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All the way up I thought about the end of the world. The night before I’d stayed late deep cleaning the bakery and listening to Bill McKibbin talk about climate and capitalism. It was a hard story to hear. I worked till after one, went home to shower and sleep and dream apocalyptic dreams, biked my morning’s deliveries, and fled to the mountains. All the way up I thought about neoliberalism and exploitation, about inequality and power, about the ocean become desert, about atmospheric oxygen dropping, about heat and fire, rising tides and rising floodwaters, the wild gone, the animals gone, the forests gone. When my grandchildren walk this path, I thought, the mountains will still be standing, but will the trees? Will the cedars, the firs, the hemlock and spruce? What of the willow thickets, the vine maples, the red alders with their leaves wet and gleaming in the soft light? The forest, with its carpet of new green, its mossy boulders and thick ferns, its orchids and trillium, its snowmelt streams falling in white ribbons down the mountainside, was so beautiful it broke my heart. We walked in the clouds. The birds were quiet. The rain fell soft against leaves and loud against our coats. Up we walked, and up. We were wet from hats to socks despite our Gortex. When I bent down to lift the face of an orchid, water streamed from my hood. For a moment, we could see the far ridgeline though the shifting mist and trees, and then it was gone again. Somewhere up in the snowfields above treeline my mind quieted, though the climate grief remained, a familiar ache in my throat. It was colder in the open and we soon lost the trail. The snow was rotten with hidden streams. We turned and followed our footprints back to the wet, green forest. After a time the rain stopped. We walked down into sunlight. Sophie Owner | Baker  TODAY AT MARKET and NEXT WEEK FOR MARKET PREORDER 10am – 2pm, 1100 Railroad Ave BREAD: Red & White ($7.50 / 720g) Mountain Rye ($7.50 / 750g) Vollkornbrot ($8 / 750g) Elwha River Spelt ($8 / 750g) Seedy Buckwheat ($8 / 420g) SWEETS: Gingersnap Cookies ($5 / 2) Chocolate Chip Hazelnut Cookies ($5 / 2) Rhubarb Snack Cake ($5) Brown Butter Shortbread ($9 / half dz) Hazelnut Shortbread ($9 / half dz) SUMMBER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION 9 WEEKS REMAINING Every Wednesday, June - August Pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, Fairhaven. RED & WHITE Subscription - wholemeal wheat table bread. MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription - seedy rye & wheat tinned bread. TOAST Subscription - a new type of tinned wheat bread every week. Next 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. Red & White Mountain Rye Toast: TOASTED CORN Special guest: BITTERSWEET CHOCOLATE “This weather...” the farmer next to me started, and trailed off. “Well, at least it’s good for growing grass,” said the other. “Our pastures are doing great.” “Yeah, there is that,” said the first, sighing. But not being a farmer myself, and rather liking the way our garden has grown tangled and green, even if the tomatoes and cucumbers are lagging, I’ve enjoyed our cool, damp June. It’s quiet weather, good for reflection and growth. Biking through the low light, the warm, misting rain, the empty streets, I feel my mind, too, growing greener, spreading roots and uncurling new leaves. If you read the Herald this week, or the city’s news site, you know that the city and Lighthouse Mission Ministries are working to relocate the low barrier shelter, which has been temporarily housed in Bellingham High School, to the former Public Market on Cornwall. One of the things I’ve been thinking through on my rainy rides is my own reflexive NIMBYism. I’m ashamed to say that my first thoughts were for my business, and the space adjacent to the Public Market that I’m considering as a potential bakery location. My business is, of course, beside the point, or it’s a later point, after everyone in our community has a safe and healthy place to stay. Housing is a human right, without exception for mental health or addiction. Downtown property owners and businesses are organizing in opposition to the proposed location. Please add your voice to the conversation when the public comment period opens. $1 from every loaf of bread sold today will go to HomesNOW! The city has extended the permit for Unity Village from April 30 to 90 days after the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency. After the rocky end to last year, HomesNOW! is posting their monthly fiscal reports on their website. Sophie Owner | Baker  TODAY AT MARKET and NEXT WEEK FOR MARKET PREORDER 10am – 2pm, 1100 Railroad Ave BREAD: Red & White ($7.50 / 720g) Mountain Rye ($7.50 / 750g) Vollkornbrot ($8 / 750g) Seedy Buckwheat ($8 / 420g) SWEETS: Gingersnap Cookies ($5 / 2) Chocolate Chip Hazelnut Cookies ($5 / 2) Sour Cherry Rhubarb Snack Cake ($5) Brown Butter Shortbread ($9 / half dz) Hazelnut Shortbread ($9 / half dz) Tahini Shortbread ($9 / half dz) LIMITED TEST BAKE SUMMBER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION 11 WEEKS REMAINING Every Wednesday*, June - August Pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, Fairhaven. RED & WHITE Subscription - wholemeal wheat table bread. MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription - seedy rye & wheat tinned bread. TOAST Subscription - a new type of tinned wheat bread every week. Toast menu: June 3 - Summer Garden (herbs, olive oil, toasted cornmeal) June 10 - Toasted Sesame June 17 - Oat & Honey June 24 - Buckwheat & Molasses July 1 - Toasted Corn July 8 - Wild & Seedy (sunflower, sesame, flax, maybe others?) July 15 - August 26 TBD *If you're going to be away for a week, you can gift that loaf to a friend or ask to double up your order the following week. Next 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. Red & White Mountain Rye Toast: OAT & HONEY Sweets: LEMON POPPY POUND CAKE 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 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  “Why do you bike?” she asked me. The question shouldn’t have taken me by surprise, but it did. “Because I like to,” I replied, reaching out for more words and coming back empty-handed. The conversation moved on. As answers go, it was true enough, but thoroughly inadequate. Never mind noise and air pollution, never mind the costs of transit infrastructure and public health, never mind livable cities and public safety, never mind geopolitics and oil. Those are all good stories, true stories. I could have told any of them. Or I could have finished the story I’d begun, had I not gone mind-empty and tongue-tied. Here is the story: I like to bicycle. I like having half an hour inside the world and its weather, with the wind and sunshine and the driving rain against my face, with the sky opening above me and the smells of the city—woodsmoke, the chemical choke of fabric softener from a dryer vent, petrichor, cut grass, the bloom of night flowers, the secret wilderness of water and forest under the Dupont bridge—blowing by, even if I spend the rest of the day shut up inside a wood and concrete box. And I like the mechanical efficiency of cycling: the way muscle translates so effortlessly into speed. I like the freedom a bicycle’s speed and size gives me to explore off the city’s arteries and into the winding capillaries of the neighborhoods, with an eye out for pocket parks and abandoned fruit trees. I like the rush of descent, crouched low, waiting, waiting, waiting, faster, and braking just in time for the intersection. I like bicycling as a small, daily act of thanksgiving: for a body that is strong and capable, for the day, for the city, for the minutes between one task and another, when all I need to do is pedal and breath and watch out for homicidal drivers. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Herb & Olive Oil Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Shortbread Strawberry Rhubarb Slab Pie Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: SPICED RING RYE!  Tell me about kitchen thrift. Tell me about breadcrumbs and crostini, about the ribolitta of your childhood, about the almond croissants and bostock at your favorite bakery. Tell me about strata and bread pudding, about casseroles at the end of the week, about kvass bubbling on the counter, and the brødtort you once ate in Denmark and never forgot. Tell me about your grandma pressing the crumbs from the bottom of the cookie jar into a cheesecake crust and about rye slices in the pickle crock. Tell me about bread and pastry rescued and reborn. Eliminating waste is, for me, both an economic and an ecological choice. It’s easy enough in this little one-woman business to be mindful. At the end of a bake day I have an empty flour sack stuffed with burnt parchment, herb stems, and fruit scraps for the compost. Maybe a bottle to recycle, or a bit of unavoidable plastic packaging for the trash. At the end of a market day, thanks to you, I rarely have much left over, and what I do have I can easily barter or give away. But I imagine that as the business grows, so too will its potential for waste. And so I think about apple peel vinegar and orange marmalade, about cherry pits in vodka, about the small economies of cost and flavor. And I think about a cafe menu built on lost bread and pastry and the creativity of working without waste. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker 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: Blue Corn Nixtamal Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription, June 12- July 31 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). We were talking the other day about the knowledge paradox of teaching. My friend, who teaches engineering and design to high school students, was explaining the new CNC software he was navigating. “Last year this program was so easy to teach,” he told me, “because I didn’t know how to use it either. This year...” and with a quick series of clicks he demonstrated his newfound proficiency. The router started spinning across the screen, tracing the design he’d laid out. “This year I know too much.” Just now, the stack of books by my bed includes a gardener's manifesto, a classic literary cookbook, a beautiful and cynical essay on the history of humankind, and Wendell Berry. In a week or two, the books will be different, but the stack will still lean heavily towards food and agriculture. Because so many of my friends, too, live lives built around food, I can often assume a deep and unspoken knowledge beneath our conversations. Without the shared obsession, where does the conversation begin? I want to explain this business to you, the why and the what of it, but where do I start? With the flavor and nutrition of sourdough? With agricultural politics? With environmental ethics? My relationship with food has been built over a lifetime. Which stories do I use to lay my foundations? Do I tell you about the garden I kept as a child and my friendships with trees? Or do I tell you about the sinking sensation of flying over the country for the first time after reading Cadillac Desert and watching the circle-square patchwork of central spigot irrigation spread over the landscape? Do I tell you how, after a farmworker friend told me about her father shepherding each of his daughters across the border in turn when they were teenagers, about the fear and loneliness and the bodies in the desert, about how she’s never been back home, I went to her half-empty village in the Mixe and her grandmother made me tortillas? Or do I tell you about our Sunday brunches, the pleasure I feel when I look around at a house full of friends and laughter, with the sun rising towards noon, and the table scattered with crumbs and empty coffee cups? I don’t have answers, but I’ll keep thinking about the questions. You think about them, too. Tell me about businesses you’ve encountered that effectively share their stories through advertising, design, mission statements, literature, or well trained staff. Learning to bake bread is only one part of building this business. Learning to teach people about bread might be just as important. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Gleaner* Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Chocolate Malt Chocolate Chip Cookies Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies Oatmeal Scone Apple Cake Shortbread WEDNESDAY BREAD SUBSCRIPTION Cinnamon Twist Mountain Rye *a whole wheat bread made with: with apples from the last few trees of an orchard remnent in the county not yet overtaken by scrub forest; pears from my grandmother's house; dried champagne grapes our 80+ year old neighbor planted along the fence; dried concord grapes from what was once an urban homestead; dried plums from the back alleys of Sunnyland; and dried apricots from the farmers market, because apricots are a sadly ungleanable fruit in the Pacific Northwest. It took years, but eventually bread killed my bike. Ok, that’s exaggeration. But bread lamed my bike badly. I was riding my work bike a few months ago—the one I use to haul those ridiculous trailer loads to market—and looked down to see a distinct wobble in my back wheel. Being an indifferent bike mechanic, and a busy baker, I dropped the bike off at the bicycle cafe for a truing. But by mid-afternoon, Andrew, the mechanic, had called to say the wheel was a loss. The metal of those shiny aluminum spoke nipples, once the height of bicycle fashion, was too soft to turn. There was no righting this wheel. I’d have to buy another. So of course, I rode away and forgot about my wonky wheel, except on Saturday mornings when I loaded up the market trailer, and would glance down with apprehension, imagining it flattening suddenly under the weight of all that bread. A foolish imagining, but I couldn't shake it. (Though I’ve started breaking the market load into two trips, until recently I hauled it all in one precarious load, with a trailer weight of approximately 345 lbs. When you add me into the equation, that means my little bicycle was carrying the equivalent of 3.5 bakers, or 214 large loaves of bread). Eventually, though, that weekly anxiety added up to a return trip to the bicycle cafe, this time for a new rear wheel. I pedaled over from the bakery on my road bike to pick up the work bike yesterday afternoon, while the oven was reheating between loads of bread. When I walked in, Andrew called me over eagerly. “Let me show you your old wheel!” He held it up, triumphant. “I’ve only seen this once before,” he told me, tracing a thin crack all the way around the inside of the rim. “Look!” he pointed to places where the crack had widened, whole chips of rim missing. When he spun the wheel, I could hear them rattling around inside. “It’s a good thing you got a new one! This one could have collapsed at any time.”  See you soon. Sophie TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Oat & Honey Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies Oatmeal + Red Berry Scone Buckwheat + Plum Scone Plum Cake Shortbread WEDNESDAY BREAD SUBSCRIPTION Wild & Seedy Mountain Rye The garden is wild with last year’s seeds. Cornfield and California poppies, calendula, phacelia, red, white, and yellow clover, wall rocket, fennel, and hairy vetch claim the borders and pathways, grow in flowering thickets over the uncultivated edges of vegetable beds, riot in the corner where the old compost heap lay. Yellow spears of mullein shoot up through the old fishing net we hung as a deer fence. Ours isn’t a huge garden—ten by ten meters, perhaps—but the wild edges make it feel deep and secret. Were I still today the fairy expert I was at five, I might know those edges differently, but the knowledge of magic is long lost to me. Instead, I admire practical things: the peas trellis heavy with vines, the tidy rows of leeks and lettuce, the bank of self-seeded calendula with flowers in every warm color, from safety vest orange to dusky pink and soft, butter yellow. I read a book on sustainable agriculture last week that argued that the keys to success in farming were diversity and the elimination of waste, and I thought, these seem like good practices for any business, especially one so marginal as a bakery. Out in the garden in the gray light of dawn, picking my breakfast, my eyes kept sliding back to the poppies, impossible red against the muted colors of morning. Maybe there’s a bakery lesson in this, too, I thought. Maybe a business, too, can have an orderly, productive center, and deliberately uncultivated edges, were imagination and unexpected beauty can grow. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker
TODAY AT MARKET Red & White + Garden Herb Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies Oatmeal Marmalade Scone Strawberry Buckwheat Scone Rhubarb Strawberry Galette Shortbread WEDNESDAY MARKET Red & White Oat & Honey Mountain Rye Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies Scone, Shortbread, Galette |
