We’re starting slow: it’s just Mark and Cindy baking after all. But we’ll have a selection of 3-4 different loaves each day; baguettes, whole wheat boules and the always popular Orange Boot Birdseed loaf — a sourdough multigrain loaf with lots of seeds and oats.
Over the next several weeks we’ll be adding more bread, some rolls and sweet stuff too, as we get our production schedule figured out and some staff added.
We’re open Tuesday – Friday from 11AM – 6PM and Saturday from 11AM – 4PM. At least for now
The way it seems to be working is we have our morning bake completed and out for you by 11AM. On Fridays and Saturdays, we also do a smaller afternoon bake of baguettes and birdseed loaves that are out by 2PM. That’s your two best chances at the widest selection of bread for the day.
You can reach us via phone at (306) 584-BOOT (2668) or drop us an email.
I’ll leave this on the home page until we get the rest of the website tuned up.
]]>Happy Holidays!
We hope you’re all having a great holiday week. We were going hard at the bakery right up till Christmas Eve then took a couple days off to be with our family and recharge a little. Then it’s been back to the bakery to paint, assemble equipment and clean. We’re always cleaning. I’m sure our shop will be cleaner than the first day the mall opened, but it’s worth it.
Opening Day is Getting Close
We’re not 100% sure when opening day is, but it’s not too far off. If all goes well we’ll be ready to start bringing flour and other ingredients into the shop in a week or so. Opening in mid-January is our best guess at this point.
We’ll be letting people know via the Bootnik email list: if you haven’t yet, please sign up and you won’t miss a thing!
In the Meantime
It’s not good bread, but at least here’s a hint of how your bread will be baked. Last week we took delivery of our MIWE Condo bread oven. Built in Germany, used for a week at the IBIE baking conference in Las Vegas, then delivered to Regina via New Jersey and Toronto. The last 50 feet were the toughest as Cindy, her dad Chris and a great forklift operator threaded the needle to get this large oven through a surprisingly small door opening. Cindy was calm enough to film parts of it — it’s not White Christmas but it’s not bad either. Can you feel the tension?
Happy New Year!
2010 has been a crazy adventure for us as we finally took the plunge to open Regina’s first artisan bread bakery. 2011 will no doubt be even wilder when we start baking for you and get serious about bringing you the best bread we possibly can. Your emails and phone calls keep us going; thank you so much for your support over the past two months.
We wish you huge success and happiness in 2011. If we can add a wee bit of great taste and nutrition to your best year ever, then we’ll be very happy indeed.
]]>Watch the video direct in YouTube by clicking here.
Lots of work to go on the bakery itself along with this website. If there are any WordPress developers out there looking to do some pro-bono (or nearly so, or in exchange for bread) work to earn the unending praise of Regina bread lovers, please fire me an email!
Still not a Bootnik? Howcomewhy? Become a Bootnik here!
]]>We love to make you smile
Without a doubt, the best part of baking every Friday was getting to see you every week and hear your stories about how you liked what we were doing. We especially loved the stories where you shared bread with a friend and they loved it too.
That’s the neat thing about our bread — it’s even better when you share it.
Our friend Beth told us a story last month about finding a loaf of our bread buried in the bottom of her freezer and how much her family loved it. The loaf was likely from our Christmas bake last December; while we don’t recommend freezing our bread for 10 months, we’re glad to hear that it was still tasty!
Where to from here?
When we added the 100th person to our bread list last year we thought “Eureka! That proves Regina loves great bread and everyone is craving a real artisan bread bakery in the city!” So we stopped baking and ran off to talk to bankers, equipment suppliers and landlords.
We thought it would be a short hiatus from baking till we got the store opened and then we’d be back to making you smile every week and making new friends.
In the event, it was much harder than we thought. We looked at a dozen locations and dug deep into three locations in the past year. It was a Goldilocks experience; too small, too big, zoned incorrectly and, in the case of River Heights Mall, a landlord who wanted nothing to do with another bakery in his mall.
This August, we finally gave up. Decided that it just wasn’t going to work, so let’s stop fretting and never speak of it again.
And then it happened
Once we officially, finally, gave up, it only took two days. Cindy sent Mark on a bike ride north to check out a renovation on Saskatchewan Drive. Mark, who rarely listens closely, rode south looking for a renovation on Gordon Road. He didn’t find it, of course. But he did find a space for lease that was “just right.”
So the bankers got called back. The equipment suppliers got emailed. And we started reviewing lease agreements. On November 1, we got a set of keys and a huge mortgage. We’re in business.
Announcing Orange Boot Bakery. For Real!
Our new address is 3904 Gordon Road, in the Albert Park Plaza strip mall. Today we tell people “you know, the little mall with Sparky’s restaurant that used to be the Brown Derby?” It’s our hope that in a few years people will say “you know, the little strip mall with Orange Boot Bakery?”
It’s a nice little space with lots of natural light and an intimate feel to the place. If you drive by today, you’ll see an empty shell with JR’s Convenience Store over the door. But not for long!
A small bread shop, built for you (and people like you)
Our vision is for a nice, small, European style bread shop where you can get the best bread, a nice pastry and maybe a cup of coffee. Cookies and muffins made with the same care you use at home. Fresh fruit tarts in fresh fruit season. Savory buns and turnovers for a quick lunch or snack.
There are bakeries like this all over Canada, from Victoria to Halifax to Whitehorse. Even in Saskatoon. It’s time we had one in Regina. And very soon, we will!
Our schedule shows us being open in January 2011. We’re hoping to get things ready in time for a ‘soft opening’, exclusively for you Bootniks on the email list, in mid-December. That way you can have some good bread for the holidays.
Will you help us?
I know you share our vision because you are the people who gave us the vision. Now we need your help to spread the word and get more people excited about what we’re doing.
Please forward this email to all your friends who love great bread. Let them in on the secret – they’ll love you for it! Invite them to sign up to our email list so they can be a Bootnik too. There’s a signup form at our website, or they can just click here to go straight to the signup form.
Finally, let us know what you think – now, when we’re planning our bread lineup and later after we open. You’re our friends, customers and Board of Directors. We love hearing from you!
]]>We had a bake sale today at The Day Job to kick off the Christmas festivities. Cindy’s treats were a huge hit. She’s been researching smaller sweet items for the holidays and tried three new items. The best of the bunch was a chocolate cookie dipped in icing and roasted almonds at one end — they sort of look like a lit cigar although they don’t taste like one at all. They’re fun to eat in three small bites — the first taste is almonds, followed by chocolate and almonds, and finally pure chocolate. Yum!
No surprise to you that it’s been a while since we’ve baked for you all. We really miss it. The best part of the bake sale was seeing the joy in the eyes of the folks who bought our baking. That’s the best part of our bread baking too. Not connecting up with you makes this journey to opening even longer.
Goldilocks and the Road to a Real Bakery
Over the last four months we worked long hours getting a lease in place, but with no real success. We’ve had two opportunities fall through: a too-small site near downtown which found us caught between a zoning issue and an impatient landlord, and a too-large site near Taylor Field in which the landlord was wonderful but the building was too large, too soon.
While we learned a lot with both sites and met some very helpful people, we’re still searching for a ‘just right’ location. Or maybe ‘good enough’ is a better way to put it. Big enough for an oven, mixer, refrigeration and, of course, a place for customers to stand, and maybe park nearby. But not so large we go broke paying rent.
We’ve got a couple more leads to follow up, and one space with great potential but a very reluctant landlord. So hopefully we’ll have more information to share soon.
Announcing the Bootnik email list
When we started this site I made a few beginner mistakes around keeping everyone in the loop. I spent some time this fall getting everything pulled together so that all of you can get consistent updates without our email account getting tagged as a spammer.
We’re now using an email provider called Mailchimp to send out the emails to everyone who’s on our Orange Boot email list — that is, the (Orange) Bootniks!
People who subscribed to website updates are Bootniks too — we don’t want you to miss out on news and insider info (like the quite-possible-almost-for-sure Bread For The Holidays event.) This means website subscribers *might* be getting some updates twice, from the website and the Bootnik list. If this happens often and it bothers you, fire me an email and I’ll fix things up for you.
One More Thing
I almost forgot — if you’re not signed up to our Orange Bootnik list yet, now’s the time! Be the first person on your street to learn about when we finally open the best Artisan Bread bakery in Regina. Either use the box in the upper right corner of the website or click this link. Your neighbours will think you’re way cool!
Photo by tannazie
]]>Although I’ve spoken to a great many of our friends and customers over the past year, I haven’t posted to the site in a very long time. This has caused a bit of worry with people who discovered the website and thought they missed out on some fun (and great bread.) I get a couple emails a month from people asking if we’re still baking.
Are we still baking in the brick oven? Yes and No. We’ve done a few bakes for special occasions, but we’re not baking on a regular schedule.
Are we going to open a full time bakery? Very good question! It looks like…YES!
We still have a lot of work to do, not least of which is settling on a location. But we’re working hard at it — picking a location, sourcing equipment, getting the financing in place, etc. I think we have the dominos lined up so that once we settle on the location, the rest can fall pretty quickly.
Our dream site at the River Heights Mall fell through back in May — the landlord has other plans for the mall that doesn’t include world class bread and baked goods If you feel differently, perhaps you can tell him But you know, once that option officially died it actually opened up some new ideas for us. I guess we were stuck on one place so much that we couldn’t see the opportunity in other sites.
We’ve also been talking with other bakers. Second generation bakers and rookies who have been open less than a year. So we’re feeling much more confident that we can be open and baking for you before I need to post a Summer 2010 update.
In the meantime, please drop us a line if you want to chat, either with a comment on the website or via email. Words of encouragement are welcome, as is a kick in the pants once in a while — your choice!
]]>I hope you’re all having an excellent summer! While our oven has been idle for much of the summer months, there is more than enough things going on to fill up the time. It’s to the point now where I wonder how we ever got any baking done last winter!
For us, the summer has been spent on three big activities:
Now, I’ll be getting into the bread business in a second, but the reality is that we don’t know when we’ll be opening again. What I will promise, however, is that if you pledge Mark or Cindy in the MS Bike Tour, there will be free bread for you. Guaranteed by the end of September (unless you are away in September.) Just click the links above (on our names) to learn more about the tour.
I’m a member of the Bread Baker’s Guild of America and two BBGA items really shaped my summer. The first was my trip to Edmonton back in June which was pretty discouraging when the talk got down to the nuts and bolts of operating a small bakery in 2008. That and I spent much of July following a discussion of all the risks and threats of running an undercover bread operation. Not a pretty sight, which strengthened our resolve to either do this ‘for real’ or stop.
One of the problems I’m having is getting concrete information on what’s acceptable facilities for ‘home baking’ that can be sold at bake sales, farmer’s markets and the like. I recently reached out to the Regina Farmer’s Market folks to see what their rules are and hopefully that will help.
We’ve received a lot of support from our existing customers and new folks who want to be a part of the Orange Boot Experience. Thank You! There have been many days when we wonder if we’re ever going to crack this nut, and your encouraging emails and visits make us want to keep trying.
If this sounds like we’re on the fence, well, it is. Sorry. The path forward is as muddy as it was back in June. But I think of you folks as our Board of Directors, who deserve to know what’s going on and have the opportunity to provide some direction too. Does the path forward seem really clear to you? Please tell us! If it requires some sitting time on the back patio, come on by!
]]>I hope you all had a great weekend. Father’s Day was a nice, relaxing affair — out to a movie with the whole family, a late lunch, some puttering around the house and we finally got the garden in. Nice day and beautiful weather too.
As I mentioned last week, this Friday is the final bake day for a while as we plan out our next steps. But we’re going out with a bang, offering an old favourite and a personal favorite we haven’t made for several months.
#1: Saskatchewan Sourdough — let’s go for a straight white loaf with sourdough starter for some extra tangy zest.
- Saskatchewan Sourdough, 500g, $3.50
#2: Semolina — we use Saskatchewan grown organic semolina flour for an extra shot of golden colour and flavour. Then we shape it in a traditional S and give each loaf a nice coating of sesame seeds. yum!
- Semolina Loaf, 500g, $3.50
One note: There’s a finite number of loaves we can bake on Friday — 112 loaves to be precise. Depending on the volume of orders this week we might have to put a limit on amount of bread for each of you. Feel free to order as many loaves as you like, but we may have to pull back a bit. Thanks for your understanding.
In closing, I want to take a minute to wish each of you a sincere and heartfelt Thank You for all your support over the past 8 months. Your response to our bread and your incredible positive feedback has inspired us to make our bakery a dream worth pursuing. We promise to keep in touch over summer as we build our business plan and will be reaching out to some of you for advice along the way. If we don’t see you this week, have a great summer!
Best wishes,
Mark, Cindy, Ben and Robyn
]]>Well, the Bread Baker’s Guild meeting in Edmonton last week was an interesting learning experience. New kitchen, new instructors, and the chance to meet some incredible bakers from across Western Canada. We even made the Edmonton CBC news (free bread to whoever can find me a link to this!)
The main reason I took the trip was to meet with bakers I admire and get as much advice as possible about how to start up a ‘real’ bakery. And I certainly got a lot of advice! Not all positive, but that’s all part of the package too.
Cindy and I have spent many hours this week getting our head around the cross-roads we’ve reached with this start up phase of our business. We’ve tapped out what we can do out of the house, which, though it’s more than we ever expected, is not enough to sustain us. So the time to grow is now. But where to get the time to grow?
This is a long way of saying that we’re going to be taking an extended break from baking in the wood oven. We’ll be baking this week and next then stopping for the summer. We’re going to take the summer to build a real business plan source equipment and re-open ‘for real.’
So, two weeks of baking — what’s up this week?
#1: Flax and Currant Bread: Shaped like a paver but light as a feather, this rustic loaf has a nice nutty/sweet flavour and is just plain good eats. Think ciabatta but healthier. This loaf was a huge favorite the first time we offered it so don’t miss out!
- Flax and Currant Bread, 500g rustic loaf, $3.50
#2: French Loaf – For those of you who like your bread straight up, we offer a French Loaf. A nice white loaf. Nice and tasty, that is!
French Loaf – 500g, $3.00
Best wishes this week!
]]>My apologies for the late notice of this week’s baking features. It’s been crazy around here since last Thursday when we headed out to Ben’s soccer game in Moose Jaw. We were flying around like that crazy wind and didn’t slow down during the rain over the weekend. We haven’t slowed down yet — that comes sometime on Wednesday. Wednesday’s calm will give us all the energy we need to gear up for Friday baking!
This week we start our 4-5 week cycle again with two old favorites:
#1: Saskatchewan Sourdough (Pain au Levain) Don’t be put off by the “sourdough” in the name — our loaf has a robust taste with just the slightest yogurty tang.
- Saskatchewan Sourdough, 600G loaf, $3.50
#2: Orange Boot Birdseed Bread: A very popular multigrain loaf with roasted sunflower and sesame seeds, rolled oats and flax seeds. Great for toast, sandwiches, stews and soups.
- Orange Boot Birdseed, 600g loaf, $4.00
===== So what else is new? =====
Hmmm…let’s see. We’re reaching the end of the ‘test marketing’ phase of our journey to a real bakery. Your patronage and constructive feedback has helped us so much over the past 8 months — you’ve given us the confidence to take the Orange Boot to the next level. Sooner or later we’re going to need to focus on expanding, although we’re still not quite sure what the next step is.
I’m heading off to Edmonton next week for a seminar on Preferments put on by the Bread Baker’s Guild of America. It’s the first class of its type offered in Canada so I can’t pass it up. The best news is that one of the instructors is Tracey Muzzolini, who is co-owner of Christie’s Mayfair Bakery in Saskatoon. We’re all huge fans of Christie’s and I intend to get as much information and advice from Tracey as I possibly can. I really hope this week will help us define the next step for the Orange Boot.
Best wishes this week!
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