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

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.

See you soon.
Sophie

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

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the truest story about childhood I've read in a long time. It is a dark fairy tale, a story of monsters and magic, of wonder, and terrible powerlessness of childhood; a story about a time when magic is as likely as any other answer, before the hard edges of facts push the impossible out of the world.

There is a scene early in the book when the little boy sits down to eat in the neighbors' farmhouse kitchen:

"The daffodils sat like patches of sunlight, making that dark wooden kitchen even more cheerful. The floor was made of red and gray flagstones. The walls were whitewashed. The old woman gave me a lump of honeycomb, from the Hempstocks' own beehive, on a chipped saucer, and poured a little cream over it from a jug. I ate it with a spoon, chewing the wax like gum, letting the honey flow into my mouth, sweet and sticky with an aftertaste of wildflowers."

And now, every time I think about pastries, about new recipes, and what I role I want sweets to play in the bakery, I remember that scene. That's what I want in a pastry: comfort, substance, and flavor, with the satisfaction and sensual pleasure of cream running down a honeycomb. I want pastries that belong in a kitchen full of daffodils and sunlight, with a pot simmering on the stove, and muck boots piled, muddy, outside the door. I want pastries for wet fields and mountains, for hard work in all weather, for children in the street on a summer evening, and winter evenings that smell of woodsmoke, for kitchen gardens and old apple trees and bumblebees in the lavender and hyssop. Does that make sense? I can see it all so clearly in my mind.
​
See you soon.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White Wheat
Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot
Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies
Breakfast Scone (apple butter, raisins, hazelnuts, oats)
Raspberry, Rhubarb, Buckwheat Scone
Lemon Rhubarb Bar
Shortbread

PRE-ORDER for Wednesday 5/30
(place order by Sunday night for Wednesday pickup)
Chocolate ($10)
Mountain Rye ($7)
Vollkornbrot ($8)

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)