After weeks of sluggish dough and frustratingly long days in the bakery I finally realized the problem wasn't the cooling temperatures but my sourdough culture itself. At some point I must have let it get too hot or too cold or too acidic and the community of yeast and bacteria became unbalanced. I pulled my backup sourdough culture out of the fridge and added it to the mix, and voilà, this batch of bread rose beautifully and on schedule.

If you bake your own sourdough bread, keep a little backup sourdough! You can start a new culture from flour and water in a week or two, but why wait if you don't have to? Cold and low water availability are two very good ways to slow down fermentation. I use both, taking a spoonful of ripe sourdough and mixing it with flour until its the texture of dry crumbs, then storing those crumbs in a jar in the fridge. Every 2-12 months (whenever I remember) I refresh the jar. But you can also keep a jar of wet sourdough in the fridge, protected by the a layer of alcoholic "hooch" that forms on top, or a ball of stiff sourdough buried in flour, or dried sourdough flakes at room temperature. There's no wrong way, as long as it works.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Years ago a friend of a friend gave me a zine he'd written about climate change and culture. I still think about it often. In it he argues that our individual actions can be meaningful when they push cultural change. For example, if I plant a vegetable garden in my suburban back yard it serves my own pleasure, health, or home economics. A vegetable garden in the front yard, when the crabgrass stretches flat and green up and down the street, is about my own life and about changing or challenging the conversation in my community. The same, I think, can be true of buying local food, giving away wealth, traveling by bicycle or public transit, paying a living wage, and all the other counter-cultural choices, small and large, that we make in the course of our busy days.

There's a story I've been told my whole life--and one that I'm still trying to unlearn--about the value of private action and conscientious consumerism. It's a dangerous story because it's allowed me to feel like I was taking meaningful action by rejecting elements of consumer culture in my own life or business without doing the more difficult and uncomfortable work of challenging the culture around me.

It's not that we shouldn't be putting up solar panels or getting rid of our cars--we should!--but that those choices need to be the start of the conversation, rather than the end. All the thought and money I put into making ethical choices for this tiny business are never going to have an impact unless I can make them in a public facing way that gets other people in my local or online community to think and talk and, perhaps, to make changes of their own.

I need to plant my gardens on the street.

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

The earth moves more quickly at the equinox, or at least it feels that way as we tilt towards winter. Each day is shorter, the light cooler, the night colder. The other morning I woke to blue skies and rode out into a bank of fog that capped the hill and pooled in the hollow of downtown, leaving our house bare in the pale sunshine.

It’s a lovely morning. Over the traffic roar and refrigerator hum I can hear a chickadee whistling in the back yard (are our ears tuned particularly to birdsong, to pull their frequencies out from all the human clatter?). Yesterday’s bake went beautifully, mostly. The rye breads—all three kinds! Mountain, Vollkorn, and Ring—rose well; the wheat loaves bloomed; the cookies are crisp; the plum scones tender; the apple cake as perfect a fall pastry as I’ve yet baked with its sweet-tart fruit, earthy buckwheat and rye, and hint of warm spice. Only the gingerbread went awry, collapsing as it cooled. I’m not sure I have the patience to nurse this temperamental cake through another season. Delicious as it is, it may be time to retire it in favor of a less fragile recipe.

Ezra’s setting up the stand as I write. I’m off to ride the morning’s deliveries and then I’ll circle back to the Depot. It’s been a long time since I spent a full day at market, wallowing as I’ve been the luxury of two day weekends. I’ll see you there.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

The figs are done, the blackberries sour with rain and cool weather. But the prune plums are ripe, purple skins dusted with yeast and insides a delightful, juicy yellow. I’ve been running our dehydrator for a week drying down my first harvest, one batch after another. The early saucing apples are near their end, the denser fall apples starting to sweeten. I’ve seen pears beginning to drop on my rides through the city and grapes darkening with color. This is the most bountiful time of year for a gleaner. In city parks, alleys, the edges of parking lots and along parking strips, in private gardens, there’s fruit ripening. Everywhere, fruit. Don’t be afraid to knock on your neighbors' doors and ask to scramble up their trees. The worst that will happen is baffled rejection. The best, a winter larder stocked with sunshine.

This week’s snack cake is made with our Gravensteins and an earthy mix of buckwheat and rye. The oat scones are contrasting tender, sweet pastry with tart, juicy plums. There’s an apple rye bread coming up in the Fall Bread Subscription and I’ve been wondering about grape pastries. Soon it will be time for gingerbread cake. I’ve put up ten gallons of apple sauce so far in preparation.

And now it's time to make toast and perhaps one last cup of coffee, pack up my panniers, and ride home from the farm before Chuckanut gets too busy. I'll see you at market in a few hours!

Sophie
Owner | Baker

There’s a crab spider in the echinacea, sucking a syrphid dry. Last night my headlamp caught the gleaming black backs of beetles eating something I’d rather not step in. The other morning I picked up an apple and found a tree frog clinging to its curve, heart beat in its throat, copper back bright as a penny. A skunk lives under the back shed. Since we cut the long grass the doe no longer beds down here, but she still wanders through to browse the unprotected tomatoes and young apple trees. I’ll spend most of the day pruning the dead wood out of these long-neglected fruit trees and thinking about the habitats we might plant for all our creatures, great and small and humans included, if we can successfully beat back the blackberry and the English ivy, keep the bindweed, tansy, thistle, lesser celandine, and yellow archangel under tight control. If you have expertise, advice, or book recommendations on landscaping for biodiversity, we’d welcome them, because although this plot we bought at the edge of town is now ours to steward, it’s home to many and could have space for many more.

Ezra will be at the market stand from 10-2 and the bread this week is truly beautiful. Every fermentation yesterday was right on point, from buckwheat to wheat to rye. The plum cake is as much plum as cake. The berry scones have the last blackberry harvest of the year, picked from that very blackberry hedge at the foot of our garden that I’m aiming to eradicate. The cookies are crisp and buttery, just the way we like them.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

I left the bakery just after eight. Between the buildings I could see the sun, huge and orange, balanced on the horizon. I raced its setting down Holly, swerving around the Friday night drunks, down Roeder, across the railroad tracks to Squalicum Park. The western rim of sky was yellow-orange and empty. The sun had won.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Is there any feeling sweeter than waking up to the sound of rain on your tent fly, snuggling down into your blankets, and slipping back to sleep? Especially after months of drought and sunshine and the threat of fire. Of course, because we’ve been so long without rain I packed the rain fly away months ago, and even after yesterday’s low clouds persuaded me to dig it out of my gear I left the flaps rolled back to let in the night breeze. The second time I woke I was floating above a small lake on my sleeping pad. Still, it was a good morning.

The rain is already letting up but maybe we’ll get a shower or two today at market. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Our thirsty land needs it, and we Northwesterners, mossy as we are, need it too.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Along the roadsides and southern hills the blackberries are ripe. They hang fat and gleaming in the sun, tempting passing cyclists. This time of year you’ll often see me at the side of the road or pulled up on the sidewalk, bicycle discarded, hands scratched and lips purple, mouth full of sunshine.

A perfectly ripe blackberry is plump and firm between your finger tips. It separates from the stem with the gentlest tug. The attachment point is clean white. Press it between your tongue and palate and it dissolves with the sweet, dark taste of summer. For baking, though, you want sour with your sweet. Pick your berries a little firmer, a little less glossy. They separate with a twist and a snap so soft you feel it in your fingers more than hear it.

I rode back from the commissary late on Thursday. The sun had set, the sky ahead fading orange to green to white. At home, I pulled double-kneed canvas pants out of my pannier and on over my shorts, zipped my dad’s old hickory striped work shirt over my tank top, and switched my sandals for the boots just inside the door, not bothering with socks. I walked to the bottom of the garden. I was still wearing my helmet with its mounted light. The wall of brambles rose in front of me. I could hear a small creature scurrying underneath, the roar of the telephone pole factory like an airplane taking off, cars on the road behind me. On the other side of the hedge the neighbor’s dog stirred and growled on its chain. I pushed into the thorns, using the protection of pants and boots to reach deeper. The blackberries gleamed in the white light of my helmet. I filled one half flat and another till I had enough for the market bake. Then I picked up my boxes, turned off my light, and walked back to the house in the dark.