E-mail article     Print view

Fresh Baked

Our grand dame of handmade bread rises in a second 'Central' location

PREV |  of  | NEXT

ROD MAR / THE SEATTLE TIMES Grand Central founder Gwen Bassetti, who led the artisanal-baking revival in the Northwest, has opened a second bakery in the Eastlake neighborhood, where bright pastries share the spotlight with her lusty, crusty loaves. The billowing clouds of fun-filled frosting on these cupcakes get their loft from the whopping one-pound-plus of butter called for in the classic formula for buttercream frosting.

THIS PAST SPRING, Seattle's cherished Grand Central Baking Company opened a new Grand Central Bakery and Café at 1616 Eastlake Ave. With its frankly modern look and feel, the new café is something of a departure from the original place, where Seattle's artisan-bread revolution was born.

Tucked under the lofty brick archways of a historic building in Seattle's Pioneer Square, "The Bakery," as it was originally known, opened in 1972, the same year Starbucks set up its first store in the Pike Place Market. Possessed of a certain mystery that goes hand-in-hand with its location, the older bakery always prompts a sense of discovery. Regulars and first-time visitors alike sense that they are in on some kind of secret.

Chic and sunny, opening boldly onto a courtyard at the north end of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the new café is anything but tucked away.

Architect Joe Hurley left the lofty ceiling open to the rafters and chose ecologically sensitive materials such as Richlite tabletops and handcrafted concrete countertops to evoke an ultra-contemporary expression of the Northwest style. Walls are decorated with internally-lit art panels featuring photographs of waving grain fields.

But even as the new spot embraces all that is fresh, it somehow conjures all the magic and charm of the original. The magic part comes in the form of the handmade breads and the baked-on-site pastries that are the company's stock-in-trade. The charm part is the staff, led by founder Gwen Bassetti, who developed all the recipes for the breads on which the bakery was built.

Bassetti grew up in a Massachusetts household where "making bread was a way of life." Her transformation from New Englander to Northwesterner began with a summer job as a baker on a dude ranch in Wyoming and progressed to the San Juan Islands, where she sold "Jam, Bread and Vegetables" from a roadside stand staffed by her children. Four years after she and her partners opened "The Bakery," she left "to raise sheep and children" in Eastern Washington. But in 1989, when the kids were grown, she and Pioneer Square developer Alan Black purchased the bakery, renaming it "Grand Central Baking Company."

By this time, Bassetti had developed a passion for the rustic sourdough bread she had seen on trips to San Francisco, and she had baked her way through Carol Field's classic "The Italian Baker." "Without realizing it," says Bassetti, "I was on the crest of a wave that became the artisan-bread baking movement." Indeed, Grand Central was one of the first bakeries on the West Coast, along with La Brea Breads in Los Angeles and Acme Baking Co. in Berkeley, Calif., to abandon copious amounts of commercial yeast and rigid loaf pans in favor of slow-rising dough and hand-formed loaves baked in hearth ovens.

The same playful approach to classical technique that gave birth to the artisan breads at Grand Central spawned these wild and wonderful cupcakes.

Greg Atkinson is a contributing editor for Food Arts magazine and a culinary consultant. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com. Greg Gilbert is a Seattle Times staff photographer.