 I took the long way home. The night was wet and so warm I rolled my sleeves up above the elbow and undid the buttons at my neck while I waited at a stoplight. After the day’s heat, scents bloomed in the light rain. I rode open mouthed, tasting the city on my tongue. I wanted to remember each night smell, I wanted to find the adjectives and metaphors to hold them, but they were subtle and I was moving too fast. Between one breath and the next, they changed and were gone. 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: MILK & HONEY  “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!   (accidentally candid self portrait on the loading dock because I lost track of the camera timer) After long hours cocooned in the fluorescent, time-warping glare of the commissary I stepped out onto the loading dock and woke up for the first time all day. There, for a few minutes, I had the low sun heating my back and the breeze against my skin. I had the sounds of traffic and sea gulls and the busker on the corner. Beneath the breeze I could smell the alley: sewer and garbage and the restaurant a few doors down. And suddenly I was close to tears, the grief caught in my throat as I held my breath against the pressure in my eyes. The whole day gone and I had missed it. A small grief, this lost day, but I stood with it for a moment longer, remembering to breath, remembering the feel and sight and taste of the outside, remembering the sun and the world turning, before I went back in to work. 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 Oat Scone Shortbread Strawberry Rhubarb Slab Pie! (though I don't know how this will hold up in pastry bags. BYO bowl and fork, perhaps?) Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription through July 31 RED & WHITE Subscription $49 MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription $49 BAKER's CHOICE Subscription $56 Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: Polenta  Despite all indications to the contrary (namely, my laughably financially insecure profession), I’m not a risk taker. I’m obnoxiously frugal. I look before I leap. Often, I look for so long that from the outside the leap looks impulsive. From the inside, though, it’s the only remaining option. For years, I rolled with the long bake days. If the orders spiked and I had to spend sixteen, eighteen, twenty hours in the kitchen, I did. Sure, it sucked, but with tea and snacks and maybe a nap on the grungy floor, I could make it through. I even felt a kind of stupid pride in my endurance. By last year, though, I was getting tired. It wasn’t enough to push through the week and sleep on Sunday. The bakery was supposed to be work. Work that I liked, certainly, maybe even work that I loved, but not my reason for existence. I was sliding dangerously close to burnout and I was too exhausted to do anything about it. I had my first sixteen hour day in months last Tuesday. By the end I was aching and tired, but I wasn’t resigned. “No fucking way am I getting into this again,” I thought, and went on Craigslist to buy the first used oven I could find that would stack with the oven I bake in now. The newest addition to the mangy herd of ranges and ovens crowded under the Type 1 hood in the commissary isn’t a deck oven, of course. It isn’t even a combi. It’s just another fan-on-all-the-time American Range convection oven. But honestly, when I bought it, I didn’t think about long term equipment investments or the hassle of reselling it when I move out of the commissary. I didn’t think about amortization or margins. I’ve calculated and recalculated those equations, and in the end when I thought about my sore feet, about the production bottleneck at the oven, about how much I hate working through dinner, they didn’t matter. I leapt. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker P.S. I'm not actually sure how I'm going to take these two 680lb ovens off their stands and stack them together. If you have expertise in moving heavy objects, or just good lifting form and some free time Monday, I'd love help solving this rather daunting puzzle.   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: Raisin Honey Rye Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription, June 12- July 31  I won’t always write about walking. As summer approaches the work begins to tighten around my days, squeezing out the spare hours till moving through the world becomes purely functional: cycling for transportation, running for exercise, driving for hauling impossible loads or covering impossible distances. Then I’ll write about baking, or cycling, or perhaps running. But now, in the slow heart of winter, I have time to walk. The time I take to walk without direction is often the truest part of my day. The chores and routine work, the hours absorbed by the blue glow of my screens, the casual interactions with friends and strangers, these so easily blur till the days slip by into unremembered months. Perhaps what I find in walking is the sort of moving meditation others seek in yoga or martial arts. Walking brings time into focus, makes me fully embodied and awake to my surroundings. Already, most of the hours I spent indoors yesterday are slipping from my memory, but I remember so well the yellow of the willow branches and the clean cut of snow against wet pebbles at the high tide line. I remember the cold of the wind and the heat of my body. I remember the sound of wings, and looking up to see crows silhouetted against the white blue sky, flying north. Sophie Owner | Baker THIS WEEK's WEDNESDAY BREAD Order by Sunday night to pick up Wednesday, Feb 20 Red & White Mountain Rye Baker's Choice: Sour Ring Bread NEXT WEEK's WEDNESDAY BREAD Order this week for pickup Wednesday, Feb 27 Red & White Mountain Rye Baker's Choice: undecided Order ONLINE and pickup on Wednesdays from: Downtown: Cafe Velo, 120 Prospect, 9am - 7pm Fairhaven: Shirlee Bird Cafe, 1200 Harris, 7:30am - 5pm Birchwood: the front step, 8am - 8pm  After the holidays, after the lights, the rooms warm with friends and family, after the gifts, after the tamales and pozole, the roast beef, ragu, and rugelach, the gingerbread and gingersnaps, after eating and eating and eating, I step out into the world. It’s mid afternoon. Damp cold. The sky mottled gray. I start slowly, moving awake after days glutted on food, books, and sleep. The muddy track along the lakeside is quiet. Under the car rumble, I can hear the waves lapping. They roll towards shore from two directions, crossing at a wide angle. Each facet of the water’s surface reflects a different sky. For a while, I stand watching the water, trying to catch the shifting pattern; it eludes me. I run on, under the gray sky, along the gray water, through the lowering dark. I cross a hillside of waterbirds probing the grass. The ducks lift off before me in waves. The geese keep eating, unperturbed. I take the long stairs up from the lake two at a time. One flight after the next. I reach the top gasping, sweating, calves tingling, thighs trembling, face flushed, cold fingers fisted, feet fumbling for the last step. I am wholely alive. Every corner of my body is awake. This is a gift I try to remember: legs and lungs that move me through the world, arms that lift and carry, hands as competent to mix dough as they are to hold a pen. I am glad to have work that demands mind and body both, glad too to live in a community whose support lets me turn that work into a livelihood. Thank you. The bakery is growing steadily, straining the seams of the shoestring operation I’ve been running for the past four years. I have you to thank for that, as well. Because of that growth, I’ve been able to double my donations this year from one percent of sales to two percent. A small change, but a step in the right direction. And because of that growth, I’ll spend the winter planning how to build my bakery dreams into brick and mortar reality. I’ve passed enough hours staring out over the water, watching the light and writing stories in my head. It’s time to run. Happy almost New Year. Sophie Owner | Baker WEDNESDAY BREAD Order by Sunday night to pick up Wednesday, Jan 2 Red & White Mountain Rye Broa Milho Honey & Spice (pain d'epices) WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION Sign up to get a loaf every Wedneday, January 2 - March 6 RED & WHITE subscription MOUNTAIN RYE subscription BAKER's CHOICE subscription: 10 weeks, 10 ryes When the mixing and shaping are done for the day, when the bread is rising, and the cookies and scones are lined up in orderly rows up and down the sheet pans, then the real work is finished. Still, hours remain. Still there is the baking, the oven loaded and unloaded and loaded again, the proofing baskets to scrub, dishes to wash, cooled loaves to stack in their stacks of boxes, walls to wipe down, the floor to sweep and mop. It is late morning on a day that started well before sunrise, and the work is not even half done. So I make a cup of coffee, milky and strong, and sit out back where I can see the alley and a ribbon of sky through the window. I open the library’s collection of digital books on my phone, and go in search of someone to read me a story. It has to be the right story. A real sweep-you-up, fast-paced, wild rumpus of a story. A story to lift me off my aching feet, above my stiff knees, away from the sweat and flour grit and my tired-sticky eyes. A story to carry me through the late morning, over the afternoon, and deep into the evening. It is a wonderful and disconcerting thing, to lose myself so completely in a book. When I am reading, or being read to, I no longer hear the world clattering around me or notice the passing of time. It has always been this way. Theoretically, I believe in being fully attentive to my work. After all, I spend most of my days working. If I don’t pay attention to the working hours, I could lose the greater part of my adult life. But in practice, my baking days are too long, the kitchen too loud and poorly lit. My body tolerates more than my mind, so I let the stories carry my mind away while my body moves steadily on through the familiar motions. It is the bike ride home that brings me back. After hours of living divided, the steady pump of tired legs, the air moving over my skin, the smells of the night, hook my mind and pull it inside my body. Afterward, if I have the energy and the light, I’ll run down to the water. Standing on the broken willow at the path’s edge, looking out at the ocean and sky through its branches, I’ll listen to the waves wash their steady beat against the shore. Each wave is like a breath. Each breath pulls me farther inside my skin, till my mind stills, and I am whole again. TODAY AT MARKET Red & White + The Whole Garden Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies Oatmeal Marmalade Scone Strawberry Buckwheat Scone Sweet & Sour Cherry Galette Sour Cherry & Hazelnut Tart Shortbread WEDNESDAY MARKET Red & White Country Rye Mountain Rye Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies Scone, Shortbread, etc. See you soon.
Sophie Owner | Baker I am rarely alone while baking. All day and into the night I listen. The words keep me company through hours that can be achingly long, and block out some of the noise and chaos of the kitchen I share with a half dozen other businesses. I often start the day with news podcasts (oh, for a radio tuned to the gentle repetition of NPR, as in the kitchens of my childhood!). I listen to The Takeaway or Up First for the headlines, NPR Politics for the view inside the Beltway, Intercepted for a more cynical twist on the same, KUOW for happenings around the Sound. I am usually still alone in the kitchen at this point, the first desperate rush of mixing and shaping over, settled into the steadier rhythms of fermentation. I am moving fast and sure-handed. I reach for words as deep as still water, for ideas that will carry me like a river. Thich Nhat Hanh on mindfulness, or Atul Gawande on death. I am invigorated by the work and by the words. I am all possibility and hunger. The day crests, doughs mixed, temperature climbing despite the open door to the alley, oven on a continuous burn. I begin to tire. Just slightly. Not physically, yet, but my mind slows and my ambition flags. I focus on one step and then the next. There is no room anymore for philosophy, or natural history, or cultural criticism. I reach instead for a story, a bold narrative to carry me on. This week it was The Dispossessed. Another week Americanah, or All the Light We Cannot See: novels carried as much by the power of their story as by their writing. Around the twelfth or fourteenth hour I begin to fall. My feet ache, and my knees. My eyes are gritty. I am sticky with sweat and flour. The work has been going well, but it is far from over, and I want only to sit down. To lie down. To close my eyes, just for a little while. This is when I turn to the kind of books I might be embarrassed to read in public. Romances, thrillers, young adult novels: the books you might pass in the window of an airport book shop, or see stacked on the sidewalk outside a used book store for a dollar. I do not care anymore about the quality of the writing, as long as it isn’t distractingly bad. I don’t care about character development, or research accuracy. I am uncultured and exhausted. I want witty dialog, action, and a tidy happily-ever-after. These books are like junk food: immediately satisfying, distractingly salty-sweet, easily over-indulged, empty. But usually they are just enough of a treat to get me through the last hours and home to bed. Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies (Exploded) Croissant + Pain au Chocolat Fig Danish Shortbread Granola Wednesday Market Rosemary Sea Salt Mountain Rye Sweets See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker POSTSCRIPT: OVERHEARD
(I’m introducing a new postscript to my weekly newsletter with the best of what I’ve read or listened to in the past week(ish). As with most of what I write here, this is only tangentially connected to baking, in that I listen to dozens of hours of podcasts and audiobooks every week to turn off the anxiety-inducing white roar of the commissary kitchen, and for the pure pleasure of having someone tell me stories.) I've been thinking about this UNEP report on sustainable lifestyles, and the Quartz article on conscious consumerism that led me to it, all week. They will likely shape next week's newsletter, so, you know, if you want to do your homework, you could read them before hand... I bake in the noise and chaos of a shared kitchen. We work to an industrial soundtrack. The fluorescent lights and condensers are a base note of white noise. Then the oven comes on, fan whoopwhoopwhooping, slightly off center, and someone throws the switch to the hood. It roars. The dishwasher is a soft-steady beat, like percussion brushes. Objects come together with force: metal clatters on metal, glass tumbles with ceramic, plastic falls with a hollow thump. People call out, mumble, shout. This is likely why kitchens are so often aggressive spaces: our roaring, chaotic soundtrack sends cortisol flooding our brains, hour after hour, day after day, till everything blurs white with the noise. But in the mornings I have the kitchen to myself, quiet except for the static of lights and refrigerators. I hear rain falling down the drain pipe next to my work bench, and sometimes a seagull calling overhead. I hear the garbage truck clunking down the alley. And often I'll set my phone in a metal mixing bowl to amplify the sound and listen to the news. Yesterday morning I was listening to a conversation between Jeremy Scahill and Naomi Klein, a brutal piece on Trump's war on the earth, that left me hopeless and tender. There was no time to step outside and breath through the panic under the open sky, so I thought instead of the mountains. I thought of fairy moss ankle deep under madronas, of the slow spread of lichen over rock, of the sensuous curve of smooth trunk revealed by peeling, papery bark. I thought of the way clouds pile up against the Chuckanuts and tangle with the tops of the islands. I thought of rain on cedar leaves, of nurse logs, of crumbling wood and persistent, tiny trees pushing cotyledon through the duff. Calm spread through me like roots, taking hold. I returned to the rising dough. Today's Market Menu Red & White, Mountain Rye, Smoky Vollkornbrot, Cinnamon Raisin Bittersweet Chocolate & Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Cardamom Rolls with Rose & Yogurt Glaze Orange Cream Raisin Rolls Granola and North Forest Meringues, little clouds scented with spruce tips and fir. For Wednesday Order Wild & Seedy, Red & White, Mountain Rye Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies (half dz) Pesach Special: North Forest Meringue (half dz) See you soon!
Sophie p.s. Next week, in honor of Easter, I'll be making beautiful braided egg bread (aka challah) and rainbow-sugared marshmallow eggs, so make sure you add a trip to the market into your weekend plans! |
