Neckar Coffee Sable Baking
Sable Baking Dialogue is equally important to Ashley Chapman, owner of the Bench-area micro bakery Sable Baking. Every Saturday morning, eager customers line up outside her small popup window on the side of French restaurant Petite 4, where she explains her handcrafted, European-style offerings — everything from Vollkornbrot, a dense German seed bread, to Kardemummabullar, a Swedish cardamom roll.
“I’m doing the whole process from start to finish,” said Chapman, “It’s an old-world style of bread, so it takes a lot of time and care and practice. It’s something that I wasn’t good at when I started, and over years of doing it and studying under people who have been doing it for a long time, I learned the skill. I feel like that’s how an artist treats their work.”
“My ultimate goal would be to stay as small as I am,” said Chapman. “I don’t really want to get into wholesale. I feel bad that I sell out pretty often. There’s a part of me that wishes I could grow my production a little more, but I’m not able to in the space that I am in, so it has to stay small.” Back at The Funky Taco, Archambo flips a slightly misshapen tortilla on the flat top. Since each of Funky Taco’s flour tortillas is hand rolled, they can vary in shape and size compared to their commercial counterparts. But when the press spits out a perfectly round tortilla, Archambo gets noticeably excited. “That’s butter!” he exclaimed, citing the kitchen’s nickname for a perfect tortilla. “The food that we’re trying to put in front of our guests, it needs to look beautiful, it needs to taste beautiful, but it also needs to come from a good place,” he said. “I think all of that defines artisanal food.”
Chapman learned her craft at the San Francisco Baking Institute before honing her skills at bakeries around the Bay Area. She eventually moved back home to Boise to open Sable Baking, where she focuses on naturally leavened breads that take around 48 hours, from start to finish. She hand mixes, shapes, scores, and bakes each loaf, which range from Apricot Semolina to Chili Paprika Levain. Though Sable has grown to include a weekly pop-up shop and monthly bread-share program, Chapman hopes to keep things boutique. Ta r a M o r g a n / / @ b o i s e f e e d