Logan Square, Chicago · Saturday and Sunday
This weekend’s bake
Crumb & Ember bakes 6 things a weekend in a home oven — naturally leavened loaves and hand-shaped pastries, all of it baked the morning you collect it. Send a request and the baker confirms it herself.
Bread
Mixed Thursday, shaped Friday, baked the morning you collect it.
Country Sourdough
$12Naturally leavened · 900 g loaf
Fresh-milled wheat and a long cold proof. Blistered crust, open crumb, a little tang at the finish.
Seeded Rye
$13Rye and caraway · 800 g loaf
Dark rye with toasted sunflower, flax and caraway. The loaf that holds up under cold butter and sharp cheese.
Olive & Rosemary
$14Castelvetrano olives · 700 g
Green olives folded through a soft white dough with rosemary from the back stair. Baked dark on the bottom.
Pastry
Laminated and knotted by hand; best within an hour of pickup.
Butter Croissant
$5Laminated over two days
All butter, nineteen layers, baked the morning of pickup so it shatters when you tear it open.
Cardamom Bun
$5.50Knotted by hand
Soft enriched dough, cracked cardamom and pearl sugar. Best within an hour of pickup, honestly.
Buckwheat Chocolate Cookie
$4.50Dark chocolate · flaky salt
Buckwheat flour and brown butter with big shards of 70% chocolate, finished with flaky salt.
The baker
One baker, one oven, a two-day rise
Crumb & Ember is one baker, Nora Balin, and one home oven in Logan Square, Chicago. The bread is mixed on Thursday night, shaped on Friday and baked on Saturday and Sunday morning while the coffee is still going.
She began by selling the extra loaves to neighbors from a folding table on the front steps. The bread has not changed much since: fresh-milled wheat, a long cold proof, rye toasted until the kitchen smells like a woodpile. The pastry came later, mostly because the oven was already hot.
If a bake goes sideways you hear it from her before you leave the house. The person answering requests is the person doing the baking.
Digital guide
The Sourdough Starter Field Guide
A short digital booklet about keeping a sourdough starter alive in a home kitchen — feeding it, reading it, and coaxing it back when it sulks.