It was exhilarating when I quit the last job I hated. I was ready to move on and leap into the unknown future of my life as a baker. Unexpectedly, however, the dream took a detour—or maybe just a longer, more scenic route.
Flash back to 1995: I was wearing a suit every day, trying to meet my sales quota each year, and drinking the company Kool-Aid. One day that year, my buddy Tim Holt gave me a copy of the January issue of Smithsonian magazine, which featured a cover article about the famed Lionel Poilâne. Reading the article, I realized I had found my muse. Poilâne was a French baker running his father’s bakeshop at 8 rue du Cherche-Midi on Paris’s Left Bank. Lionel coined the phrase “retro-innovation” as a measure of progress. He was possessed by the old-world ways of making great bread: using human hands, time, and fire as an artisan’s instruments. These techniques required patience, and they had largely been neglected in postwar France as industrialized baking methods were widely adopted and the quality of French bread, long an icon, declined.
With his genius for promotion and his passionate embrace of bread made in the old way (pain d’autrefois), Lionel Poilâne helped repopularize rustic country breads, naturally leavened, made by hand, and baked in wood-fired ovens by men who worked hard in hot, steamy basements at a physically demanding job. (Ask these guys about the romance of baking!) His was the craft of an artisan. Poilâne’s ingredients were stone-milled wheat flour, water, and sea salt. A 1.9-kilo miche could last an entire week.
His earthy breads were described as having a winelike complexity, and people lined up on the sidewalk to buy them from the iconic boulangerie. A charismatic and knowledgeable promoter, Lionel replicated the wood-fired oven routines of his family’s boulangerie on a large scale outside of Paris during the 1980s and began shipping his big round loaves around the world, baking about fifteen thousand loaves a day in twenty-four wood-fired ovens. Lionel’s brother, Max Poilâne, went on to open his own wonderful boulangerie in Paris’ 15th arrondissement. The two brothers made near-identical loaves the way their father had taught them to: in big rounds weighing almost 2 kilos (4.4 pounds) apiece. (Sadly, Lionel, his wife, Irena, and their dog died in 2002 when the helicopter Lionel was piloting crashed during a fierce storm in high winds off the coast of Brittany.) Both brothers—along with many other Parisian bakers, I later discovered—were fueled by traditionalist convictions about bread baking that inspired me. And even though I’d never worked as a craftsman or had any kind of job related to food, as I held the magazine in my hands I knew instantly, at a very deep level, that being this kind of baker was right for me. It was a certainty like none I had ever experienced.
Prior to reading the Poilâne piece in Smithsonian, my personal experience with baking bread was a recipe for an herb bread with dill, anise deeds, parsley, and a lot of sugar. The method involved using a whisk—a whisk! I made that bread often, and at the time, I liked it. But I had no reference point for bread at its best, and it was unlikely to be found in the United States anyway. When I lived in London in 1989 and often traveled in Europe for my job at IBM, I loved looking in the windows of pastry shops, butchers, and cheese shops and eating foods specific to the place I was in. I found these markets inspiring and could tell they had been making the same great food in the same way for generations. I asked myself why we didn’t have places like these at home and whether I could perhaps someday bring some of the transcendent goodness, quality, and timeless character of these shops back home in a venture of my own. But I had only strands of ideas—nothing concrete that rang true.
I remember sitting in my backyard in Virginia under a cherry tree in full bloom on a warm, sunny spring afternoon, reading my first issue of the quarterly newsletter of the Bread Bakers Guild of America. Cue the chirping bluebirds. The Poilâne piece in Smithsonian had inspired me to join the guild as an entry point into the world of good bakers. Reading about serious professionals baking good bread spoke to my soul—and fueled fantasies of rising at 3 a.m. to bake bread. (What are you, nuts?!) This issue of the newsletter had a feature on Lionel Poilâne’s visit to the guild’s annual dinner, another on the U.S. baking team winning the bread category for the first time at the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie, and an excellent piece by the original seer of the Guild, Tom McMahon, about the importance of connection between bakers and the farmers who grow their wheat (a connection I finally achieved ten years later when I switched to Shepherd’s Grain flours). Tom had a clear, high-level vision that promoted his ideals of advancing both the quality of bread and environmental responsibility. Throughout the newsletter—my first glimpse into the minds of the bakers and owners of good artisan bakeries—I detected a sense of mission and passion. It helped water the seed of my desire first sown by the Smithsonian article about Poilâne. I finished reading the newsletter, and I still remember how, at that very time, it seemed right that I should become one of them.
Until I escaped the corporate womb and became a baker in earnest, I did what I could to learn about the world of artisan baking from the outside looking in. I visited many bakeries in Paris during trips there, two or three times each year. (I had a Parisian girlfriend—how convenient!) I bought baking books. My heroes were French bread bakers: Moisan, Poujauran, Kamir, Ganachaud, Kayser, Gosselin, Saibron, and others.
In the late 1990s I read about a couple of bakeries in northern California: Della Fattoria and Bay Village Bakery. They baked the kind of bread I wanted to bake, in wood-fired ovens (I was absolutely certain that I was going to be a wood-fired oven baker like Poilâne—a certainty later changed by a firmer grip on reality) and their bake houses were in their backyards. I thought that sounded perfect! After two decades of big city commuting on jammed freeways, the thought of walking across my backyard to get to work was alluring to say the least. These bakeries were also idealistic, as mine would be, using organic flour and employing the best-quality methods to make the finest bread they knew how to bake. And they were successful. Della Fattoria was selling bread to the French Laundry in Napa (this was before Thomas Keller opened Bouchon Bakery). Bay Village was developing a reputation for having the best rustic breads in the country, and Chad Robertson was mobbed every time he went to the farmers’ market in Berkeley to sell his bread.
I knew that I needed to learn how to bake bread at this level, and my Bread Bakers Guild newsletters made it clear that the best options were at the San Francisco Baking Institute and the newly opened (and now closed) National Baking Center in Minneapolis. I wanted to learn from multiple people and then adapt the collage of lessons into my own baking style. In August of 1999, soon after chucking my last job, I was off to the San Francisco Baking Institute to take Artisan Breads I and II, two weeks of hands-on instruction. I’d finally made the break from my corporate career and I was a free man about to learn a new trade. A free man. Maybe a little crazy.
I’ll never forget my first day at the institute. Ian Duffy, our instructor, had us each mix a small amount of dough by hand—wet, sticky dough. I was trying to work the dough the way Ian did: his hands developed it, turned it, and folded it, and before long it was a smooth ball with an outside skin soft and smooth as a baby’s bottom. Then I’d try, and I’d have dough sticking everywhere. No soft, baby’s-butt dough skin, just a red face and an oh-shit-what-was-I-thinking exclamation point in my head. That night I went to my hotel more than a little worried that maybe this wasn’t the career for me. But by the end of two weeks I could handle the dough okay, and with all of the great instruction I’d received, I thought that with a lot of practice at home maybe I could start to get the feel for this stuff.
While I was in northern California, I met Chad Robertson and Elisabeth Prueitt (now quite famous for their work at Tartine in San Francisco) at Bay Village Bakery in Point Reyes, and Chad and I began a conversation that lasted for years about levains, milling, French versus American flour, and the fermentation needed to bake the kind of old-school French country bread I was after. Chad’s bread was the best I’d ever had in the United States. It was baked to a dark chestnut brown and had gentle flavors of wheat and fermentation, and the character of the crust seeped into the soft, light interior. It tasted fantastic, and it was beautiful too. I thought his bread was in league with that of the best boulangeries I had visited in Paris.
Chad did all of his bread baking as a solo act. After a ten-second commute through his yard, he mixed the levain and the doughs, chopped wood, built the fire for the oven, and, many hours later, swept out the oven to prepare it for baking. In the filtered sunlight of a Marin afternoon, Chad divided and shaped his dough by hand. The next morning he would bake magnificent bread in the intense radiant heat of his oven, loading loaves in and out on a peel by hand. I left that first visit with Chad nodding my head up and down and thinking, “Yeah, this is it for me.”
Next I stopped to visit Della Fattoria in Petaluma, California, where they were baking dramatic round loaves decorated with grape leaves, destined for the annual Sonoma Valley Harvest Wine Auction. I stood out of their way as they baked these loaves in side-by-side wood-fired ovens built and designed by Alan Scott—the same kind Chad had at Bay Village. I was taking pictures, and if there was something I could do to help them out, I did it. The bakery, run by Ed and Kathleen Weber and their son Aaron, is in the most idyllic setting. The bake house is attached to their home on fifteen acres of Petaluma farmland, with beautifully tended gardens and a lot of small, life-is-good details that showed me they were living a great life on their own terms, and it was paid for by baking good bread. Again, I thought, “Yeah, this is it for me.” I rode with Ed as he delivered the loaves to the auction, and when I came back Aaron asked if I wanted to come bake with them for a week or two. What a great offer! This was my first chance to spend time in a live craft bakery, and the Webers were extremely generous and forthcoming. It’s fun to look back on those days—getting up at 5 a.m. and walking toward my future, down the Webers’ lawn to the bake house, staring up at a night full of brilliant stars, about to be humbled by more sticky dough.
After my informal “apprenticeship” with the Webers (really, just one week), I was ready to continue my instruction. I knew I was going to need more pastry skills, and the National Baking Center in Minneapolis had two great instructors, Philippe Le Corre teaching pastry, and Didier Rosada teaching advanced bread baking classes. Two weeks there, plus a one-week pastry class with Robert Jorin at the CIA in Napa, rounded out my formal training. Chad and Liz, after they moved Bay Village Bakery to a retail spot in Mill Valley, were also very generous sharing many of their lessons, and they let me observe their bakery’s operation during multiple visits. Without their help my first years at my own bakery would have been even more challenging than they ended up being, and their quality was the gold standard that I aspired to. This kind of give-back and sharing, while being pretty common in the food service trade, is totally not what happens in the last industry I worked in. Small business has so much more heart than big business.
It was time for me to set up a wood-fired oven in my own backyard bakery. Not long before, I had moved into the perfect setting to be near the rest of my family, who had all migrated to Eugene, Oregon. I had a cool house on five acres with a 1,200-square-foot outbuilding that I could convert into a bake house. The zoning allowed for a small home business, and the house wasn’t part of any homeowners’ association that might have rules against this kind of thing. It looked like a great setup. Plus, I had time to learn the craft, convert the outbuilding, and, before too long, begin my career as a baker—or so I thought.
When I moved to Eugene, I assumed all I needed to do to start my enterprise was get a business license, build the bakery, and begin to bake bread. To my surprise, a community uprising against my little venture developed, and the intense energy with which my neighbors pursued their goal created a public NIMBY fuss that landed on the front page of the newspaper, on the local TV news, and in a pair of two-hour public hearings where one neighbor after another took the stand to rage against, among other things, having to smell bread baking every single day: “like Sisyphus, pushing the same rock up the hill, every day into eternity,” according to their attorney. Smoke from my chimney stack was going to exaggerate respiratory problems for one family, whose house was several hundred yards away. Sparks from the chimney were going to burn down the entire neighborhood. The bakery would turn into a tourist attraction, causing too much traffic in the neighborhood. My driveway was too steep for a fire truck to navigate in the event of a fire. Ashes from my oven were going to change the pH balance of the soil. Trash from the bakery was going to attract rodents. It was an Alice in Wonderland construct where just saying something makes it true; the process seemed to me to be anything but a court of rational appeal.
The residents of eleven out of eighteen homes in the small neighborhood wrote letters protesting the plans for the bakery. Here is a favorite excerpt of mine:
Flour dust can be very explosive. A dropped bag of raw flour can be ignited in much the same way as volatile fluids. This may be one of the hazards of baking, but it does not belong in a residential area.
In the course of due process, the legal burden was on me to refute any and all claims, no matter how seemingly absurd, like the exploding bags of flour. I produced a certified letter from the State of Oregon’s climatologist identifying the direction of prevailing winds by month. (Away from the neighbors 44 percent of the time, but that didn’t account for days of air stagnation, it turns out. Who knew?) I had certification from an environmental engineering firm stating that the emissions output from the oven would be no greater than that from a standard woodstove. I should have tried tossing a bag of flour in the courtroom to see if it would explode.
After a pair of lengthy public hearings, four months of angst, and county files at least eighteen inches thick, the final ruling was to deny my application for a business license to run my little bakery in a zone that allowed home businesses. It was time to shift mental gears.
Immediately, I was anxious to put Eugene in my rearview mirror. Too bad about the house; I loved that place. But where to? I decided to start with a fresh plan and give up on the idyllic and admittedly safer route of opening a low-expense backyard startup. I embarked on a mission to find a new town in which to open my idealized retail bakery. To finance this ambitious—and expensive—venture, I would sell my house and apply most of my savings, risking everything I had. I wanted to move somewhere I might actually be welcomed, where people would appreciate buttery croissants that shatter when you bite into them, crisp cannelés perfumed with vanilla and beeswax, and rustic country breads—a place where nobody would complain about the smell of baking bread. Where would it be?
I drew up a list of things the town needed to have: good weather (hindsight snicker), an active restaurant scene that wasn’t stodgy, and a good farm-to-table sense. After a six-month quest, which included stops in San Luis Obispo, Yountville, Boulder, Denver, Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and Monterey, as well as two weeks of training at l’Institut Paul Bocuse in France (yes, I got to meet the man, at his restaurant, and yes, his big beefy hands rested on my shoulders for a photo that I never received—sounds like a fish story, I know), I finally settled on Portland.
I barely knew the place, but it had me hooked for reasons my future self would understand better than I did at the time. Now, I realize that I was drawn to Portland because so many of its craftsmen were (and still are) doing production on a smaller, less industrial scale, with a focus on quality. Our hands are our most important tools. Our customers can associate names and faces with the food they eat and the beverage they drink. These things are characteristic of the word “artisan” and a principal reason why I named my bakery “Ken’s Artisan Bakery.” In Portland, it is not unusual to know who made the beer or wine we are drinking, the cheese we are eating, or the salami on our pizza—and that’s how I knew it was the place for me.
That said, it is difficult enough to open a restaurant or bakery in a town you know and make it work—especially if you have no history in that line of work. Going into a city where nobody knew me was absolutely insane. But I had a bad case of tunnel vision and I could only see the light at the end: my own bakery in a place I was pretty sure I’d love. Over a three month period, with layout and design help from Michel Suas of TMB Baking (a sister company of the San Francisco Baking Institute), I built the bakery in a shell of a space in an old neighborhood in Portland filled with bars and restaurants. My oven, the big mixer, and the other major equipment I’d ordered all arrived together in a single container that entered the United States at the port of Newport News, Virginia, and then came to me on a flatbed truck. The truck arrived at about 8 o’clock on a cold, rainy weekday night in early November. Along with a team of new hires and our superhero installer, Carlos, I met the driver in front of the bakery and unloaded the truck with a rented forklift. The delivery was a day later than expected. I remember the driver calling from outside Boise, Idaho, letting me know he had a bad toothache and needed to see a dentist but was going to drive through the night to get to me. I had images of the Italian oven and French mixer I had been waiting for all those months, which had traveled from Europe by boat, toppling down some mountain pass between toothache and here.
All of the equipment was installed in mid-November 2001, and we opened on November 21. New hires all around me and I was running the place—my first food job. The shock of the previous two years—misfiring in Eugene, figuring out where to open my bakery, selling my house in Eugene, finding a space in Portland, and getting the place up and running—then suddenly being open and selling bread and pastry? Whoa, that’s a big one. But in one moment the past was behind me, and all that mattered was getting people in the door. Ken’s Artisan Bakery was born.
The neighborhood where the bakery was located had the highest population density of any place between Seattle and San Francisco. But the neighborhood was filled with modest rental apartments, and the per capita income data concerned me. I was going to compete on quality, not price. We opened just two months after September 11. During a recession. And the carb-fearing Atkins and South Beach diets were peaking in popularity. Portland set a record for most consecutive days with measurable rain. The unemployment rate was around 12 percent at the time. Today, an ambitious bakery opening would get instant media attention. At that time it barely got a mention. So we had an intermittent trickle of customers, friends, and family coming through the door, along with curious passersby and a few drunks.
Some people appreciated our efforts, recognized our ambitions, and understood the quality of our ingredients and our intention to produce bread and pastry according to my idealized vision. Now, I tend to remember the things that went wrong more than the things that went right. Our first sheeter, used to laminate croissant and puff pastry dough, was too small. Making it work required that we prop boards on overturned trash cans at either end to catch the dough as it ran back and forth between the rollers. The cannelés were inconsistent, but when they were on they were fantastic. We were baking all of our pastries in the deck oven, and constantly reaching into the oven’s upper decks for sheet pans gave us all a series of nasty accidental sheet pan burns on our forearms.
I arrived at 4 a.m. each morning, mixed the baguette dough, helped with the morning pastry work, and baked levain breads that had been chilled overnight. Then I divided, shaped, and baked baguettes, with the first batch coming out of the oven around 8:30 a.m. People who came in at 8 or 8:15 a.m. were often angry or dismayed that the baguettes weren’t ready yet and sometimes taunted us with comments like “You call yourself a French bakery?” I absolutely couldn’t arrive at the bakery any earlier than 4 a.m., and although I could have theoretically put the baguettes in the oven before 8 o’clock, they wouldn’t have been as good. Still, the accusatory glares were hard to take. Our French customers were the most aggravated. I needed to know what people thought of our stuff, but these comments kind of pissed me off, too. It was an open bakery. We were vulnerable to impressions of all kinds.
The retarder, a walk-in cooler where all of the shaped levain breads spend the night for a long, slow, cool fermentation, had some idiosyncrasies. Every week, on Monday, it would shut down. Without telling me first. Before Christmas in 2001 we were closed Mondays, so I never noticed. Of course, Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve fell on a Monday that year. On Christmas Eve morning, I arrived at the bakery a little early, just before 4 a.m., looking forward to baking and selling bread that would be on people’s holiday tables. Then I opened the door to the retarder and was greeted by a blast of warm, humid, slightly sour air and loaves overflowing their proofing boards, totally overproofed and beyond any hope of being worth baking. Still, I baked a dozen or so just to see what I could get, and what I got was lousy, sour loaves, each about the size and shape of a double-wide size 20 low-top basketball shoe. Merde! All I could do was bake the day’s baguettes and be sold out of lousy, sour bread by about 10 a.m. Cory Schreiber, chef-owner of nearby Wildwood Restaurant, walked in and kindly bought one of the pathetic, flat levain loaves—and gave me a shoulder to lean on. Thanks, man. Still, I didn’t understand the problem. I thought the retarder shut off because of something I’d done wrong. And at that point, six weeks into running the bakery without a day off, working from 4 a.m. to 6 p.m. or later every day, my judgment was a little cloudy. The following Monday, New Year’s Eve day, the same thing happened again. Waaah! On January 2 I made some calls and learned that I was using the retarder on a seven-day program cycle, which needed to be refreshed each week, otherwise it went into proofing mode and warmed up. (Yeah, I noticed.) Some lessons we learn the hard way.
Whenever I felt like we were starting to find a rhythm in our production, a new problem would jolt me back to reality. Like the fact that I repeatedly had to crawl on top of the 500°F oven whose burner sometimes stopped firing in the middle of my bread bake to replace a blown fuse (deep breath), only to realize months later that the wrong value fuse was in one of the sockets, and I kept replacing the wrong fuse with another wrong fuse. Sigh. One time, at 5 a.m., I pushed one of the buttons on the bread oven for steam, but instead of steam I saw a river of water flowing from beneath the oven. I quickly popped a lower front panel off the oven and saw a burst rubber hose, and the water wasn’t stopping! Throw the shutoff valve. Inspect. Grab a kitchen knife. Cut the hose just before the break. Reattach it to the pipe and secure with a hose clamp. Then run and grab the mop bucket and a pile of towels for cleanup. This happened over and over for several months. Bad hose. Who gets a bad hose? Nobody said this was going to be easy, but jeez.
I baked the levain breads to a dark caramel color on the outside. I was really proud of those loaves, but Portland didn’t seem very impressed. So I put together a handout titled “Why We Bake It Dark.” I’m not sure it helped much, but I felt the need to explain myself. We used Valrhona chocolate for our chocolate croissants (and still do). I also made a true pain au chocolat: a thick slice of freshly baked levain bread covered in butter and shavings of chocolate and sprinkled with a dash of fleur de sel. We sold at least two or three of those each day. I typically let a few loaves of unbaked levain sit out until they were well overproofed and gassy, then compressed the gas out of them, cut them into fougasse, and then baked them. We sold some of them plain and others brushed with olive oil and with fleur de sel sprinkled on top, like giant pretzels. My pastry chef, Angie, made beautiful apple tarts, chocolate and coffee éclairs, puff pastry with pears, chocolate tarts, brioche, financiers, macarons, brownies, profiteroles with different fillings, gougères, gâteaux de riz, and galettes des pérouges. People would walk in and ask if we had any scones. Or they would hear we were making cannelés, come in, and ask, “Where are the cannolis?” People pronounced artisan “artesian.” I set out to replicate the bread and pastries of a good boulangerie in Paris, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when people here didn’t recognize all the things we made. Today they mostly do. Portland’s food scene has changed a lot in the past decade.
We used organic flour, Tahitian vanilla beans, Niman Ranch ham, bags of sea salt from Brittany, aged Gruyère, the best butter I could buy, and, as mentioned, Valrhona chocolate. I imported tea from Mariage Frères in Paris. We made everything from scratch, and there was usually more staff present at any point in time than customers. We charged $2.50 for a chocolate croissant, and people gave me the stink-eye. I found a note in the comments box that said, “$2.50 for an herbal tea and hot water. You have lost this customer for good!” Other people complained that there weren’t free coffee refills. Many people let us know that our pastries were too small, appeared to be overbaked, and were too expensive ($3.50 for a 4-inch fruit tart, $2.50 for an apple turnover, $1.75 for a handmade butter croissant). At least nobody was complaining about the smell of bread baking.
Those were the most intense days of my life. By necessity, I’m tempted to say, and I’m not sure why. Maybe the transformation from a desk-job career to this intensely physical, sleep-deprived work required a kind of shock treatment as segue.
At the end of the day, after fourteen hours at the bakery, I remember cleaning out the big mixer, my head in its bowl, and thinking about my heroes—all the great chefs I had read about, who were known for their all-day work ethic. If they could put in those kinds of hours, I thought, I can do it too. I knew I was truly tired when one day I noticed the sound of my feet dragging across the floor. I was past feeling it. I was probably past good judgment too. About three months after the bakery opened, I finally took a day off. I slept for a solid twelve hours, and when I woke up I felt like a zombie with a severe case of jet lag.
Despite the initial challenges, I remained optimistic about the future, because that was my only option. Positive feedback started coming in to help balance the negative things. We kept a small green suggestion box out by the coffee station, with pieces of paper and pens (people stole the pens!). I got a much-needed boost in confidence from comments like these:
“The bakery is extraordinary. The best I have been to in the United States.”
“We just returned from ten days in Paris and visited a number of well-known bakeries—none of the croissants we tried came close to yours.”
“We came today for our four o’clock snack with my son, and I wanted to let you know that we loved the pain au chocolat, the profiteroles, and the brioche. It felt like home! Thank you for that pleasure.”
“Don’t change anything. It’s superb!”
In addition, a few good restaurants made inquiries about buying our bread, and I knew I needed the money from wholesale accounts if the bakery was going to make it. When I was ready to buy a delivery van and begin that new phase, I was proud that our first three restaurant accounts—Paley’s Place, Higgins, and Bluehour—were (and remain) among Portland’s best restaurants. That gave me some sorely needed revenue and visibility.
They gave me tremendous support in other ways, as well. Greg Higgins featured my apple bread on a special menu one night, and Vitaly Paley did a tasting menu event featuring my bread in every course. Other chefs also lent a hand. Dan Spitz, at Ripe, did a similar dinner. Some restaurants put my name on their menus when they featured my bread. In one case, the menu read, “Nice buns, Ken!” Many of these chefs also generously offered advice whenever I needed it.
On a more serious note, by the end of the bakery’s first year I had lost almost $70,000 and greatly feared I’d have to close down. I didn’t have much cash left. Plus, I hadn’t received any publicity or reviews other than a Sunday feature by Sara Perry in the Oregonian’s Living section. I believed that what we were offering was unique, and we had dialed in our quality and consistency after a lot of refinement during our first five or six months. But it seemed like nobody was paying attention. Ego was part of the media deal, but more than anything else, I needed press to give us credibility with the buying public who maybe didn’t know we were worth the trip. (This was before the days of the hyperactive foodie blogosphere.)
So I decided to try to make some waves on my own. Our first event was a special bread tasting. I ordered a couple loaves of pain Poilâne, which you can order online for overnight delivery, and had Grand Central Bakery and Pearl Bakery bring some of their breads to my place. The event was friendly, not competitive. I wanted people to taste my bread alongside France’s most famous bakery’s. This unusual event—a bread tasting!—brought in at least 150 people and got them to focus on bread and its flavors—a rare standalone subject (as evidenced by the fact that we really don’t have the same breadth of vocabulary to describe the flavor of bread as we do for wine, beer, or select other things). I was pleased with people’s reactions to my bread, still a new product on the local scene, especially as it compared favorably with Poilâne’s, a benchmark for me.
Cash flow gradually improved, but we weren’t out of the woods yet. Then the city informed me that the street at my intersection was soon going to be closed during the daytime hours for the next three months while underground water pipes were replaced. I had a daytime business. I feared this was going to be the final dagger. But as I thought about how the city would be putting the street back together at the end of each workday, I wondered about trying to do some nighttime business while continuing the daytime bakery operation. I hatched an idea that involved getting a liquor license, selling beer and wine, and turning the bakery’s cafe into an evening hangout offering simple fare.
Around this time I met Rollie Wesen and Claudine Pépin, who had just moved to Portland from New York. Claudine is Jacques Pépin’s daughter, famous in her own right for doing TV shows on PBS with her dad and writing several cookbooks with him, in addition to her own TV appearances and working as brand ambassador for Moët & Chandon. Rollie is a chef who had worked at a number of hot New York restaurants. Both were looking for work, and each appreciated the bakery. I couldn’t pay what either was worth, but they joined the team, and with Rollie in the makeshift kitchen (no stove!) and Claudine running the cafe, Ken’s Artisan Bakery became a simple bistro five nights each week, offering a weeklong plat du jour of coq au vin, duck confit, or some other classic. This finally got us the media attention I both craved and needed, and the press extended beyond the bistro to my obsessiveness about baking. Eventually, Rollie and Claudine both ended up leaving for jobs that paid closer to what they were worth, and after eight months I closed down the bistro with a cassoulet party that sold out in a day. Turning the bakery into a restaurant was fine as an experiment, and it helped bridge a gap.
In January 2003, Jim Dixon wrote a piece about the bakery for Willamette Week, titled “Yeast of Burden” (which was nominated for a James Beard award in journalism). “Slicing into a loaf, you feel the crust crackle, but it’s not tough or too chewy. The crumb is soft, moist and riddled with the holes created by expanding fermentation gases. It has that yeasty, nutlike wheat taste typical of good rustic bread, but there’s another, deeper level of complex flavor that’s hard to pin down. It makes you want to keep eating.” He also referred to baking as my obsession, and as I got more press, it seemed “obsessive” was the operative word in pieces about me. Seeing anything written about the bakery was gratifying after the loud boom of media silence during the first thirteen months.
Finally, people started coming—people from all over. We were sort of prepared, and sort of not prepared. Baked goods aren’t like restaurant fare; we can’t make them on demand. We start almost everything at least the day before, so we have to guess: How many baguettes are we going to sell tomorrow? How many éclairs, croissants, and tarts?
One day André Soltner, the former chef of the famed New York restaurant Lutèce, and his wife, Simone, walked into the bakery. Chef Soltner later told Claudine and Rollie that my croissants were extraordinary. Then Claudine brought her dad into the bakery, and we had dinner together. He was equally complimentary of my croissant, saying it was among the best he’d ever eaten. He was so kind and very gracious. Having dinner in my bakery with Jacques Pépin, I was floating. These visits from some of my heroes and their praise gave me much-needed confidence.
Over time, when I could afford to hire enough staff to create a more sane schedule for myself, we managed to bake baguettes a little earlier in the morning. And comments that we bake our bread and pastries too dark decreased. Maybe I adjusted; maybe my customers did. Maybe we met in the middle. (Maybe they actually read my “Why We Bake It Dark” manifesto?) The greatest reward in those first years was when it became clear that most people really enjoyed the food we were making. We had a growing number of regulars come in day after day, week after week. We watched as their children grew up before our eyes. And now we have been around long enough to have seen customers that we loved pass on. Having a positive impact on the community was never possible in my previous career. Once it became evident that we weren’t going to fail, that my landlord wasn’t going to get stuck with a bankrupt bakery, I could stop being nervous that someday I might have to go back to my old life. The work really is its own reward.
