Saboteur Bakery in Bremerton, WA.

Blake Harris, Baker and Kate Giuggio, Owner

Origins

Giuggio: We’ll be in our tenth year at the same spot in the summer. I actually started the bakery in 2016 with a former partner. He moved on about four years ago, It’s a pretty tiny local shop, very much neighborhood focused. We’ve definitely stuck with our same kind of classic pastries and then added more things. Blake has definitely added some really cool newer interpretations of what we’ve done before and some totally new products, too

We’ve been in this space for ten years, but prior to that, we were renting the storefront of a very small space pretty close to here but in downtown Bremerton, and we were using a commissary kitchen and delivering the pastries there. The place that we were renting was in the front of a pole dancing studio. The Seattle Times came to do an interview and we said jokingly that it was a firefighter training facility, but in reality, it was Navy wives doing pole dancing and people coming in to buy pastry, which was so fun.

Company Mission

Giuggio: We’ve truly mastered Viennoiserie, which isn’t the norm, especially around here. We have long lines. I live right next door and if I’m not at the bakery on a Saturday morning, then the line will often be outside my house.

Harris: I also think since I’ve been here, we’ve really been highlighting our classic croissants because of the French influence. Our ham and cheese croissant is really popular, but we also have pulled-pork croissants and stuff people haven’t necessarily seen in croissants. We have strong local support but we get a lot of people traveling to us, too. Sometimes, people say, well, as long as I’m here, I’ll take 10 of these, or something like that. Since I’ve been here, we really do try and support a lot of the local farmers, and we’re very close with some of the millers that do our flour. We try to support as much of our local food system as we can.

Signature Products

Giuggio: Our twice-baked almond is definitely the customers’ favorite. Mine is the raspberry custard brioche. We actually watched a TikTok video a few weeks ago of a guy in Bellevue waking up at 3:30 in the morning and documenting his entire drive, which is an hour and a half, to get a ham and cheese croissant. One single ham and cheese croissant. Also, our twice baked almond is something that people will ask for every single time for sure. We usually have a quiche. We’ll do a savory scone. Sometimes it’s a chive and cheddar; sometimes it’s a sun-dried tomato basil. Then we’ll have savory croissants.

For beverages, we keep it pretty simple. We’re actually the first place in this county that carried Stumptown Coffee. We just do simple espresso. We don’t even carry syrups or anything. It’s a very minimalistic European-style coffee program.

Harris:  I’m a big savory guy, so I eat our ham and cheese almost every day. We’ll do pulled pork with pickled red onion. We’ve done carrot pesto for savory. I try to have a savory one just because not everyone likes sweets.

Equipment Must-Haves

Harris: As the one making the croissants, our sheeter is mine. I spend so much time standing in front of that sheeter. Those belts wear out after a while and you just have to give it some TLC. A lot of what we do is bare bones. The equipment really does its job and really makes us feel good about it.

Giuggio: Mine is definitely our Italian deck oven. They’ve both been with us. They’re both problem children

Production Tip

Giuggio: We have such a small staff. We don’t have a program that tells how to increase our hours or scale back. We make as much as we can and then we sell it and it’s gone. We don’t really have to look at it so myopically in those kinds of financial ways.

Harris: Having someone to be able to lean on, especially in the back of the house is huge. A lot of baking isn’t happening when one of us isn’t around, so it’s really easy to maintain what we’re doing just because it’s such a small crew. We open at 8 a.m. and we’ll close at two in the rare instance that we’re not sold out, but typically we do sell out before that.

Secret of Success

Giuggio: I would say don’t try to do more than you can. I think that we all get a little quixotic in what we believe we can accomplish and we can’t do everything. This year we didn’t do panettone. We would be trying to unload pastries through a crowd of people. You could just tell how wanted and needed that this was in our area. Being across from Seattle, this area often gets kind of downplayed as a little bit less sophisticated with less refined tastes, which I don’t think is true. Having truly well-crafted artisan stuff really works.

Giuggio: We have a farm that will deliver to us. They have carte blanche. If you think something looks great, bring it to us and we’ll buy it. We also have that relationship with a fruit farmer too. He doesn’t even have a cell phone, so most of the time he’ll just show up with, you know, 25 pounds of blueberries. He says, “these are great right now,” so we tell him, “Great, perfect.”

Harris: This is one of the few places where quality kind of has trumped quality and that’s really worked for us. We are producing as much as we can and we never try and kill ourselves to get that extra batch out. We can really make sure everything we’re making is something we’re proud of.

Future Plans

Giuggio: I think we’ve kind of outgrown this space a little bit. We’ve been batting the idea around of moving to a bigger location, but no, we don’t have any solid plans for that right now. We really love serving the neighborhood. It’s pretty awesome for my neighbors in the morning to step outside in the morning and just smell pastry. Where we are is a very cute kind of little village. It feels very cool and European.

A lot of our menu is based on seasonality. Last week we introduced a pistachio white chocolate snail, which was new for us.

Harris: As we get more into spring and summer, when carrots come down, we’ll do coffee roasted carrots and pesto, and whatever the farmers bring us. That’s part of what we enjoy as bakers; kind of looking at that box and thinking: what can we do with this?

For more info, visit www.instagram.com/saboteurbakery

(This article appeared in the Spring 31 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)