About the bakery
One oven, one starter, six mornings a week.
We opened on Pear Street in March 2014 with a stone hearth oven, a rye-and-well-water starter we’d been feeding for nine months, and the simplest plan we could write down: bake bread we’d want to eat, sell it the same morning, close when the shelves were empty. Eleven years in, that’s still the plan.
What we bake
A short menu, kept short on purpose.
Country sourdough is the everyday loaf and it’s been the everyday loaf since week one. Seeded sourdough on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Olive and walnut loaves on the weekend. Two pan loaves — a white sandwich and a whole grain milled in-house — that we’d hand a sandwich shop without flinching. A short pastry case: croissants when the weather isn’t pulling them apart, kouign-amann on weekends, scones that change by day, and one savory we rotate every two weeks.
What we don’t do: gluten-free, custom cakes, anything that ships. The oven holds what it holds and the menu is sized to the oven, not the other way around.
The flour
Where the wheat comes from.
The bread flour is a single varietal from a mill in Skagit Valley that we’ve used since year two. The whole grain we mill ourselves on a small stone mill in the back, from hard red wheat grown by one farm three counties east. We taste-test every new shipment against the bag it’s replacing and we’ve sent flour back twice this year.
- Bread flourCairnspring Mills · Skagit Valley · since 2015
- Whole grainCamas Country Mill heritage red, milled in-house weekly
- SaltJacobsen flake, harvested off the Oregon coast
- WaterFiltered tap, no softening agents
- Starter age11 years, fed twice daily, refrigerated overnight
The team
Three bakers. Four behind the counter.
The ovens go on at 4am. The first loaves come out at 7. The shelves are usually empty by 1pm. The rhythm has held more or less unchanged for nine years and we like it that way — the people who work the bakery work it because they want a predictable morning, a clean kitchen by noon, and to be home before the afternoon falls off.
Eli, Sam & Wren.
Two on the bench every morning, one off. Each runs a four-day week. The starter gets fed on the off-day too — whoever’s in town walks down at 7pm.
Avg. tenure 5.4 yr
Open six mornings.
Two on the counter at any time. Everyone can answer what’s in the seeded loaf today and which pastry was made first. New hires shadow a full week before the till is theirs.
Mon closed for rest
4am to 1pm.
Mixing starts the night before. Shaping at 5am. First load in the oven at 6:10. Doors open at 7. Kitchen wraps by noon, counter by 1 or when the shelves go empty — whichever lands first.
~210 loaves a day
What we won’t do
The short list of nos.
The temptation when a bakery works is to add categories. Cakes for birthdays. Sandwiches at lunch. Wedding loaves. Wholesale at scale. Every category is another hire, another piece of equipment, another reason to skim the country loaf. We’d rather bake the country loaf the same way we’ve baked it for eleven years. Eli, head baker
We’ve turned down two grocery-chain pitches this year. We don’t take catering. We don’t ship. The bakery has stayed about the same size for nine of the eleven years and that’s the plan.
The hearth
One oven runs the day.
The deck is 18 square feet of fire-warmed stone and it sets the pace for everything. We load the country loaves first at 6:10, swap in pan loaves at 6:45, and finish on pastry while the oven is coming back down. The day ends when the stone has nothing left to give.
The bench, the proofing schedule, the size of the menu, the headcount — all of it is sized to what this one deck can hold in a morning. That’s the whole reason the bakery feels like the bakery.