticed how often people try to use the gap between hope and execution to invalidate counter cultural ideas? As if one cannot be an idealist and fallible at the same time. As if one cannot be hopeful and human.

Earlier this week I was, reluctantly, trying to explain anti-consumerism to a skeptical acquaintance. “You drive, right?” No, not really. “But you have a cell phone?” Yes. “Well then, you buy things.” Never mind the absurdity of the statement--of course I buy things--that was the end. Idea refuted. Q.E.D. In the moment, I was annoyed and defensive, but by the time I was trudging through the market bake yesterday I was curious about his conclusion to the conversation, and my own. Our lives are complicated and contradictory. To live entirely without hypocrisy, it seems to me, we would have to be cynical or apathetic. As long as we believe strongly, as long as we are curious and kind, as long as we work to do less unnecessary harm, isn’t that a good beginning, rather than an end to the argument for living thoughtfully?

“My ideals are often one step ahead of my ability to fully embody them,” activist Mark Boyle wrote, “and that is no bad thing; in fact… I wonder if hypocrisy might be the highest ideal of all.”

Off to load up for market.
See you soon.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

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

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap
Oat Scone
Gingerbread Cake
Apple Cake with Cultured Cream
Shortbread
Buckwheat Crisps

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

Here we are, poised between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the high holy days of capitalism. I suppose it’s further proof that I will never be a great entrepreneur—as if the bicycle and brick breads didn’t give me away—that I find this celebration of rampant consumerism macabre. Because it’s not really the great deals and free shipping we’re celebrating, is it? It’s not a holiday about corporate generosity. What we’re celebrating is our ability to take without question. To take from the poor and give to the rich. To take while the fires rage and the seas rise. To take and take, no matter the cost.

Does the act of giving balance the taking? Can we really, without irony or acknowledgment, take blindly from the world, and then turn around with a smile and hold out our plunder to the people we love? Look! we say in plastic and packaging, Here is my devotion in planned obsolescence. Look! Here, is my caring in pit mines and clear cuts. Look! Here is my adoration in poisoned rivers and lost species, my gratitude in child labor and exploitation. Look, my dearest, I love you more than the world itself!

In a speech she gave near the end of her life, the old-left dreamer Ursula le Guin said, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
​
See you soon, if my early morning politics haven't scared you away.

​Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot
Chocolate Malt Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingerbread
Brown Butter + Nibby Buckwheat Shortbread

The Wednesday Bread Subscription is over for the season. The next subscription, starting in January, will be a survey of rye breads (though there will, of course, be wheat breads available as well).

I am glad to hold my work in my hands. In a life awash in distractions—thoughts, words, screens—the bread is an anchor. Here, the wet clay of rye, sticky, malleable, and patient. There, the delicate wheat. The doughs are alive and particular. This one wants firm, decisive handling, but that one—be gentle! I mix every dough, up to my forearms, stirring and squeezing flour and water into a smooth mass. I shape every loaf, tipping each with cupped hands into a pan or basket to rise. And when I unload the oven, I examine the bread, noting its triumphs and imperfections: the bloom of a razor-cut line in the crust, the pale, soft sides where two loaves nosed too close together, the curving profiles, the cracks and color. No matter how long the day, no matter how tired I am, no matter how overwhelming the news spinning out of the radio, the sight of the loaves lined up to cool on the rack makes me pause in gratitude. Here is tangible work. Here is what I made with muscle and nerve and the touch-memory of my hands.

See you soon.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

​TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Oat & Honey
Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot
Chocolate Malt Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Oatmeal Fig Scone
Apple Quince Galette*
Gingerbread*
Brown Butter + Nibby Buckwheat Shortbread

THANKSGIVING ORDERS
(For pickup Wednesday, Nov 21, at 1313 N State St.)
Apple Quince Pie (serves 8 / $28)
Gingerbread Bundt with Pear Caramel (serves 12 / $42)
Rosemary Potato Bread (720 g / $8)

*Sample the Thanksgiving sweets today at market before you place your order!

“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by,” Annie Dillard wrote. I think about this as I work. It is not a good day. I am tired to the soles of my feet. The work pulls me deeper into the night and won’t let go. I trudge on.

I daydream about good days: the exuberant pleasure of a day spent swimming in the ocean, or reading books, or sitting over long, leisurely meals with friends. I think about good days as I load and unload the oven, as I stack dishes from the drying rack, as I sweep and mop the floor, wipe down the counters, scrub the sinks, and carry the compost out into the dark alley. They’re Sundays, all, and sweet and sunlit in my mind.

But of course, I don’t live a life of Sundays. I wouldn’t, even if I could, though the weeks between are often blurred by schedule and repetition. Is that what Dillard meant? That the days of sun and pleasure are easy enough to find, if you have the time and inclination. It is adding up the days between, weaving the hours and their mundane tasks into the fabric of a meaningful life, that is the great and difficult work.
​
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing…Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern."

​See you soon.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White + The Whole Garden
Oat & Honey
Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot
Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Oatmeal Blackberry Scone
Buckwheat Peach Scone
Shortbread

WEDNESDAY MARKET
Red & White
Toasted Sesame
Mountain Rye
Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies
Scone, Shortbread, etc.

“What would you do if you didn’t have to work?” he asked.
“Didn’t have to work?”
“Like, if you were independently wealthy.”

I had to think about it. I was unloading the oven. Tired, sticky with sweat and flour, trying to ignore the new burn across my left wrist. “This,” I said at last. “I would do this.”

The answer surprised me. The words, and their certainty, felt like a revelation. From the outside, this probably sounds ridiculous. After all, what have I been doing but living, breathing, eating bread for the past four years? But my twenties have often felt like a decade long existential crisis. Certainty has been scarce in the years of doubt.

In my early twenties, I was paralyzed by the fear of choosing the wrong path. The future spread before me, possibility and promise, and yet to step onto one path, it seemed, meant forsaking all others, and so I stood still, frozen by agonized indecision. It was an age of hyperbole and deep self-absorption.

By my middle twenties I could see that the paths were not, if fact, straight, but braided together. As long as I was walking in the right direction, I decided, I would be ok. But still, I spent a lot of time looking over my shoulder as my friends marched off into families and careers, their lives growing ever more distant.

My late twenties have been given more to mundane worries—financial security, work-life balance, healthcare—and vague fantasies about a make-believe 9-5 with benefits and free weekends that, on closer examination, disintegrate into Machiavellian office politics and hours hunched over a computer.

And so I felt that moment of certainty through my whole body, like a deep breath that pushed out the clutter and worries. My shoulders went back. My eyes widened. Laughter expanded in my chest. And then I finished unloading the oven, lined the loaves up on the rack to cool, walked over to the bench where I’d been rolling out pastry, and got back to work.

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White + The Whole Garden
Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot
Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies
Oatmeal Apricot Scone
Raspberry Buckwheat Scone
Herb & Onion Tart
Raspberry Cream Tart
Shortbread

WEDNESDAY MARKET
Red & White
Rosemary
Mountain Rye
Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies
Scone, Shortbread, other sweets

Raven Breads will not be at the market next Saturday, 7/28.