Warm baguettes, pastries on offer from farmers market staple
By Rachel Hergett EBS COLUMNIST
I arrived at the Big Sky Farmers Market in early August with a mission. I was seeking out Mark Sinclair, owner of Sinclair’s Bakery, and perhaps more importantly, a fresh baguette.
For Sinclair, freshness does not mean that something was baked the day before, or even that morning. His bakery is a one-of-a-kind trailer, loaded with commercial baking equipment, and able to deliver breads and pastries fresh from the oven, and in many cases still warm.
The freshness aspect plays into Sinclair’s beliefs around food. He leans into simplicity and quality ingredients like Montana-grown wheat.
Sinclair’s fascination with pastries began with exposure to European coffee shop culture during a ski trip to Switzerland when he was 14, long before there was a Starbucks on nearly every corner of American cities.
“I fell in love with the idea of not being rushed out of places, but having things made fresh,” he said.
In the years since, Sinclair seems to have lived many lives. Once upon a time, Sinclair left graduate school in Vermont with a master’s degree but not enough experience to land a full-time teaching job. After substitute teaching for three years, he found himself asking for a job in a Vermont bakery he frequented as a customer, Baba a Louis. He also speaks of time working construction, experience that allowed him to convert his basement in Kalispell into a bakery, and of his series of instructional baking DVDs that were sold in 22 different countries.
Then, in 2012, after splitting from his then-wife, Sinclair took the basement bakery equipment to a company in Idaho that built a trailer around it. Sinclair’s Bakery has been a staple of the Big Sky Farmers Market since 2013, except for the three-year hiatus when he moved the whole set-up to Spain to try to make it work in Madrid.
“A lot of customers I have were with me before I left,” Sinclair said.
The Big Sky Farmers Market runs Wednesdays through Sept. 25 from 5 to 8 p.m. in Town Center. Starting in October, Sinclair’s may be found at the Bozeman Winter Farmers’ Market at the Gallatin County Fairgrounds. He can also be found online on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.
Back in the Sinclair’s Bakery trailer, I’m in some sort of pastry heaven. Each time the oven opens, a new smell makes its way to my nose, deliciousness piled on deliciousness to the point of overwhelm.
Sinclair moves around constantly, rotating trays of pastries or sectioned baguette pans from the fridges to the ovens to the shelves, and rating each one in his head. Baguettes should be crispy, not crunchy. He’s looking for rise and crust and color and so many more factors honed over years of experience. He’s a harsh critic. It’s not that any are bad, he explains.
“To me, it’s better than any other bread you can buy here, but I want it to be the best I can make,” he says.
Customers start to line up, or peek into the back door to ask when the baguettes or other favorites will come out of the oven.
“I follow him online,” one customer notes, not knowing I had plans to write an article. “He’s my hero.”
In a heavy New York accent, the customer gushes over Sinclair’s sour rye loaves, which seemed fitting, as the rye is a bread Sinclair learned to make from a Jewish New Yorker.
I scan the trays. There are pinwheeled palmiers—French pastries that, sans filling, remain flat like cookies with a shape resembling hearts or their namesake palm leaves. Ham and cheese croissants and spinach artichoke puffs provide savory counternotes to the almond-flavored bear claws, and fruit-filled apfelstrudel, strawberry turnovers and berry danishes featuring a mix of raspberries, blueberries and blackberries. The oven opens again and a new aroma fills the trailer—that of pain au chocolat.
While many of the pastries have French roots, Sinclair likes to keep others on the menu that are representative of other areas and food cultures. Take the casadiella, a pastry endemic to northwestern Spain that Sinclair likens to baklava. Sinclair’s version is baked, rather than fried. Pastry dough surrounds chopped walnuts doused in sambuca, an anise-flavored liquor. It’s deceptively simple.
“It’s one of those things where the combination is more than the individual,” Sinclair says, naming the casadiella as his favorite item to come out of the truck. I’m inclined to agree.
As I leave the trailer, Sinclair hands over a fresh baguette, giving it a rating of 8.5. In this moment, though, it is perfect.
I step into the crowd, cradling the baguette as if it were a newborn babe, feeling its warmth deep in my chest and earning a chuckle from a group of seniors for the act.
“I just want to break off the crispy end,” one says, miming grabbing the end of the baguette.
So I let her. Why not? Food, I often say, is love. It is best shared. And what better way to embody that than the literal breaking of bread?
