My dear readers,
Greetings to you this fine morning. I hope you are well and have enjoyed eating rice these last three weeks. Or pasta? Tacos? Porridge? Quinoa bowls? Perhaps you have taken to making your own darn bread, and we, your long-suffering yet long-recessing bakers, are proved superfluous. Whatever the case, I greet you and look forward to seeing you again.
I want to alert you to a relatively few but not insubstantial changes to our menu, mostly concerning sandwiches.
What just a handful of seasons ago was more or less a one man show has somehow grown into a twenty-person operation of considerable complexity. As time has gone on and the shop has grown, we have begun to feel the need for somewhat more definition around the various teams at the bakery: bread, pastry, and made-to-order (pizza, breakfast sandwiches). While I expect there to remain quite a lot of overlap, it is becoming clear that, for example, the bread team is better off focusing their efforts on bread-making, while the made-to-order side (where we make pizzas a few evenings) is better equipped to handle sandwiches. Made-to-order also creates a lot more space for a larger menu since we aren’t limited to sandwiches that must hold up in the display case for a few hours.
Thus, we’ve decided to open a little hoagie window to the left of our primary counter. (The window we use for the fast lane on Saturdays.) So long as all goes according to plan, we’ll have these made-to-order beauties available each day we’re open (wed - sat), 10:30am to 2pm. Yes, beginning today. We’re keeping the menu pretty simple to start: an italian (above) with capicola, sopressata, and prosciutto; a roasted vegetable with herbed chevre (vegetarian); and a roast carrot with cucumber, pickled onion, arugula, and a particularly tasty and zippy house spread. That one’s vegan, if you’re counting. As time goes on, and barring catastrophe, we plan to add more sandwiches and sides to the menu.
Nevertheless, I do think it appropriate that the bread team make something for our ready-made case as we always have, albeit much simplified from the former offerings: more of a “bread-with-a-little-something-on-it” than a dedicated sandwich build. That is, we’re still going to set some baguette sandwiches in the case as we have done, but they won’t be the same ones. To begin, we’ll have a very traditional French sandwich called jambon-beurre—ham and butter1—and a very nice smoked salmon-cream cheese sandwich with capers, dill, and lemon. These simple but excellent little sandwiches allow us to keep something in the case in the morning before the hoagie window opens up at 10:30, without foisting a couple hours of involved sandwich building upon our bread bakers.
What, then, of the old standbys?—the ham with dill havarti, and the roast cauliflower with romesco? Well, for now they’re gone with the wind. They were excellent sandwiches and I sure hope they served you well, but after five years I just plain got tired of them (especially cauliflower-hunting all over town every Monday since we never seemed to be able to find enough), and for the reasons mentioned above it was time to move on. If you were a longtime and loyal eater of these fine specimens, I would like to thank you and simply to say: give the hoagies a shot. I believe we have improved.
New pizzas this week too, but I’ll let you check our website for those tomorrow. And a mildly adjusted special bread schedule:
Wednesday : olive
Thursday : sweet potato sandwich, apple-walnut, spelt
Friday : cinnamon-raisin, backcountry
Saturday : cherry-hazelnut OR blue corn honey (rotates each week), seeded baguette, spelt, backcountry, fougasse, focaccia, various rolls
You should also notice some new quiche starting this week: bacon and chive, and mushroom with onion and tarragon. They’re quite nice.
Croissant merrily soldiers on. Coffee continues to be brewed hot and good. The bread—the bread!—doth not yet wane in its excellence. We might even have some hot apple cider on tap by the weekend. All is well.
Well, enough of that. Put your cross country skis on and come get a loaf, and a hoagie for the ride home!
yours truly,
david the baker
p.s. You have perhaps noticed that I’m trying a new email platform. I hope it’s working fine on your end; I grew weary of the incessantly intrusive and ominously encroaching gargantuan corporate nature of the old one, and I like these guys.
I can hear a murmur of polite reservation, perhaps mild discontent, from some quarters at this moment. Ham and butter? Isn’t that a bit much? Please know that I too, my fellow American, had my doubts when I recently discovered this simple sandwich. My fears, however, were speedily allayed upon the first few bites of a trial: with very good quality whole-muscle ham and excellent grass-fed butter, this very simple sandwich becomes much more than the sum of its parts, an unforseen harmony of texture, and a surprising coherence which really needs nothing else to achieve the whole. I believe in it.