Port Townsend is a Victorian seaport, arts community and food Mecca on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, USA. There’s a bakery there, and it goes by the name Pane d’Amore.

Founded by Frank d’Amore and Linda Yakush, the bakery sits at the heart of this delicious, health-led and gourmet region. They serve breads and pastries to the public and supply restaurants with fresh loaves seven days a week.

“We maintain a wider focus on the entire baking process,” commented Yakush. “We don’t just buy ingredients and manufacture bread - we source the healthiest and most ethically sound products always, with a focus on the top priority - what lands on the table.”

Pane d’Amore uses Shepherd’s Grain flour, sourced from sustainable family farms and Food Alliance certified grain. While the bakery does not make 100% organic products across patisserie lines, organic ingredients are always used where possible.

Keys in the success of Pane d’Amore have been the wide variety of baked goods they offer, and their willingness to listen to their commercial clients and regular customers. They currently create twelve separate kinds of dough, and forms them into 38 different loaf shapes.

“Most people say we’re nuts,” Frank d’Amore says. “Some great bakeries will make up to six or seven doughs, add various inclusions, and shape them into perhaps fifteen loaf shapes. But we cover the entire spectrum, making something for everybody. We have everything anyone could possibly come up with.”

Pane d’Amore is located on Tyler Street in the historic Uptown district of Port Townsend. If you’re visiting the area, you’re encouraged to stop by and see the bakery in action.

By Stefan Walters

An extraordinary French documentary about the dangers of chemical pesticides to the health of our children. Contains interviews with farmers, parents and children living in France.

Autumn makes everything pumpkin, Hallowe’en doubly so… This year, I perfected a Quick Pumpkin Bread technique thanks to canned organic steamed pumpkin puree. This stuff is 100% pure pumpkin, and while it cuts out the joys of cooking pumpkin bread from scratch, it also makes it a lot easier to bake pumpkin bread and still have time to make pumpkin soup.

Here’s my recipe for extremely delicious pumpkin bread in under 10 minutes (plus baking time)

You will need:

5 cups flour
4 cups baker’s sugar
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
3 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 cups chopped pecans
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
1 1/2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons salt
15 oz canned pumpkin
3 sticks unsalted butter, cubed
1 1/4 cups cold water
6 eggs, beaten

Set the oven to 325 degrees, and oil four regular loaf pans.

Sieve the flour and sugar into a large mixing bowl, then add the other dry ingredients. Add the pumpkin and mix well. In a pan, melt the butter over a medium heat, then add to the bowl. Stir with a wooden spoon, adding the water and then the eggs. Work quickly - the mixture doesn’t need to be mixed very thoroughly. If there are lumps, don’t worry. Pour the batter evenly between the four pans and bake for 1 hout and 20 minutes. Insert a toothpick, and if it doesn’t come out totally clean, bake the bread for another 10 minutes. Leave in the pans to cool, or eat it hot.

There is more than an hour to go until dawn and the rest of the world may be safely slumbering in its bed but I’m putting on a hair net and slipping into my baker’s whites. As someone whose previous forays into the world of flour and yeast have ended up with little to show other than something resembling a crispy cowpat, and a kitchen that looks like the aftermath of a shoot up in a Medellin cocaine factory, I’m approaching the day ahead with trepidation.

Arriving at Betty’s Craft Bakery, a vast Swiss chalet on an industrial estate near Harrogate in Yorkshire, England - the design is a tribute to the company’s founding father the confectioner-entrepreneur Fritz Butzer – the first thing I learn is that the real bakers here have already been hard at work for several hours, turning out hundreds of hot loaves, fresh cakes and some impossibly ornate pastries.

For me, the object of today’s lesson is to somehow overcome the irrational fear that bubbles up any time I reach for the dried fruit or desiccated coconut. Not that I mind cooking, far from it. Like most modern-day metrosexual men I pride myself on the fact that I can knock up a court bouillon and poach a Hebridean wild turbot with the best of them. But when it comes to folding together a bowl of cake mix, I confess I’m far more Mr Bean than Mr Kipling.

But it seems I am not alone. You may or may not be aware but it is UK National Baking Week – seven days of events designed to convince people like me that not only is making your own cakes and bread fun, it is also healthy and cheap – the perfect answer for those looking for good wholesome food in these economically straitened times.

It is estimated that half a century ago 90% of households would bake at least once a week. Today it is less than half that. According to celebrity chef Rosemary Shrager, who is the public face of this industry-backed campaign, the retreat from the range is a profound loss. “People have been persuaded by the food manufacturers and the supermarkets that they don’t have the time and that they are far too busy to bake and must buy convenience food instead. They think baked food is fattening and unhealthy but it is the complete opposite of that. You need to make time, get the children involved – baking is very social – everything they say against it is wrong and I feel that very strongly,” she says.

Having watched Hell’s Kitchen maybe once too often, I am expecting the atmosphere in the craft bakery to be a little intimidating. The reality could not be more different. While people are busy and clearly working extremely hard, relations are highly cordial. Betty’s commands a devoted loyalty from its staff. Many arrive fresh-faced from college, before honing their craft here their entire careers. It is a father to son, mother to daughter kind of place. You will even find spouses working alongside each other.

Here is perhaps evidence of the much vaunted psychological benefits attributed to baking. It is claimed that the mere process of kneading dough can expunge stress from the system. The smell of a freshly-baked cake percolating through a house is enough to lift even the blackest of moods while the process of moulding and shaping taps into our inner creativity.

Joining the bread station – the 11 bakers here have more than 150 years service between them – I am helping make the last batch of the day. But far from reaping any immediate existential dividends from fashioning the olive and sun-dried tomato rolls bound for the famous tea rooms across God’s own county, I am more concerned about the integrity of my dough matrix and keeping the embryonic loaflets the right way up. Perhaps I am over worrying. The bakery motto is “variation is a sign that craftsmen are in control”. Variation – yes, control – maybe not yet.

It takes up to five years of kneading and mixing before someone can call themselves a master baker. I am not that ambitious but I would like to be able to make bread once in a while.

David Smith, who has been rising at an unfeasibly early hour to turn out Yorkshire cobbles - a local round crusty style of bread loaf - to a grateful public for more than 20 years has some advice for me. “If you get given a bread maker – throw it in the bin or give it to a car boot sale. The mixing is fine but it comes out like a brick and it takes all the fun out of it. On a Sunday morning when you have nothing else to do you can make all sorts of things – chuck in whatever you like to the mix – sweet or savoury, just have a bit of fun. And if it gets too sloppy just keep on kneading – don’t add extra flour and you’ll see it change from a stringy mess to a lovely silky dough,” he says. Gary Rhodes, the British TV chef, apparently does a very good packet mix – nothing to be ashamed of, he tells me.

Since starting aged 15 in a small family-run business in Bradford, England, he has watched other bakers steadily shut down their ovens. “There used to be a time when every village had a baker but they have all gone now and that is down to supermarkets,” says Smith. He was forced to join the dark side himself but it was not a happy experience. “It was soul-destroying,” he recalls. “I wanted to come back and use my hands. It was about getting back to basics – doing it the way your grandfather and their grandfather did it.”

But for once the supermarkets have someone else to blame. It was Otto Frederick Rohwedder who installed the world’s first bread slicing machine at his bakery in Chillicothe, Missouri, back in 1928, later perfecting an automated way of wrapping the loaf. It was the beginning of the end for bread-making traditions that could be traced back to the ancient Egyptians, who became the first people to leaven the simple grain paste cakes that had been the stuff of life since Neolithic times. The simple alchemy of bread making has entranced mankind ever since. The rising process is brought about by the action of CO2 produced by the fermenting yeast trapped in the dough mixture. The cooking process kills off the yeast while the starches in the flour set hard to maintain the airy structure.

But there is more to baking than just bread. Next it is my turn making cakes. Here, pastry maker Sarah Lancaster is busy crumbing-up a giant vat of ‘fat rascal’ mix – a heavily guarded secret at Betty’s. Baking, Lancaster says, is an exact science, and soon I am measuring flour, sugar and dried fruit to the nearest gram. But the best cooks rely as much on sight, smell and touch as they do on the accuracy of their scales, she adds. Her advice to wannabe home bakers is simple: be prepared. “Always make sure you have the ingredients in the cupboard before you start. Otherwise you will find you have 10 minutes to go until it has got to go into the oven and everything will go horribly wrong,” she warns.

Having twisted laminated pastry into some passable croissant shapes, sent a batch of Yorkshire tea cakes off to the oven and cut out some gingerbread Halloween cats (easy-peasy), my confidence is rising like a proving dough. That is until I am taken to the cake decoration department. Here there is a new terror to behold: icing. “Have you done this before?” asks Alison McCabe, who has spent the past 23 years applying a glacial sheen to some of the finest fruit cakes known to man. “Oh dear,” she replies when I answer in the negative. Icing a cake on a moving turntable is rather like patting your head while rubbing your tummy … while simultaneously plastering a ceiling. Not easy.

But Rosemary Shrager tells me later that even this is a skill that will come with time. “The thing about cooking is once you try you have to do it again and again. The more you do it the more effective you become – you must not give up,” she says. I promise not to and even agree to bake a cake at my home this week and email a picture of me holding it. She is delighted. But that still leaves the problem of all that washing up.

Take a look at Betty’s bread recipe in the Recipes section, complete with some truly time-tested tips for baking the perfect loaf.

This article is from The Independent UK, published October 23, 2008

Fabulous vintage organic film…. Scroll down, and click to play!

With thanks to Anita for her kind permission, and her fabulous idea to make it.

Eccolo is a fine restaurant in Berkeley serving fresh local produce in simple delicious ways. So simple, so delicious. Here are their Roman-style fried artichokes, served with home made with aïoli. Chef / owner Christopher Lee isn’t doing rocket science here… He’s just using the freshest seasonal ingredients in time-tested recipes. Fabulously stuffed sandwiches, perfect salads, classic Italian entrées. To make his fried artichokes, simply heat a pan of high oleic acid safflower oil, throw in some baby artichokes that have been quartered and had their coarse tips and hair removed, and remove them from the oil in about a minute, depending on the tenderness of the flowers. Easy!

Eccolo, 1820 Fourth Street, Berkeley, California, 94710

Tomatoes are so expensive in California right now, even though the sun shines pretty much every day, and my little tomato plants in the garden seem to fruit without needing much help from me. Regular, non-organic, taste-free, pesticide-laden tomatoes at major stores like Vons cost around $3 per pound. So the big, beautiful, organic, heirloom, vine-ripened, ridiculously tasty, big fat tomatoes available at the Farmers’ Markets in SoCal for $3.50 per pound are a complete bargain, in comparison.

Even better, heirloom tomatoes - by their very nature - don’t keep well. They are picked at the point of perfect ripeness, and generally snapped up on the same day by eager L.A. gourmet shoppers. So what’s a tomato farmer to do at the end of the day with all the heirloom tomatoes that are slightly squishy, or too delicate to transport back to the farm for another day?

Well, luckily for me, I acquired pounds and pounds of these babies yesterday for free, and boy did they smell good when I roasted them with onion rings, sea salt, olive oil and whole cloves of garlic! I set the oven to 350 degrees and baked them for an hour, then drained off the juice and baked them for another 20 minutes at 400 degrees.

So here’s my top tip - get down to your local Farmers’ Market at the end of the day, and see if you can pick up some bulk buy bargains of the best produce you can find. Nature is truly bountiful right now, so roast ‘em and freeze ‘em ready for autumn sauces and stews.

Whether you call it a zucchini flower or a courgette flower, this flower is a delicacy lightly battered and deep fried, tempura-style. But have you ever felt sorry for the poor vegetable that will never come to fruit if you pluck this flower and eat it? I always wondered how stands at farmers’ markets managed to sell these blooms, when if they just waited a little while they could sell a big beautiful juicy zuccini / courgette instead. Well, I recently found out how they do it. Fact is, if you pluck the flower close to its base, the fruit still develops on the stem behind the place that it once was. So you can eat the flowers and then harvest the zucchini / courgettes later in the season. Of course!

Last night I attended an organic fundraising dinner for the Children’s Eternal Rainforest. The forest is in Costa Rica, and is surrounded by land which has been logged. Last night’s dinner at CAA in Los Angeles was to raise money to buy some of the cleared land surrounding the forest in order to replant it, growing the rainforest.

The evening was organised by Sara Newmark from New Chapter Organics. The food for this event was organic, with all the ingredients provided by Whole Foods.

There was a roasted fig salad with asiago cheese, followed by a choice of either brick roasted chicken with chestnut stuffing or vegetable tian with couscous and grilled vegetables. Dessert was pastel de leche, a Mexican-style sponge cake soaked in a lime cream sauce, with fresh strawberries on the side.

Cocktails included a fabulous ‘acai martini’ made from Bossa Nova acai juice and VeeV vodka, a new spirit made from acai berries.

I organised the music, playing electric violin in the main room, with my friend David Starfire DJ’ing after dinner.

A lovely evening, which raised many thousands of dollars. Here’s the story of where the money will go…

In 1987, a classroom of young children in Sweden decided to take action to protect endangered rainforest. They creatively staged fundraisers, such as puppet shows, pony rides and bake sales. The Swedish government matched their earnings, and in less than two years they raised enough money to buy 3,000 acres in Costa Rica.

Today, the Children’s Eternal Rainforest is the largest private reserve in Central America, protecting 54,000 acres. Children from 44 countries around the world have contributed to its protection.

It is managed by a Costa Rican nonprofit organization called the Monteverde Conservation League, and in 2002 the Monteverde Conservation League US was formed as the US charity to support the Children’s Eternal Rainforest.

Because rainforests are so important in storing carbon, providing habitat for migrating species, moderating global climate change, creating oxygen, and are the home of half of the biodiverity on the planet, we have every reason to protect them. Moreover, because humans are responsible for the devastating deforestation, we feel it is right to also be responsible for protecting rainforests and the species that make the forests their home.

Unfortunately, people continue to slash and burn rainforest at an estimated rate of an acre every second, or approximately 30,000,000 acres a year. The goal of the Monteverde Conservation League US is to raise money to buy and reforest parcels of land that stretch down the mountains toward the Pacific Ocean so that altitudinal migrating animals such as monkeys and leopards will have food year-round, the rich biodiversity of this region will be protected, and generations to come can benefit from a protected ecosystem.

Deep green goodness is best enjoyed from leafy greens that are as fresh as possible. These giant chard leaves were picked from my garden and steamed within 24 hours. Once you’ve tasted veggies as fresh as this, you’ll understand why so many cooks become gardeners. They were grown from seeds planted last year from my friends at JL Hudson and pretty much grow themselves in most conditions. Just add water and wait for them to flourish.

Before cooking up these leaves last night, I went to my local yoga studio for a little post-work breath, stretch and relax. By strange coincidence, my fabulous teacher, Gabe Hendrie, was comparing some of the poses to chard and fresh salad greens. She described how yoga poses and greens are not as good if they wilt, and how the simplest of ingredients and poses make the most vibrant and nutritious dishes and yoga asanas. She also said that the best reason to do anything, whether yogic, food-related or otherwise, is for the pure enjoyment of it. Of course, Gabe’s observation of parallel culinary and yogic forces and the pursuit of pure pleasure struck a nice chord with this particular OrganicFoodee. So after class, I asked Gabe for a chard recipe that brought her the highest enjoyment factor. This is what she said:

1. Take four big leaves to feed two people as a hearty side serving.
2. Don’t use too much stalk. Discard about half of it, then chop the rest into 1 inch / 2 cm long pieces and steam.
3. While the stalk is steaming, halve the leaves down the spine, then slice them in 1/2 inch / 1 cm strips.
4. Once the stalk is fairly tender (about 4 minutes), throw the leaves on top and steam until everything is cooked to your taste.
5. In a bowl, mix 4 tablespoons olive oil with 1/2 teaspoon good quality sea salt. Himalayan pink crystal salt tastes good in this dish, also my personal favorite salt variety, Halen Mon. You can try a flavored olive oil too, especially lemon olive oil.
6. Once the greens are tender, remove from the heat and drizzle with the oil.
7. Serve and eat immediately for sheer taste pleasure and utmost nutritional satisfaction.