A hearty gluten-free loaf made for bread lovers (made in a gluten-friendly environment)
At Macrina, in particular over the last decade, we’ve been baking with more and more heritage grains.We’re fortunate to have a close relationship with the renowned Bread Lab and Cairnspring Mills, both located nearby in the Skagit Valley. The quality, flavor and nutrition of the heritage grains they make available, many grown in-state, has led to thrilling possibilities.
One goal has been to make a gluten-free loaf that celebrates different grains without compromising on flavor or texture. Leslie Mackie, Macrina’s founder, has spent months experimenting in our test kitchen to develop a loaf that rises to her standards. The result is our Ancient Grain Loaf. “This is unlike any other gluten-free loaf I’ve tasted,” says Leslie. “It’s highly nutritious, packed with fiber, minerals, and vitamins, and its excellent flavor makes it ideal for open-faced sandwiches or toast.”
Teff and millet, two ancient grains naturally free of gluten, add flavor and texture. Brown rice flour and finely-ground oats round out the grains, to which we add organic flax and chia seeds, olive oil and honey for enhanced flavor and richness. A long, slow fermentation process allows the bread to develop a semi-dense texture while retaining plenty of moisture. The bread has a subtly nutty flavor with a hint of honey sweetness.
At room temperature, the bread has a shelf life of two days, but refrigerated it will stay fresh up to a week.
In honor of Pi Day, Macrina will offer individually sized mini pies in four favorite flavors for an entire week beginning on March 11
Pi Day is an annual celebration of the famed mathematical constant, Albert Einstein’s birthday, and edible homonyms (aka tasty round things) — which is why we choose to celebrate it with a week-long celebration of pie. From March 11 to March 17, we’ll be offering individually sized mini pies in four favorite flavors at all our cafés. Last year, we sold out quickly, so don’t dilly dally. Here they are:
For those of you looking to share, we’ll also have the Very Berry and Maple Apple as 9-inch pies. Whether you love math or love to hate it, come celebrate your love of pie at Macrina.
Macrina Bakery makes some of Seattle’s best cakes– order one now for your Mother’s Day celebration.
Chocolate Raspberry Cake is one of our favorite seasonal cakes available just in time for Mother’s Day! Old-fashioned devil’s food cake (the base of our famous Mom’s Cake) is layered with chocolate mousse and fresh raspberries, then finished with chocolate ganache and chocolate cake crumbs.
We’ve always made cakes at Macrina, but a few years ago we started offering a rotating slice of the day in cafés (only available Friday – Sunday). Customers were so thrilled, our talented pastry team had to ramp up production! See the dates below for some upcoming slices.
Beyond the Chocolate Raspberry Cake, We have a number of impossibly delicious cakes!
Lemon Poppy Seed Cake
Our popular white chocolate cake is layered with lemon curd, whipped cream, fresh raspberries and raspberry preserves. Finished with white chocolate cream cheese icing. Available until 5/11.
Carrot Cake
An old-fashioned favorite made with fresh carrots and toasted walnuts, filled and frosted with white chocolate cream cheese icing and sprinkled with orange zest between layers. Finished with toasted walnuts and candied carrot peel. Slices available in cafés 4/29-5/1.
Tuxedo Cake
Bittersweet chocolate cake moistened with brandy syrup with alternating layers of ganache and white chocolate cream cheese filling. Frosted with white chocolate cream cheese icing and topped with white chocolate curls. Slices available in cafés 5/13-5/15.
Mom’s Cake is one of our most popular cakes. The rich, devil’s food cake is a child’s dream of the perfect cake—only designed for your grown-up taste buds. We layer the light and feathery cake with bittersweet chocolate buttercream and top it with big swirls of the velvety frosting. Slices available in cafés 5/20-5/22.
Red Velvet Cake
Our version of red velvet cake has a dark red color to match the rich Valrhona chocolate flavor layered with cream cheese buttercream. Slices available in cafés 6/3-6/5
Whisper Cake
Our popular white chocolate cake is layered with lemon curd, whipped cream, fresh raspberries and raspberry preserves. Finished with white chocolate cream cheese icing.
Lemon Butter Cake
Fresh lemon butter cake layered with lemon curd lightened with whipped cream, fresh strawberries and strawberry preserves. Frosted with lemon cream cheese icing and dusted on the sides with crumbled walnut biscotti.
Looking for Gluten-Free Options?
Our new Queen’s Cake is a rich, gluten-free* espresso-infused chocolate almond torte with a creamy center. Topped with ganache, chopped almonds, chocolate pearls and fresh berries. Contains rum. Available until 5/11.
Torta Gianduja
Gluten-free* rectangular torta with six alternating layers of chocolate espresso cake and chocolate hazelnut cake. Glazed with rich, bittersweet chocolate ganache and decorated with hazelnuts. Contains alcohol.
Certain beloved foods trigger memories, transporting us through time and space to a special moment. For me, one of those foods is a mortadella and fresh mozzarella sandwich on focaccia. Like so much Italian food, its beauty lies in quality ingredients and simplicity. The freshly baked focaccia must be golden brown, flavorful and tender with a toothy crust, the mortadella thinly sliced and artfully layered and the fresh mozzarella creamy.
My first taste of this sandwich was in Florence during a college semester abroad. The bakery had a wood-burning oven, and the baker would brush the dough with olive oil and saltwater. With a long flat peel, he’d place the floury dough into the oven, and about 20 minutes later a golden slab of steaming focaccia about four feet long would emerge from the oven. A piece of that savory bread layered with mortadella, fresh mozzarella, was, and still is, a perfect sandwich.
After college, I returned to Italy to teach history and got to know the specialties of different regions. Still, for a quick lunch, nothing surpassed my favorite Florentine sandwich, except maybe a version I had in Rome at the famed bakery Antico Forno Roscioli.
Years later, on return visits to Rome, I always headed to Antico Forno Roscioli for my favorite sandwich. I’d take it to Piazza Navona and find a spot to perch amid the fountains and take in the scene, a sentimental visit that always brought similar memories of times past flooding into the present.
This year, my daughter, Gracie, is spending a semester abroad in Florence. Recently, my wife, Michelle, and I visited her and took her to Rome for a weekend. Guess where we grabbed lunch? En route to Antico Forno Roscioli, we wandered through Campo di Fiori. Then with sandwiches in hand, we strolled over to Piazza Navona. Sitting there, I discovered something better than enjoying your favorite sandwich in a perfect setting—watching your daughter do the same thing for the first time!
Some might say, location, location, location, and they’re not wrong—go if you can. In the meanwhile, enjoy Macrina’s version of my favorite sandwich. It’s served on an Italian-style golden brown focaccia, made fresh every morning and topped with a light sprinkle of rosemary and cherry tomatoes, layered with thinly sliced mortadella and creamy fresh mozzarella. If you close your eyes and use your imagination, the patter of rain outside might just be the fountain splash of Bernini’s Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi.
Perhaps no pastry requires more napkins or inspires cravings more than homemade pecan sticky buns. They’re warm, gooey and soft in all the right places—and absolutely delicious.
After years of customer requests, we’re launching our own based on Leslie’s recipe for her homemade brunch favorite. We make them by layering our slightly sweet and pillowy brioche dough with toasted pecans and cinnamon sugar, tightly rolling it, then baking it upside down on a rich brown sugar and butter caramel with orange zest and vanilla. We invert the rolls while still warm, causing deep swirls of caramel to run through the bun leaving the pecans gooey and proud on top.
The silky not-too-sweet roll has a light, tender crumb that provides a divine contrast to the toffee-like caramel and crunch of toasted pecans.
The Pecan Sticky Buns are available individually in our retail cafés and as a four-pack. They are best served warm (5–8 minutes in a 325°F oven).
Flour, yeast, water, salt. That’s it. And yet, so many varieties of bread. We’ve been experimenting with these four essential ingredients—plus time, temperature and technique—ever since we first hung a Macrina Bakery sign over the door of our original bakery and café in Belltown in 1993. That’s a lot of loaves, a great many early mornings, a mountain of flour. The one constant: our desire to make great bread.
And that means never losing your sense of wonder over the marvel that is bread.
Increasingly, we’ve added wheat from local farmers. Cairnspring Mills in nearby Skagit Valley mills it to our specifications. We’ve spent some time exploring how hydration and fermentation impact different flours and have enjoyed the results of recent bread additions to our offerings. Beginning July 15, we will bake many of our loaves at a higher temperature. The deep caramelization of the crust adds a depth of flavor that you can’t get any other way. The higher oven temperature also produces a creamier crumb and a crackly crust. The moist interior also helps the bread keep better.
When Macrina Bakery first opened, we had a small four-door electric Bongard oven. Now we have much bigger ovens and many more loaves to bake. But Leslie Mackie, Macrina’s founder, and Head Baker Phuong Bui, who has been with us since that first year, still oversee every element of our production. It’s fun to see them so excited about a loaf of bread, the way the crust crackles when you break into it, the texture of the crumb, and what one can do with just four simple ingredients.
Our growing line of grab-and-go savory items has given our customers a quick and easy way to put healthy, flavorful meals together. Our newest item is a Rustic Ready-To-Bake Pizza.
This is not your typical frozen pizza! We form the crisp and flavorful crust from our Giuseppe dough and top it with our house tomato sauce, mozzarella and parmesan.
“Years ago, we offered a pizzetta in our cafés, and it was a customer favorite,” says Leslie. “This is an adaptation from that, and I’ve been really loving this new version,” says Leslie. “We made it simple so you can dress it up with your favorite toppings at home. Lately, for me, it’s been prosciutto and roasted asparagus. But it’s also great just as it is.”
The pizza bakes in 15–18 minutes, depending on how many toppings you add, and feeds two.
You know that feeling when someone with the best intentions gives you a gift that you’ll never use? Even as you’re saying thank you, you know where you’ll put it—the shelf in the back of your closet with the other gifts waiting for your next white elephant gift exchange. As amusing as those are, you never want to see one a gift you’ve given be the subject of so much laughter.
With that in mind, we’ve designed two gift sets—one salty, one sweet—that you won’t miss the mark. In fact, we suspect they’ll be devoured before the new year!The Macrina Mug Gift Set features our new flower-design mug, ideal for coffee or tea, a pouch of our house-made Vanilla Sugar, and four of our Brown Sugar Shortbread Star Cookies.
The Macrina Artisan Appetizer Gift Set is an impromptu appetizer party in a box. It contains our Thin-cut Rye Crostini, a Mole Salami stick made by Coro, Apricot Conserves by Project Barnstorm, and Ritrovo’s Squashed Green Olives with Truffle. One of the crostini with a thin slice of salami and a dollop of the conserves is a salty-sweet combination that will send you to the moon. The tender green olives from Abruzzo, packed in olive oil with flecks of aromatic truffle, make the perfect salty chaser. All that’s missing is your favorite cocktail or glass of wine.The Macrina Mug Gift Set
• Macrina’s new flower-design coffee mug
• House-made Vanilla Sugar
• Four-Pack of Brown Sugar Shortbread Star Cookies
We make our Chocolate Babka just a few times a year: Rosh Hashanah, Christmas and New Year’s. The loaf is rich like brioche bread, with an added swirl of chocolate glaze and roasted pecans. It’s delicious simply toasted with butter, but for a special brunch, use it as a base for French toast and serve it with your favorite breakfast sausage, raspberries and sweetened whipped cream!
-Leslie Mackie
Ingredients:
Serves 4
1 loaf Macrina Chocolate Pecan Babka
1 cup whipping cream
2 Tbsp granulated sugar
2 tsp pure vanilla extract, divided
3 eggs
2½ cups whole milk
1 Tbsp brown sugar
¼ cup canola oil
1 pint fresh raspberries
2 Tbsp powdered sugar
Maple syrup (optional)
Directions:
Remove the Chocolate Pecan Babka from its paper mold. Cut into 8 even slices. Set aside.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, add the whipping cream, granulated sugar and 1 tsp vanilla extract. Whip for 2 to 3 minutes to form medium peaks and cool in the refrigerator until needed.
Make the custard: In a medium bowl, add the eggs, milk, brown sugar and remaining vanilla extract. Whisk to combine.
Submerge the sliced bread into the custard and soak for 1 minute, flipping them half way through so both sides are evenly coated. Place soaked slices on a plate and set aside.
Place a large sauté pan over medium heat. Add just enough canola oil to coat the base of the pan. When the pan is hot (but not smoking), carefully transfer the soaked bread to the pan, fitting as many in as you can without crowding. Sauté for 2 minutes or until golden brown. Flip to cook evenly on both sides. Repeat this process until all 8 slices are cooked.
Place 2 slices on each plate. Cut each slice on the bias and fan the four pieces across the plate. Garnish with sweetened whipped cream, fresh raspberries and a dusting of sifted powdered sugar. If you choose, serve with warm maple syrup (it’s divine). Enjoy!
Our Flaky Pie Dough is the most frequently prepared recipe in our pastry department—and has been since the day we opened our doors in Belltown in 1993! The dough is perfect for so many kinds of baking, from savory quiche to double-crusted pies to classic tarts.Now, for the first time, we are selling our Flaky Pie Dough in our cafés. The dough is frozen in discs and sold in a two-pack. Each 12 oz. disc rolls out to make a ten-inch tart or a nine-inch pie shell. Or you can use the two discs together to create a double-crusted pie.
Your imagination is the limit for what you can make with our Flaky Pie Dough. To get you started, we’ve included three inspiring suggestions and one of our favorite new recipes with an accompanying video of Leslie showing you how to make it.
Stop by one of our cafés and grab a few of these. When inspiration strikes, you’ll appreciate the time-saving benefits of having these at the ready.Banana Nutella Hand Pies: With our pie dough, simple hand-pies are as easy to make as the filling inside. Start with the mouthwatering combination of bananas and Nutella (what could be easier?) and work your way up through your favorite sweet and savory combinations. Simply roll the dough out and cut 5-inch circles. Add your filling, fold the dough over, and crimp the edges. Bake at 400°F for 20–25 minutes until the crust is golden brown.
Savory Galette with Butternut squash, Roasted Pear and Gorgonzola: Shortly after opening, Leslie introduced savory free-form folded tarts or galettes, and they quickly became customer favorites. This galette is a seasonal adaptation of the one on page 203 of our first cookbook. With the pie dough already made, it’s easy to turn out an elegant lunch. Or cut the galette into small slices and serve it as an appetizer.Harvest Pie: This winter pie is one Leslie serves at her home alongside pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. It’s also one of our most requested recipes. Our Flaky Pie Crust forms the bottom crust and the top is an almond streusel. You’ll find the recipe in our first cookbook on page 249.
Macrina’s Holiday Tart: With our frozen pie dough, this festive tart is a breeze to make. It’s both beautiful to look at and makes a refreshingly delicious end to a holiday meal. The tart cranberries find balance in the sweet filling and pecans add texture and flavor. Orange zest and a dash of brandy give it some zing. Find the video tutorial below!
Ingredients:
Makes one 10” tart
One 12 oz. disc of Macrina Pie Dough
1 cup chopped pecans, roasted
3 eggs
⅔ cups light brown sugar
⅔ cups corn syrup
4 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled to room temperature
2 tsp orange zest
½ tsp salt
1 Tbsp brandy
1½ cups fresh cranberries
1 Tbsp powdered sugar
Directions:
Thaw 1 disc of Macrina pie dough for 2 to 3 hours at room temperature. On a floured work surface, roll dough into a 14-inch circle that’s about an eighth-inch thick.
Fold dough in half and lift on to a 10-inch fluted tart pan. Drop dough into pan and flatten at base of pan and edges. With the remaining overhang, fold into the pan to create an edge that stands a half-inch above the top of the pan. With your hand, smooth the crust edge to a consistent thickness. Chill for 30 minutes in freezer.
Preheat oven to 375°F.
Line the tart shell with parchment paper and fill it with baking weights or beans. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until the edges are golden brown and the base appears dry. Remove the beans and let the shell cool.
Reduce oven temperature to 325°F.
Place the baked shell on a rimmed baking sheet. Add the pecans and cranberries to the tart shell and spread them so they’re evenly distributed.
In a medium bowl, whisk the eggs, brown sugar, corn syrup, melted butter, orange zest, salt and brandy together until well combined. Pour the mixture over the pecans and cranberries. Place the tart in the oven and bake for 35 to 40 minutes. When done, the center of the tart will be set and golden brown.
Let cool for 30 minutes. Serve with sweetened whipped cream.
