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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 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 ,It’s been years since I’ve spent a day alone. Not without people alone, or at least, not only that. I mean alone without conversation, without books or screens or radio for company, without work. Often, the minutes of my bike commute are the only time I spend alone all day, and even those I sometimes interrupt with a text message or a quick, pointless check of Instagram. In the clutter and noise of my daily life I begin to think distraction is normal. I begin to think that productivity is important, forgetting that being present—to my work, to a conversation, to rain and sky and the strength of my body when I run—is what matters most. Often, it’s artists and writers who speak about stillness as a daily practice, about making time for meditation or boredom, for daydreaming or walking without direction, but I think such time alone is something we all need.  I remember the last day I spent alone. I was still living in the islands. It was Yom Kippur, late fall and damp cold. I drove the truck to Shark Reef and walked out to the rocks above San Juan Channel where I sat for hours, watching the water, the sky, two sea lions cruising north against the tide. I sat and thought about my mormor, who had died that February, and about other things I’ve long forgotten. But eight years later I still remember the feeling. I still remember the anxiety of having nothing to do, nothing to distract me; I remember the beauty and stillness of that gray, fall day, and the wonder of being part of it. 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 (I tried to make you Pan de Muerto, too. They look beautiful, but I ate one this morning and... I forgot the salt. So instead you'll be getting bread pudding next week.) FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION 9 weeks remaining Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18 Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, POLENTA On Wednesday night the middle school library filled up with adults. They were neighbors, school teachers and staff, grassroots organizers, college students from up the hill, city council members, civil servants, gardeners, and hunger relief workers. They lived in, worked in, organized in, grew food in, studied, or were curious about our neighborhood’s food desert. For me, the neighborhood acts as a collection of homes. I haven’t claimed or been claimed by these streets and schools. I’m a renter in a communal house, and therefore, by experience if not definition, impermanent. My neighbors are neighbors by proximity rather than daily contact; ours is a block of back yards, not front porches. I can come and go as I please because I have a bike, because, to me, $2 round trip bus fare is pocket change, because I can walk or run across the city and sometimes do. I haven’t thought much about our neighborhood food desert. When we circled the cafeteria tables to talk problems and solutions, I listened. I kept notes for the group. “Imagine money is no barrier,” the activity’s organizer told us. “What would you do?” And my table mates told me. They told me not only what they would do, but what they were doing. The most inspiring part wasn’t the ideas themselves, it was that, with or without funding, so many of them were already being implemented. Near the end, our Council rep stood up. “We can do all this,” she said, “but who will be living here to use the services?” And I could see it almost like it had already happened, because in so many neighborhoods it already has: the community-owned grocery, the parking lot farmers market, the network off urban gardens and food-share boxes, the scratch-made school lunches and community dinners, the vegetable truck with it’s tinny jingle, all the dreams and organizing and hard work, past and present, realized, and the neighborhood gone, flattened by gentrification. 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 Shortbread Buckwheat Crisps FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION 9 weeks remaining Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18 Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, RING RYE 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 I left the kitchen just after seven last Monday. Riding towards home I caught slices of a sky melted apricot yellow between the buildings. The color was luminous and deep. I changed course, rode hard towards Squalicum, hoping to catch the color, hoping as the desire knotted under my collar bone and tightened my throat. I was too slow. By the time I stopped above the beach the sunset had settled into a lovely, unsurprising orange. I stayed anyways, leaning against my bike, watching the sunset and the crescent moon, watching the silhouettes of herons flying north and the colors reflected in the glassy bay, till a jetski revving loops across the bright water and the brittle music playing from a cell phone down the beach drove me away. I would be earlier next time, I decided. I would go down to the water to watch the sunset every day the sky was clear. But I didn’t. I worked late all week. I rode home in the dark. Celina will be working the market today, but I might see you when I stop by to shop. 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 Shortbread Buckwheat Crisps FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION 11 weeks remaining Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18 Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, Farmer Rye We're on the other side of the equinox; the days are shorter than the nights. Riding home last night from the kitchen I wished, for the first time in months, that I were wearing gloves. The gingerbread is back on the Saturday menu in all its black and sticky glory, made with buckwheat, apples, dark beer, molasses, and plenty of ginger. And for the Jewish New Year, braided challah rounds. TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Oat & Honey Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Challah Round Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Apple Quince Pie Shortbread Buckwheat Crisps Gingerbread Cake The Fall Bread Subscription starts next week! You can order single loaves or sign up for the remaining weeks of the subscription later in the fall, but if you sign up now you'll get a better deal (especially on the Baker's Choice Subscription) and you'll be guaranteed to have bread every week! FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION When: every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18 Where: pickups all day at Cafe Velo, on Birchwood Ave, or at Shirlee Bird Cafe What: Mountain Rye Subscription ($84), Red & White Subscription ($84), Baker's Choice Subscription ($96) How: sign up ONLINE with a credit card or today at market with cash or check The Baker's Choice is a different loaf of whole grain, naturally leavened bread every week. The menu is subject to change if I find an irresistible recipe or ingredient, but will most likely be: 10.2 Buckwheat & Apple ($10) 10.9 Farmer Rye ($8) 10.16 Smoky Oat ($10) 10.23 Ring Rye ($8) 10.30 Polenta ($8) 11.6 Rugbrod ($8) 11.13 Wild & Seedy ($8) 11.20 Cider Rye ($10) 11.27 Herb & Olive Oil ($8) 12.4 Black Bread ($12) 12.11 Limpa ($12) 12.18 Challah ($12) Raven Breads will be at the downtown Bellingham market every Saturday till December 21. Except maybe the weekend after Thanksgiving.
It can be lonely, working alone. Not the work itself—that I enjoy—but the way it takes over my mornings, afternoons, and evenings, till, faced with a choice between socializing and sleep, I inevitably choose sleep. The long hours alone also open room for doubt. It creeps up on me sometimes, grabs me unexpectedly by the throat. “Oh no!” I think, suddenly panicked, “I’ve chosen wrong. I can't run a business. I'm going to fail.” The specters of healthcare and home buying and retirement all rise up screaming in my head. And then something—a social media post, a conversation, an article—shakes me loose from my capitalist panic. It’s not that I don’t believe in profit. I do. I want to grow a financially successful business. I want financial security for myself: access to affordable healthcare, a home where I can plant trees, the possibility that someday I’ll get to rest. But from a capitalist perspective, profit always comes first, and building an ethical food business, or any business that internalizes costs, is not a good way to maximize profit. That perspective is repeated so often and so loudly that I sometimes lose sight of the real, immediate, soul-filling reasons for my work. This work is about craft and community, it’s about health, idealism, and de-industrializing the food system. Profitability isn’t the end, but the means to make the rest possible. Reminded of this, the panic subsides. I feel no more confident that I'll grow a success of the business, but, for the moment, I feel confident that trying to do so is worthwhile work.  This was a good week for feeling connected to the wider community of food activists and craft people. Kimberly Bell, the owner of Small Food Bakery in Nottingham and one of the bakers and business owners I most admire, mention Raven Breads in an interview. I got a handful of emails about rye bread from bakers across North America who’ve ordered the Up Rye Zine. And, perhaps sweetest of all, I received a long, handwritten letter from a baker I’ve never met in Mirboo, Australia, with news from her farm bakery on the other side of the world. These connections, these reminders that around the world other bakers are pushing for good food, for community, for environmental ethics against the relentless weight of the industrial food system, they give me hope. Sophie Owner | Baker P.S. I’ll have a handful of copies of the Up Rye Zine at market today. I made the zine as a follow up to a workshop on rye science I taught last year at the Grain Gathering and it’s written for professional bakers, but home bakers who enjoy food science might find it interesting as well. TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Oat & Honey Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Gleaner's Apple Pie 2.0 (with approx. 1/2lb apples / slice) Shortbread Buckwheat Crisps It's time to sign up for the FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION 12 Weeks Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18 Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven And then the storm was on top of me. The power went out. I sat on the front porch and watched the lightning cut white though the sky. Thunder rolled over me, light and noise and the house trembling all at once. Afterwards, quiet, and I was laughing with joy, alone in the dark. 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 Gleaner's Apple Pie Shortbread Buckwheat Crisps This week in the Bread Subscription Red & White Mountain Rye Baker's Choice: RUGBROD 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 |
