ABOUT US

Bread Labyrinth is a seasonal bakery that appears each fall and winter in Santa Fe after owner-baker Warren Peterson parts ways with the fire lookout where he lives and works through the spring and summer New Mexican wildfire season. In the fall of 2022 we began setting up our “bread table” twice a week at the firewood & stone resource lot on Old Las Vegas Highway offering freshly baked bread, pastries, and house roasted coffee.

March 30th marked our final table of the 23-24’ season. As of August 2024 we are deep into test baking for the upcoming season, due to open on Saturday November 9th, 2024.

Do please follow along on instagram for all emphemeral updates. Changes in the schedule are generally also posted on the “on the table” page of the website or in an announcement ribbon across the top of each page.

PRINCIPLES & PROCESS

We start simply, with flour (as a rule, organic), water, salt. To that, in every bread, we add our sourdough culture. All of our doughs are slowly fermented over at least 12 hours in some cases as much as 36 hours. The exact pathways of fermentation depend on the the type of bread – wheat doughs are often mixed with a wheat sourdough culture and proofed for hours at room temperature before getting tucked into the refrigerator for a long cool rest. Rye doughs often follow a 3 stage sourdough fermentation (3-stufige Roggensauerteigführung), a mainstay of the German sourdough baking canon, in which alternating high and low hydration doughs are fermented successively at warm, then cool, then warm again room temperatures to strike a captivating balance between sparkling background sour notes, mid palate grain and malt sweetness, and impressive oven spring.

Our large breads are fermented exclusively with sourdough cultures. Our small breads and pastries are also made with our house sourdough culture, but always alongside a type of yeasted preferment called a “poolish”, where a tiny quantity of commercial baker’s yeast is mixed with flour and water, or flour and milk, and left to slowly ferment for as long as 12 hours, very much like a levain, or sourdough build. This slow yeasted preferment gives our baguettes their crisp shattering crusts and cotton light crumb, to our pretzels a wonderful yeasty aromatic contrast to their lye-burnished exteriors, and our pastries a cloud like lightness that compliments the panoply of butter, milk, and egg that gives these treats their richness. And to the sweets, we add sugar, spices, seeds, fruits, nuts. We love to make pastry and treats; but above all else we hope to make and share bread to live by.

Special orders are possible in the Santa Fe area with prior notice, please email warren@breadlabyrinth.com to coordinate!