I am not, generally, an anxious person, but even I succumbed to the shriek of the news headlines last week and, in a moment of panic, rashly changed my schedule to add a second oh-shit-the-world-is-ending bake. The world isn’t ending, it’s just becoming a much harder place for those whose health and finances are insecure. I am very grateful to be among the healthy and homed, to have a vegetable garden that’s showing its first new-green growth and a bicycle that can carry me through clean air and sunshine. And I’m grateful to all of you who have gone out of your way to buy bread from this little business, which is both my livelihood and my passion.

I’m trying a new distribution method with the April Bread Subscription. To support social distancing, bread (and pastry!) pickups will now be self-serve from front porches and driveways across Bellingham. For now, pickups are in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, Sunnyland, and Fairhaven. If you have a (reasonably bike-able) front porch to offer in the CBD, Sehome, or South Hill, I’ll gladly add another south end pickup to the May Subscription.

The Bellingham Farmers Market has put together a list of market vendors offering weekly subscriptions. Sustainable Connections has a longer list of CSAs from 2019. Signing up for farm (and bakery!) subscriptions helps small food businesses with cash flow through the lean early season. We are all deeply grateful to live in a community that supports us and our work. Thank you for keeping your spending within our community, for eating the food we grow and make, and for telling your friends and neighbors to sign up!

Sophie
Owner | Baker

P.S. If you work in the food industry and don’t know how you’re going to float the next weeks and months, use the discount code WORKBREADWATERSALT to take 30% off your Raven Breads order at checkout.

Practicalities:
Pickups every Wednesday in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, Sunnyland, Fairhaven.
Orders due by Sunday for pickup the following Wednesday.
Sign up by 3/22 for 6 week (3/25-4/29) Subscription.
Sign up by 3/29 for 5 week (4/1-4/29) Subscription.

Subscriptions:
RED & WHITE subscription
MOUNTAIN RYE subscription
TOAST subscription

This week’s bake:
Red & White
Mountain Rye
Toast: Buckwheat & Molasses
Pastry: Brown Butter Shortbread

P.P.S. A bakery hygiene note: Except for double bagging the exposed ends of loaves, nothing much has changed in the bakery. I still wash my hands frequently, sterilize surfaces and dishes, bake everything at 350-550°F, handle finished product with gloves or tongs, and don’t come to work sick. According to the FDA, “Currently there is no evidence of food or food packaging being associated with transmission of COVID-19,” but if you want to be extra safe, sterilize your bread in the toaster.

Only uncut loaves are available at this time to reduce post-bake handling, and because they have the best shelf life.

FAMILY WHEAT (1.4 kg / $14.30) – organic wheat, water, salt.
MOUNTAIN RYE (2.3 kg / $21.30) – water, organic rye, organic wheat, organic sesame, organic flax, organic sunflower, salt, organic caraway & coriander.
ALL RYE (2.3 kg / $21.30) – organic rye, organic rye berries, water, salt.
For maximum shelf life, keep breads in a bread box, cut side down on the cutting board, or loosely wrapped with wax wrap or plastic to prevent them from drying out. Wheat bread will keep about 2 weeks, rye 3.

Good morning Bread Eaters. It's a glorious blue-sky Sunday and I'm headed for the hills, but before I go, I wanted to give you a quick update. The near future is an unknown landscape for our community and its small businesses. I remain committed to baking your daily bread because producing beautiful, nourishing food and maintaining the connections between our farmers, millers, bakers, and eaters, feels as important now as ever. Raven Breads is lucky to be in a position to weather the economic uncertainty of the coming months without the high overhead, debt payments, and payroll that are hurting so many small businesses right now. The farmers market represents over half my annual revenue, and because of that seasonal income I operate for the first six months of the year in the red, but even if the market season is delayed, I hope to find other ways to feed you.

I've been thinking about ways to make the Spring Bread Subscription safer for everyone involved. Would you like your bread bagged up in plastic? What about having more self-serve bread pickup boxes out on front porches around town? And do you have a porch on which you'd be comfortable hosting a box? If you have other ideas for better bread safety and distribution, let me know! I'll have the Spring Bread Subscription posted on the website by the end of next week.

I hope that you're healthy, your hands are clean, your community is strong, and your bookshelves are well-stocked.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

This week in the WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION:

Red & White
Mountain Rye
Baker's Choice: Korn Rye or Corn Rye? (I'm still undecided)

Westphalian Pumpernickel, the Baker's Choice loaf for March 25, is available for pre-order until the end of the day.

Last Wednesday through Friday I moved briefly down to Burlington to prep for and teach a two day workshop for the Bread Baker’s Guild on baking with local grains. We named the workshop after the first clause of Arthur Ashe’s famous and ever useful quote—“Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.”—because the grain system, like every other part of the food system, is personal and political, economic and ethical, and endlessly, overwhelmingly complex. Mel, my co-teacher and the head baker at Grand Central Bakery, talked about wheat. I talked about rye. We both talked about enzymes and wet harvests, protein levels and why the commodity market is wrong about what makes “good” grain. Every time the questions got too technical we turned to our most over-qualified student, a lifelong baker and cereal scientist from OSU, and gave him the floor to expound on how nitrogen application effects protein content, or the role of the aleurone in sprouting grain. We baked breads and pastries with four kinds of wheat (Doris, Skagit 1109, Salish, Trailblazer) and two kinds of rye (Gazelle, Binto?), plus a little buckwheat on the side. Below is the recipe for the excellent wholemeal galette crust that we made for Friday breakfast and filled with roasted winter vegetables, goat cheese, and herbs, and which you’ve probably encountered at the Saturday farmers market filled with my summer fruit gleanings.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

ALL PURPOSE GALETTE CRUST
(probably adapted many years ago from a recipe by Dawn Woodward and/or Liz Prueitt)

Makes two 9-10” galettes

160g whole wheat
45g whole rye
10g dark buckwheat
2g (½ tsp) salt
145g butter, cold
65g water, cold

Mix as you would any pie crust. Chill. Roll into rounds. Add sweet or savory filling (approx. 350g filling per galette). Fold in the edges and brush the crust with a little yogurt, egg, or cream for shine. Bake at 400F for 20-30 minutes, or until the crust is golden and the filling, if fruit based, is bubbling nicely.

This week in the WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION:

Red & White
Mountain Rye
Baker's Choice: Rye & Oat

Westphalian Pumpernickel, the Baker's Choice loaf for March 25, is available for pre-order for another week. Because this bread takes almost three times as long to make, bake, and cool as my normal ryes, the order window closes next Sunday.

This time of year, without the market to meter my weeks, time goes fluid. Work days and rest days overlap and trade places. There is always more to do but no one besides myself to note its doing. Bake days, with their set schedule and clearly defined goals—this many bags stamped and labeled, this many loaves mixed and baked—are a welcome escape into order and external accountability. A weekend spent clearing the garden of last year’s debris in preparation for spring is even more tangibly satisfying. Soon enough the market will resume and I’ll be wishing for the freedom of winter, but for now I wander between work and leisure, feeling vaguely guilty about the hours wasted in between. So it goes, slow season to busy, and always looking forward to the change ahead.

Speaking of the coming season, Raven Breads is hiring for the Saturday market and the bakery. These two part-time jobs start in April and could be combined by the right person into a single position. If you like bread and bicycles and want to be part of this little business as it grows, check out the job descriptions HERE.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

This is the last day to subscribe to the remaining weeks of the WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION, though you'll still be able to order single loaves going forward.

Baker's Choice Subscription:
March 4: Alpine Spice Rye
March 11: Rye & Oat
March 18: Korn Rye or Corn Rye?
March 25: Westphalian Pumpernickel

Sure, there are a million, or at least a few dozen, baking books on the shelves of your local library. Absolutely, you should explore the collection (breads are in the 641.815’s), pull out every book with a pretty spine and flip through its pages, pile the best up next to you on the floor as you browse, and emerge from the stacks with your arms so full you can’t see where you’re walking. Feeding your book lust is one of great, gluttonous pleasures of the public library. But what I’m most excited about right now are not the abundance of new baking books, glossy and beautiful though they are, but all the zines I’ve bought, bartered, and been gifted recently. I received another in the mail this morning and have spent a few happy hours exploring Katie Gourley’s lovely new “baking for biodiversity” book (it’s not yet up on her website but while you wait, check out her past tiny books), flipping back through my incomplete collection of Lost Bread’s grain zines, and rereading the thought-provoking zine on climate change I got while visiting a friend in Boulder last month. It's enough to make me itch to write a follow up volume to last year’s Up Rye Zine, but first I need a direction, a thesis, a story to fill the pages. Do you have ideas for the Up Rye Zine vol. 2, or recommendations of other small publications I need to add to my alternative library?

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.

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!

I was going to write about biking through the flooded Skagit flats and all the astonishing, wondrous birdlife, but then I remembered I had a better bird story up my sleeve. Here, for your entertainment, is the tale of the Williams' Warbler:

After dinner, after the dishes were washed and dried, I lifted a lemon sucker from the tin on the counter and headed out back to unload the car. Over towards the fence I heard a bird warbling, a thin, drawn out cry. I propped a box on my hip and turned to the dark trees, searching for a silhouette, a clue to the maker of this melancholy song. No movement. I took my load to the house and returned for another, listening to the dark. The candy was sweet and bright on my tongue, the night almost warm. Not till I was climbing the back steps for the second time did I finally pinpointed the call. Here. It was right here! It was my own breath, whistling out of my stuffed up nose while my mouth was busy with the candy.

The end.

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.

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!

Well, having spent the week melting my brain onto my computer screen while pretending to build spreadsheets and actually jumping pointlessly between browser tabs and stumbling down useless internet rabbit holes, I have nothing to say to you here. Not even a good walk through the woods to report on, or musings from an afternoon spent watching the rain on the ocean. I didn't leave the house yesterday! That's how bad it's been. So instead, I offer you an interview published earlier this week on the food blog Stir the Pots, given before my bad work habits destroyed my capacity for complex thought and prolonged attention.

And now that the rain has stopped I'm off for a ride to check out the Anacortes Farmers Market. Our own winter Bellingham Farmers Market is next Saturday. Raven Breads won't be there, but you should go anyway.

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's 1 spot 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

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

Where Does My Food Come From?
An Annual Report

The word “local,” like “artisan” and “natural” before it, is a victim of its own success. You can see it proliferating down the grocery isles and across marketing campaigns. The more popular (and profitable) it gets, the more confused its meaning becomes. Is a food “local” if it’s made here, from scratch, with commodity ingredients grown in Kansas or Ontario or Mexico or China or, most likely, all four? What if it’s sourced and mixed and parbaked in a factory somewhere else, but baked and served here: is that local? Is 5% locally grown enough? 50%? What are the geographic boundaries of “local” anyhow?

When I say I want to support the local food system through this business, here is what I mean:

In 2019 I bought 67% of Raven Breads’ ingredients (by dollar) from producers in Whatcom, Skagit, and King Counties. This number doesn’t include the value of locally produced ingredients, like Whatcom milk and cream, bought through a third party, or the value of the fruit harvested in the back yards and abandoned orchards of Bellingham (every blackberry, cherry, plum, fig, pear, apple, and quince that went into the pastries and bread), so the true value of locally produced ingredients was probably closer to 75%.

Of course, not all of my ingredients produced here are grown here. Of the flours I buy from Fairhaven Mill in Skagit (49%), only the rye and pastry wheat are grown in Whatcom County. The hard red wheat is grown near Walla Walla. The hard white wheat and buckwheat currently come from out of state. And the chocolate that I buy from Theo Chocolate in Seattle (8%) is made with cacao and sugar grown by farmers in Latin America and Africa.

Butter (12%), as existentially important to pastry as flour is to bread, is still a sourcing failure. Unless you count Organic Valley, we don’t have any local, organic dairies making bulk butter, so my organic, cultured cream butter comes from a large producer in Oregon. Seeds, spices, oils, sugar, and molasses (13%) come from a natural food distributor based out of Eugene, and though I always* buy organic and/or Fair Trade ingredients when purchasing through a distributor, some of these products are likely coming from the commodity organic market, making them only a small step above their conventional counterparts.

I try to keep my sourcing as transparent as possible, so please, ask questions. And ask questions about sourcing and supply chains of the other restaurants, food trucks, food producers, and grocery stores you support. The way we eat shapes the world. Soil erosion, CO2 emissions, nutrient runoff, groundwater depletion, farm worker rights, slavery, animal rights, antibiotic resistance, immigration policies: these may seem like abstract, distant issues, but they’re on our plates and in our coffee cups every day. I don’t think it’s possible to eat without causing harm, but keeping the geographic distance and the length of the supply chain between us and the farms that feed us short makes understanding the true cost of the food we eat a little easier. What we understand, we may love. And when we love our food and the soil, the climate, the people and animals who produce it, we may work harder to protect them.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

*Except when the organic/FT option is out of stock, an unfortunately frequent occurrence when working with a small distributor.

The WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION runs January 22 - March 25.
Sign up ONLINE.

RED & WHITE subscription ($7 / week)
MOUNTAIN RYE subscription ($7 / week)
BAKER's CHOICE subscription ($8 / week)

BAKER's CHOICE menu:
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!

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

SIGN UP now open to the public