Vancouverites love to line up, and there is one fixture of the Vancouver farmers markets that consistently boasts the longest line of all: Purebread bakery. And little wonder, with its cornucopia of crusty bread, brownies, cookies, tarts — some sweet, some savoury, and all of it worth the wait.
And so there was a collective cheer when the Whistler company opened its first permanent Vancouver location in October, in the historic Flack Block at Hastings and Cambie. They’ve managed to recreate the feeling of saturation that their farmers market customers experienced.
Splayed out behind glass, Purebread’s display of wares is, shall we say, stuffed. Stuffed with brownies shot through with lemon and chevre, with raspberry, with caramelized banana. Stuffed with tiered trays of croissants that hide hearts of almond or chocolate.
Stuffed with scones, their nubbly edges protecting tender insides with plump dried fruit. And just when you think the counter will snap with the weight of it all, someone comes from the kitchen with more.
The sheer volume of choice is due to curiosity. Owners Paula and Mark Lamming are constantly playing. “We get bored, so we always have new stuff. People get bored of having the same thing all the time,” she says. “We always have someone coming in saying, ‘What’s new today?’”
Inspiration for new items can come from mysterious places. For example, when their kids were younger, Lamming had a soap-making business. “One was lavender rosemary,” she says. “I thought, hey, you can eat both those things. I could try that in a scone.” Today, it’s one of their most popular flavours.
Even though they have physical locations in both Whistler and Vancouver, they continue to sell at farmers markets. “A lot of our baking is trial and error,” she says. “You try different things and see how it goes. You can sample with people — they’re pretty brutally honest, so it works well.”
Neither of the Lammings has formal training in baking, so they’re unencumbered by the idea of what they should do. There’s a cheekiness in the menu, such as the simply named “crack” bars: similar to a butter tart (sans raisins) with an oatmeal crust.
And perhaps given Whistler’s high Aussie population — and Mark’s New Zealand roots — Purebread also offers treats more often seen Down Under. On a recent visit, a pile of Anzac cookies (oversized oat cookies with coconut) beckoned in a pile. Also in the rotation are Lamingtons (square cakes glazed in chocolate and rolled in coconut) and pavlova (gentle meringues with squooshy centres).
Of course, there’s also the bread. The bread list is long and runs the gamut from anything-but-ordinary baguettes to the extravagant cranberry ginger raisin loaf. The Lammings aren’t afraid to play with other flours, either — there’s a healthy dose of buckwheat, rye and spelt in the lineup.
For two home bakers, the response has been tremendous. “The whole thing has been a complete surprise,” says Lamming. “We never expected to have the success that we have had. We get customers contacting us saying how much they loved something.”
That customer support has been important over the past year. After opening a new Whistler location in July 2013, the shop went up in flames in late November 2013. And three days after opening in Vancouver, a flood from an upstairs neighbour caused the shop to shut down.
“We’ve learned a lot through the whole experience,” says Lamming. And she, Mark and the Purebread team keep going. The Vancouver location is back up and busier than ever — they’ll be at the winter farmers market at Nat Bailey and she expects their Whistler shop to be back in business the first week of December.
