Our daily bread, and the foundation of our diet. We eat this bread every day for breakfast toast, for lunch sandwiches, and for dinner as toast with soups or stews. The long, cool-risen sourdough in this delicious and nutritious loaf gives the bread a flavor complexity and moistness (not to mention keeping quality) that you won’t find in a commercially yeasted dough—especially one with no added oil or sweetener.

We’ve finally done it—baked a bread made with Alaskan-grown grain! It’s not entirely Alaskan grain, since our farmers aren’t producing Alaskan wheat yet, but we’re really excited to be using barley grown in Delta Junction!

This loaf was inspired by anadama bread, a traditional New England recipe containing cornmeal and molasses. I substituted a little honey for the molasses and changed the name of the bread; the sourdough and whole wheat are assertive enough flavors without the molasses, and the touch of honey helps bring up the cornmeal flavor.

What could possibly make our 100% whole wheat levain better? I love the complex, tangy flavor and the nice keeping quality already—it’s the bread I eat every day. But what about adding Alaskan potatoes to it?

This 100% whole wheat pan loaf is loaded with grains used for brewing beer at the Midnight Sun Brewery. These mixed grains still have plenty of flavor left in them even after the brewers are done with them. They add both a malty sweetness and lots of texture to our organic 100% whole wheat flour, and the flavor of the grains added will vary subtly, depending on the type of beer brewed. Whether you have resolved to eat more whole grains in 2009, you like the idea of reducing, reusing and recycling, or you just want a hearty and flavorful bread for breakfast toast and sandwiches, our spent grain bread will be sure to please!

Everyone’s breakfast favorite, we shape this bread into a small loaf so that it’s perfect for toast. This hearty little loaf is so packed with toasted pecans and moist, naturally sweet organic raisins that it hardly needs butter or honey. And the whole wheat flour keeps you going until lunch!

Packed with huge chunks of rich, toasted walnuts, this loaf is unbelievably good as toast with a slice of cheese melting on top. It’s also great just by itself as breakfast toast, or drizzled with honey. The bread is made with 100% whole wheat, so a slice or two of breakfast toast will last you all morning.

As much as I love our regular 100% whole wheat levain, I have to admit that the toasted seed is maybe my favorite. This loaf has the added richness and toasted flavor of a variety of organic seeds! Flax, sesame, pumpkin, sunflower, and a little polenta... it's packed with good things!

This beautiful black bread, dusted with flour and baked in a torpedo shape (an elongated oval) on the hearth, is probably different than any rye bread you’ve ever tasted. It’s definitely not light rye with caraway seeds, and you’re unlikely to want to make a pastrami sandwich with it. It contains both coffee and dark cocoa powder, which combine with the sourdough-rye starter to create a slight bitterness and intense flavor that contrasts beautifully with the sweetness of the raisins and molasses.

Our olive bread is so loaded with Greek olives that even when I’m cutting small pieces to share for samples, there is an olive in every bite. A little olive oil in the dough makes the crumb especially soft and luscious; it might just be the perfect dinner bread.

Adding fresh rosemary to our hearth loaf gives it a savory herbal flavor that goes so well with lots of different foods. Decorated with leaf-shaped slashings on top, it’s quite beautiful, too. If you’re using it for a dinner bread, just heat the unwrapped loaf in a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes to get a beautiful crisp crust on it before you sit down to eat!

Here it is—finally a rye bread worthy of any Reuben sandwich you’d care to dream up… or a cheese sandwich, or a tomato sandwich, or an egg salad sandwich, for that matter! Even if you think you don’t like rye bread, try it first! It might be the caraway seeds in most commercial rye breads that you don’t like, or the sour flavor of some American-style rye.

Speckled with little green flecks of chives and subtly flavored with toasted onion, this is the softest, most luscious bread we make, thanks to the addition of lots of freshly-baked Alaskan potatoes from the Valley! Potatoes make the dough incredibly soft and silky, and the baked bread is wonderfully tender, light and moist.

We originally developed this bread to showcase Alaskan cheese, but we’ve just now run out of our stockpile of Cranberry Ridge Farms’ cheese that we bought when they moved Outside. We’re on the lookout for a new Alaskan cheese supplier, and are waiting to try out a new Asiago-style cheese from Healing Acres Goat Dairy. They are located on Lazy Mountain near Palmer, and while they are already selling soft cheeses in Palmer, we’re waiting on the hard cheese for the bread. Anyway, in the meantime, this week we’ll use Parmesan cheese in the bread, and in combination with loads of roasted garlic, it makes an incredibly savory and luscious bread. We pack lots of cheese into the loaves, so that when you heat the bread in the oven or the toaster, the cheese melts and it tastes like a cross between a toasted cheese sandwich and rich garlic bread. Give it a try!

This is our Autumn-inspired loaf, designed to taste great with all kinds of warming, winter-is-coming foods like squash, greens, soups, and stews. The pumpkin in the bread gives it a great orangey-yellow color, and also creates an especially moist crumb. It’s loaded with toasted green pumpkin seeds, and scented with cumin.

Have you ever eaten a hot cross bun at Easter time? Packed with fruits and toasted nuts, our fruited almond loaf is partially inspired by the rich hot cross buns my mom made when I was small. Our loaf, though, has neither eggs nor butter in it, making it a healthier choice—you can eat slices for breakfast, afternoon snacks or dessert and still feel virtuous!

We think this bread tastes even better than chocolate cake—and it doesn’t contain any butter, eggs, or dairy. But it’s packed with the important stuff: dark and rich gourmet cocoa powder, big hunks of dark chocolate, and dried cherries.

The South Anchorage Farmers Market Cookbook is filled with 100 pages of delicious, healthy recipes that showcase our flavorful, fresh local Alaskan produce. The recipes provide inspiration for ways to use Alaskan vegetables, fish, fruits, bread, and other products that can be found locally. Mostly vegetarian and vegetable recipes, many of which are dairy- and egg-free, the cookbook focuses on recipes that have fantastic flavor and top-notch nutritional value. The directions in each recipe include lots of hints about how to prepare these recipes with speed and efficiency. The cookbook also includes directions for processing Alaskan produce to freeze for the winter.