I left the bakery before the work was done: bread still cooling on the rack, floors unswept, tables and sinks not yet wiped down. I left because I was tired and restless and because I missed the sky. The rain had stopped. The streets and bars were filling. I cut south through the alley. Gray water wicked up the sides of my thin-soled bakery shoes. I was surrounded by concrete and traffic and noisy crowds, and then I was on the Interurban and alone under the green arch of trees. Fifty feet above me cars still roared down Boulevard, the ugly condos loomed, but on the trail the engines were overlaid with evening birdsong. The air was wet and green. I tasted wild roses blooming before I saw them. I took off my wet shoes. The sharp press of gravel felt good after twelve hours of standing on flat floors. Small rabbits watched me from the grass at the edge of the trail, darting away into the underbrush when I got close. I stopped to watch crows mob an eagle, to look out through the trees at the bright water. I walked till the trail bent across the railroad tracks and the trees opened into the grassy expanse of the park. Past the kids tossing a frisbee, past the couples on benches and the dog walkers, the steep, man-made beach was empty. I found my place at its edge. The gray water, gray islands, gray sky were quiet. To the north the Coast Range gleamed in the last light. After five minutes or thirty I put my shoes on and walked back to the trail, down the darkening green tunnel, through the alley, and into the bakery. The bread was cool enough to bag. I finished the work and rode home in the dark.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

All day in the bakery I listen to stories. I know the danger of living distracted. I recognize the contradiction of working divided, my hands in the dough and my mind far away, when I’m trying to build a business deeply rooted in place and time. But oh, the days are long and hard, and the kitchen is an unfriendly space, and I’ve always loved being read to.

When I was a child my parents took turns reading to me before sleep. I was hungry for stories. “Keep reading,” I pleaded when they closed the book for the night. “Keep reading!” I ordered, imperious, spoiled, desperate to hear what happened next, even when I could barely keep my eyes open, even when I’d heard the story two or six or a dozen times before, even when I almost knew it by heart.

Twenty five years later and though the books are now audio files downloaded from the library, not spine-cracked paper, and I’m standing in the commissary kitchen, not tucked into a trundle bed, not much has changed. I’m tired from my scratchy eyes to the aching soles of my feet and it’s hours past dinner time, but still I fuss with one more task, kneeling to scrub that far grungy corner under the sink or squaring up the rolling racks just so. I’ve checked the burners and turned off the hood. My bike is leaning by the back door, panniers packed. Outside the sky is darkening, and if I hurry I might catch pastel end of sunset. But oh, I want so badly to hear what happens next, even when home and dinner are waiting, even when I’ve listened to the book two or six or a dozen times before, even when I almost know it by heart.

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
Three Plum Cake
Gleaner's Apple Pie
Shortbread

This week in the Bread Subscription
Red & White
Mountain Rye
Baker's Choice: Milk & Oat

We went into the mountains, walking through forest, across alpine meadows, and up onto the high heather. On the knob of Yellow Aster Butte I turned and turned: Baker and Shuksan were hazy to the south, the teeth of the Skagit Range to the east, and just across the valley America Border Peak rose sharp and rust stained from Tomyhoi Lake. Below the butte we followed crisscrossing desire lines to the deepest of the alpine lakes and dove into the clear, cold water. Afterward, we lay quiet on the rocks like sunning snakes.

I came down from the mountains brighter, my mind clear as the lake water. I was made of muscle and bone and wonder. Love for the land, for my Northwestern home, expanded in my chest, squeezing worry and self-doubt and the anxiety of Sisyphusian to-do lists down to their small and proper size.

After the mountains, the city felt flat and slightly unreal. Inside the boxes of buildings there was no sky, no wind, no rain squalls, no air. Outside the walls, asphalt and turf grass hid the earth. The visceral wonder that had filled me softened and settled into memory. Worries and doubts grew back into the spaces it left behind. Under the bright, fluorescent lights of the kitchen I felt my mountain brightness dimming.

At the end of a long day of baking, hungry for the sky, I took my dinner out back behind the house and sat on top of the picnic table facing the garden. The garden is fenced with fishing nets we salvaged from a net dumpster at the marina and hung like a shower curtain on wire stapled between scrap wood posts. The first fence we built was eight feet at the corners, sagging to six at the nadir of the wire’s parabola. All last summer and fall we found hoof prints postholing through newly planted beds. One morning I walked out to find the bean vines stripped naked, all the leaves bitten away. This spring we rehung the net ten feet high at the corners. The beans are lush with leaves and red flowers.

I admired the riot of flowers as the light faded: the scarlet runner beans, the banks of volunteer borage and calendula, the cascading nasturtiums, and the sturdy sunflowers standing sentry over the beds. When I heard her steps in the dry grass I stilled, waiting. She passed ten feet in front of me. Every few steps she turned dark eyes and those big, expressive ears towards me, wary but unafraid. I didn't move. At the fence she stopped, nose to the net, gazing for long minutes into the feast of irrigated green. Mule deer are nearly as common as grey squirrels here at the edge of the city. She was unremarkable and very beautiful. The wonder swelled inside me.

See you soon.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Rosemary Potato
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap
Oat Scone
Shortbread
Blackberry Apricot Slab Pie

Wednesday bread this week:
Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: WILD & SEEDY

Sign up for the LATE SUMMER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
Every Wednesday, August 7 - September 25

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Herb & Olive Oil
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Oat Scone
Shortbread
Strawberry Rhubarb Slab Pie! (though I don't know how this will hold up in pastry bags. BYO bowl and fork, perhaps?)


Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription through July 31
RED & WHITE Subscription $49
MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription $49
BAKER's CHOICE Subscription $56

Wednesday bread this week:
Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: Polenta

Despite all indications to the contrary (namely, my laughably financially insecure profession), I’m not a risk taker. I’m obnoxiously frugal. I look before I leap. Often, I look for so long that from the outside the leap looks impulsive. From the inside, though, it’s the only remaining option.

For years, I rolled with the long bake days. If the orders spiked and I had to spend sixteen, eighteen, twenty hours in the kitchen, I did. Sure, it sucked, but with tea and snacks and maybe a nap on the grungy floor, I could make it through. I even felt a kind of stupid pride in my endurance. By last year, though, I was getting tired. It wasn’t enough to push through the week and sleep on Sunday. The bakery was supposed to be work. Work that I liked, certainly, maybe even work that I loved, but not my reason for existence. I was sliding dangerously close to burnout and I was too exhausted to do anything about it.

I had my first sixteen hour day in months last Tuesday. By the end I was aching and tired, but I wasn’t resigned. “No fucking way am I getting into this again,” I thought, and went on Craigslist to buy the first used oven I could find that would stack with the oven I bake in now. The newest addition to the mangy herd of ranges and ovens crowded under the Type 1 hood in the commissary isn’t a deck oven, of course. It isn’t even a combi. It’s just another fan-on-all-the-time American Range convection oven. But honestly, when I bought it, I didn’t think about long term equipment investments or the hassle of reselling it when I move out of the commissary. I didn’t think about amortization or margins. I’ve calculated and recalculated those equations, and in the end when I thought about my sore feet, about the production bottleneck at the oven, about how much I hate working through dinner, they didn’t matter. I leapt.
See you soon.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

P.S. I'm not actually sure how I'm going to take these two 680lb ovens off their stands and stack them together. If you have expertise in moving heavy objects, or just good lifting form and some free time Monday, I'd love help solving this rather daunting puzzle.

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: Raisin Honey Rye
Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription, June 12- July 31

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)

From the water-stained and sticky pages of the kitchen notebook.

11:50 am, Dec. 22, 7 hours into the last bake of the year, and still unfailingly optimistic that I'll be home in time for dinner:

The sun came up without my noticing, shut away as I was in the blind fluorescence of the kitchen. It is a brilliant day, clear and cold as any morning on the east side of the mountains. Inside, the last of the rye is baking; the wheat batards are proofing in their baskets; the brioche—what a foolish task I set myself, hand mixing whole grain brioche!—is slowly coming alive in the refrigerator; and the cookies are mixed, balled, and spread in equilateral triangles across an endless stack of sheet pans. After the chaos and scramble of the morning, I find myself, suddenly, back in control, standing at the beginning of afternoon with the rest of the day’s work neatly laid out before me, tidy as a checklist.

There are a few minutes, now, to make a cup of tea and step out with my notebook. Soon the timer will go off, and I’ll return inside to unload the oven, and to clear up the morning’s traffic jam at the dish pit, but for a moment longer I can stand under this glorious sky, warming my palms against the curve of my mug and breathing in the bright air.

4 pm, Dec. 22, 11 hours into the last bake of the year, and still optimistic I'll get a full night's sleep:

All the daylight fled before I had another chance to step out. Perhaps down by the water, with the bay a giant mirror to reflect the sky, there is day yet, but here, between concrete and high walls, the dark is very near. It startles me to walk out of the constance of the timeless kitchen and discover that outside, the world has turned and another day is disappearing into the west. 

1 am, Dec. 23, 20 hours into the last bake of the year, and so wobbly I almost crash my bike turning out of the alley as I ride for home:
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​All that to say that I’ve baked you a feast for the LAST FARMERS MARKET of the year. Come down to explore the holiday crafts and treats, and to stock up on bread and pastries for the coming weeks!
​
I won’t be baking again until the Winter Bread Subscription starts in mid-January. If you haven’t already, come sign up for a subscription today at the market, or do so online! Otherwise, you’ll have to suffer through a long, dark season of white bread while you wait for the farmers market to resume in April.

​Last Market
Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot
Bittersweet Chocolate + Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies
Triple Snap Ginger Cookies
Hazelnut + Brown Butter Shortbread
Chocolate Hazelnut Babka
Morning Bun
North Sea + Black Forest Gingerbread
Kabocha Tart
Granola

Winter Bread Subscription
Jan 10 - Mar 14
Baker's Choice Subsciption
Mountain Rye Subscription
Vollkornbrot Subscription

​See you soon!

Sophie
Owner | Baker

​I am rarely alone while baking. All day and into the night I listen. The words keep me company through hours that can be achingly long, and block out some of the noise and chaos of the kitchen I share with a half dozen other businesses. I often start the day with news podcasts (oh, for a radio tuned to the gentle repetition of NPR, as in the kitchens of my childhood!). I listen to The Takeaway or Up First for the headlines, NPR Politics for the view inside the Beltway, Intercepted for a more cynical twist on the same, KUOW for happenings around the Sound. I am usually still alone in the kitchen at this point, the first desperate rush of mixing and shaping over, settled into the steadier rhythms of fermentation. I am moving fast and sure-handed. I reach for words as deep as still water, for ideas that will carry me like a river. Thich Nhat Hanh on mindfulness, or Atul Gawande on death. I am invigorated by the work and by the words. I am all possibility and hunger.

The day crests, doughs mixed, temperature climbing despite the open door to the alley, oven on a continuous burn. I begin to tire. Just slightly. Not physically, yet, but my mind slows and my ambition flags. I focus on one step and then the next. There is no room anymore for philosophy, or natural history, or cultural criticism. I reach instead for a story, a bold narrative to carry me on. This week it was The Dispossessed. Another week Americanah, or All the Light We Cannot See: novels carried as much by the power of their story as by their writing.

Around the twelfth or fourteenth hour I begin to fall. My feet ache, and my knees. My eyes are gritty. I am sticky with sweat and flour. The work has been going well, but it is far from over, and I want only to sit down. To lie down. To close my eyes, just for a little while. This is when I turn to the kind of books I might be embarrassed to read in public. Romances, thrillers, young adult novels: the books you might pass in the window of an airport book shop, or see stacked on the sidewalk outside a used book store for a dollar. I do not care anymore about the quality of the writing, as long as it isn’t distractingly bad. I don’t care about character development, or research accuracy. I am uncultured and exhausted. I want witty dialog, action, and a tidy happily-ever-after. These books are like junk food: immediately satisfying, distractingly salty-sweet, easily over-indulged, empty. But usually they are just enough of a treat to get me through the last hours and home to bed.

​Saturday Market
Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye
Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies
(Exploded) Croissant + Pain au Chocolat
Fig Danish
Shortbread
Granola

Wednesday Market
Rosemary Sea Salt
Mountain Rye
Sweets

​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.)

I've been thinking about this UNEP report on sustainable lifestyles, and the Quartz article on conscious consumerism that led me to it, all week. They will likely shape next week's newsletter, so, you know, if you want to do your homework, you could read them before hand...