Wheatstalk 2018

I joined the Bread Bakers Guild of America in 1993, the same year I opened Macrina. It was an insanely busy time in my life, but I knew I needed a community of artisan bakers for support and guidance. The Guild provided that and more. The Guild was much smaller 25 years ago. Not surprisingly, its growth has mirrored the rise of artisan baking in America.

Now, I’m on the Guild’s Board of Directors. For the last 16 months, I’ve been busy working with the other eight directors to plan Wheatstalk, the Guild’s most significant event, which starts February 27. The three-day celebration of baking is filled with lectures, hands-on classes, demonstrations, and maybe most importantly, a chance to visit with fellow bakers.

We’re holding this year’s gathering at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. Of the Guild’s 2200 members, 525 members entered a lottery for the 125 available spots. All told, with the lottery winners, the teachers and volunteers like myself, about 200 artisan bakers will descend on the city. We’ll leave flour dust in our wake!

The Guild isn’t only comprised of professional bakers, but also super-talented home bakers and tiny CSA’s that bake once a week. At previous Wheatstalk events, I’ve picked up valuable tips from passionate home bakers who bake in backyard wood-fired hearths, as well as people that produce at a scale larger than Macrina’s.

Wheatstalk takes place in six classrooms, an amphitheater and a lecture hall. Featured speakers include two celebrity bakers from France, Hubert Chiron and Patrice Tireau. Stephen Jones of the internationally renowned Bread Lab, located in Mount Vernon, will be talking about the Wheat Movement in America. Also, some of the country’s best artisan bakers, bakery owners, and pastry and savory instructors will be teaching—including Jane Cho, Macrina’s Production Manager and pastry chef extraordinaire, and Scott France, Macrina’s CEO.

Scott is teaching a class called Growing Your Bakery with Amy Scherber of Amy’s Bread, a New York bakery that is a little bigger than Macrina and opened just a year earlier. Our bakeries are similar, both with cafés and wholesale operations. Scott and Amy will cover essential questions like, Do you really want to stop baking? Because when you grow, you spend a lot less time kneading dough. Out of necessity you get into the business of managing employees, training, retaining employees, pricing, food safety, and charitable donations. Scott says, “Amy and I should complement each other well. She is the baker who started her business, and I’m not. That difference should be useful.”

Once all the organizing is done, my job at Wheatstalk is very hands-on—preparing three days of breakfast and lunch for 200 people! It’s a big job, but I’ll have plenty of help. I’m serving a very Macrina-centric menu of tasty comfort food. There’ll be Macrina’s Macaroni and Cheese with Spicy Broccoli one day, lentil soup another, savory salads, and all the beautiful loaves of bread made fresh each day in the morning classes.

After months of planning, I can hardly believe it’s about to happen. I look forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones, to learning new techniques and recipes. Everyone walks away inspired and with a handful of new friends and an even deeper connection to this awesome industry than they thought possible!

Leslie

At Macrina, we support artisanal and local products and Bee Local is a great example of why. First, the taste of their honey is exceptional. The honey is raw, single-origin, and sustainably produced, making the variety of flavors wonderful. In addition, the bees provide innumerable benefits to the neighborhoods in which they forage. ~ Leslie

The Sweet Rewards of Good Bee-havior

Bee Local, a boutique producer of exceptional honey, currently manages less than 60 hives in total. They cover an area from Seattle to Walla Walla, then down onto Portland, Bend, and the Willamette Valley. Few commercial producers would consider anything less than 60 hives in one place an apiary, but this wildly inefficient process evolved from one key fact: location means everything to honey.

Ryan Lebrun is the busy beekeeper managing the hives. He loves introducing people to the incredible variety of honey produced by different landscapes, almost as much as he enjoys introducing a live hive to people unfamiliar with them.

Honey is a lot like wine. Terroir, the combination of soil, climate, flora, and sunlight in a specific place, lends the honey it’s unique flavor. Foraging bees come up with the incredible flavors by transporting nectar and pollen from whatever is blooming in the area. Single-origin honey captures a specific time and place in one jar, a sweet and nuanced treasure of nature.

Some honey, such as Bee Local’s Buckwheat Honey, is as dark as oil and has a grassy, earthy taste. Others, like their Acacia Honey, resemble chardonnay and are buttery with hints of vanilla.

A lot of commercial honey is blended. Producers buy large quantities from all over, heat it up, mix it, strain it with microfilters, and package it. Basically, it’s like jug wine. Because the US consumes more honey than it produces, much is imported, sometimes from dubious overseas sources.

“It was discovered that some foreign manufacturers were mixing honey with other sweeteners, like high fructose corn syrup, or molasses, or sugars made from rice,” Ryan says. “On top of that, they’ve found really bad chemicals in the honey. Some of the storage barrels contained exposed lead that would get into the honey. Lots of insecticides and pesticides sprayed on the crops also got into the honey. Not only was the product adulterated, it was actually bad for you.”

As a result, the US has set a high tariff on honey coming from China. Many European nations have banned the import of Chinese honey. An article in the Journal of Food Science coauthored by John Spink, director of Michigan State University’s Food Fraud Initiative, cited honey as the third most faked food in the world. To work around prohibitive tariffs, some exporters ship their product to a country like Vietnam that has no such restrictions and the honey makes its way to the US market. This scandal has been dubbed honey laundering.

But there are plenty of domestic producers of quality honey. Most of it is clover honey. “Clover is a really good honey producer,” Ryan says. “Lots of beekeepers, especially in the Midwest, make lots of clover honey. There’s nothing wrong with it. To me, it tastes like a graham cracker. But that’s the only flavor most people know.”

That is, perhaps, the best reason to try Bee Local honey: to discover the world of flavors that bees produce. At Macrina, we carry Bee Local’s Walla Walla honey and their Honey Water. The Walla Walla honey comes from an area rich in wildflowers. It has an herbal aroma, not overwhelmingly sweet, allowing nuanced flavors of mineral and barley to emerge. Honey Water is a simple syrup made with Bee Local’s honey and is the best way to sweeten drinks.

If the best reason to try Bee Local is the taste, not far behind are the ecological impacts that come from well-tended urban hives. Not all of them are immediately obvious. Ryan explains: “A side effect I wasn’t anticipating was how a hive could transform a neighborhood. Whether it’s a rooftop or a backyard, we put in a beehive, come back a year later, and you see that the whole neighborhood is into it. People want to help, and the best way to do that is to plant pollinator-friendly flowers. Then their neighbors join in planting flowers. The neighborhood gets in tune with the seasons, what they’re growing, not using pesticides—people suddenly have that in mind—they want to focus on what chemicals they’re using, what they’re city might be using, and they build a chorus of voices against that.”

Come see what all the buzz is about. Drop into one of our cafes and grab a jar. You may discover a whole new world of flavor.

When I opened Macrina in 1993, Peter Lamb and Robert Eickhof were running Queen City Grill. They put Belltown on the map as a dining destination. Scott Carsberg, chef of Lampreia, followed them in 1992. Peter was good friends with Scott and when I opened Peter would drop by and chat with Scott before picking up bread for the Queen. I used to love going there for great food and that lovely atmosphere. It always was a lively place! I’m so glad Trevor, Brian, and the others were able to keep it alive and are doing so much to make it a vital Seattle destination again. 

Leslie

Long Live the Queen

When Trevor Greenwood learned that the iconic Queen City Grill was slated to close late last year, he sprang into action. Working feverishly, he pulled together a team who shared his love of the restaurant and inked a deal to save the Queen two days before Christmas and just a week before the doors would have closed forever.

For Greenwood it was personal—he’d started there as a busser and worked his way into management and captaining the wine program. Years later, he founded Cantinetta, the beloved Tuscan-inspired restaurant with locations in Wallingford, Bellevue, and Madison Valley.

The rejuvenated Queen City Grill reopened in early 2017 after a remodel that updated the interior—touched up varnish, new lighting, paint, and plenty of improved firepower in the kitchen.

“Every restaurant that’s been around a while has to fight to stay relevant,” says Executive Chef Brian Cartenuto. “Queen City Grill opened in 1987. Belltown was very different then. And look at Seattle now. There are 77 cranes up. Lots of newcomers. Enough restaurant openings to make you dizzy. People are intrigued with what’s new.”

The task of renewal at the Queen is in the able hands of Cartenuto, the original executive chef at Cantinetta. Restaurant critic Providence Cicero, writing of his dishes at Cantinetta, said they “combine a wonderful balance of flavors with an element of surprise.”

At the Queen, Cartenuto honors the refined simplicity and whimsy that made the original Queen City Grill such a sensation. His menu has a Northwest sensibility and features seasonal produce and local purveyors.

“There’s still a burger on the menu,” Cartenuto says. “It’s important to me that the food stays fun and approachable. Through technique, quality of ingredients we try to make the food exciting, food that tells the story of the seasons and that honors our past. For example, we’re putting Miso Salmon on the menu to pay homage to the past. That was probably novel in 1990. But there’s a reason it’s a classic now. And they can be reinvented, made relevant again.”

Come to think of it, that’s an excellent metaphor for the Queen City Grill—a classic, reinvented and made relevant again.

Brunch is another new feature. Offered on weekends from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. the menu ranges through a few classics like a super custardy French toast with star anise sugar and berry compote, then veers middle-Eastern with Shakshuka, a lovely egg dish with a spiced tomato sauce and grilled flatbread.

Come visit (or revisit) Queen City Grill, one of the oldest bars standing in Seattle, now tastefully refurbished to preserve all of the romance of the original space and with an exciting new menu that has something for everyone.

When Erica Olsen and Leslie Mackie first met, Erica was swaddled in a blanket and cradled in her mother’s arms. Leslie was the head baker for Grand Central Bakery, where Erica’s mother worked. More than 30 years later, Erica is Macrina’s General Manager of Wholesale Sales.

Leslie remembers, “We were all dusted in flour when we first met.”

Erica first joined Macrina in 2017 as our head pastry chef after graduating from the Seattle Culinary Academy and a stint working under the tutelage of pastry chef Kim Maher at Super Six.

“No smell reminds me of home more than the yeasty smell of rising bread,” Erica says. “My mom was always baking. I love food, and have been working with food since I was 14, but growing up I never thought I’d be a chef.”

Erica’s work as a pastry chef has given her a better knowledge of Macrina’s products than nearly anyone. Her passion for Macrina’s breads and pastries, her natural ability to build and cultivate customer relationships, and her in-depth training period with Amy Bui (former GM of Wholesale Sales at Macrina) make Erica uniquely qualified for the job.

“I’m not really a salesperson, but I love customer service,” Erica says. “Macrina’s bread and pastries are incredible, and the quality standards are very high. I enjoy following up to be sure our customers have what they need and helping their business grow.”

Born and raised on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, Erica still lives near her childhood home. She and her partner, Rikke, love to take long city walks with Betty and Ruth, their dogs. A favorite summer activity is berry picking. “Especially raspberries,” Erica says. “Blueberries and strawberries are great, but I’ll eat raspberries until I’m sick.” She’s also an active SIFF member and while balancing a busy schedule manages to squeeze in several films every year (virtually during Covid).

“I’m thrilled to be working directly with customers to share my love of Macrina’s products,” says Erica.

At Macrina, we’re delighted that flour-dusted baby has grown up into a wonderful pastry chef who helps us connect customers with the products they need.

PCC has the best blueberries. They’re as big as the end of your thumb, dusky blue, perfectly sweet-tart, and ready to burst with finger-staining nectar. Called Sweet Baby Blues, they come exclusively from LaPierre Farms in Zillah, Washington.

To honor the arrival of berry season in the Pacific Northwest, we’ve collaborated with our friends at PCC Markets on a Mini Blueberry Coffee Cake. I’ve made my favorite fresh fruit coffee cake with many types of berries and other fruits, but the juiciness of the blueberries from LaPierre Farms, and their balance of acidity and sweetness, is unique enough that it took several modifications to adjust my recipe. The cinnamon sugar streusel topping complements the tartness of the berries nicely and I find the combination irresistible. The cake will be featured at PCC as well as in our cafés.

We began selling our breads and other baked items at PCC in 2014. “Customers are loving this partnership,” said PCC’s Senior Grocery Merchandiser Scott Owen. “We began selling Macrina breads in King County locations and they sold so well we expanded the products to all of our stores.”

I have great admiration for the dedication PCC has shown toward improving our local food supply. They maintain partnerships with local and regional farmers to provide the best-tasting, freshest produce possible. One way they do this is through the PCC Farmland Trust, which works to protect threatened farmland in Washington. The trust also helps local farmers be productive growing sustainable and organic crops. It was through them that we learned of an excellent wheat grown on PCC Farmland Trust land by Williams Hudson Bay Farm and processed by Fairhaven Mills. We now use the whole grain whole wheat flour in some of our breads.

Wayne and Marni LaPierre are an example of the type of family farm PCC has supported. In 1984, after finishing college with a horticultural degree, Wayne returned to the Yakima Valley where his grandparents had farmed. He planted an orchard of cherry trees and soon after began growing organically. In 1989, PCC began their relationship with LaPierre Farms and each year customers have eagerly awaited the arrival of Wayne and Marni’s fruit throughout the summer.

Just a few years ago, Wayne began growing blueberries. PCC contracted the whole crop.

“LaPierre Farms is a very special farm, with a grower that is seemingly doing the impossible,” Scott said. “He picks, cools, packs, and ships in about 24 hours. Our stores often get them barely a day of the vine. They are amazing in quality, texture, and flavor.”

Aside from great soil conditions and careful watering at night, one key to the great berries is careful handpicking. Blueberries don’t ripen all at once, requiring patience and multiple picks. Wayne trains all of his pickers how to identify berries that are mature. When they’re at their best they come off easily. “We just roll’em off with our fingers,” Wayne said.

It’s that kind of care, and attention to every detail in the growing process, that distinguishes Sweet Baby Blues. Give the berries a try. I think you’ll understand why they inspired me to create Macrina’s newest product, the Mini Blueberry Coffee Cake. Macrina shares PCC’s value of sourcing the best ingredients from local farms, which makes it an honor and a joy to collaborate with them.

Leslie