Abraham Palmer left a job in IT to start Box Turtle Bakery, a home-based bakery. Palmer uses locally grown ingredients and sustainable baking practices, including milling his own flour from grain. Box Turtle Bakery sells at the Carrboro Farmer’s Market on Saturdays from 7 a.m. to noon. Palmer spoke to Neecole Bostick about his bakery.
When did you start baking?
I started out-of-the-oven late summer 2009. I was definitely coming at this from another field. I had been doing IT work before, but I had always been interested in lots of different things and I wanted to try something of my own business.
How did you decide on baking, and what drew you to it?
I didn’t really see many people working with lots of local farmers and doing farm-to-table kind of things. I had an interest in the farming kind of things, even though I didn’t have much experience in it. I didn’t have a notion for how it will go, but I thought it was worth a try.
How did you develop it as a craft?
It’s been a long trial-and-error process, working with locally grown crops and farmers. There’s so much variation in the given grain and the given crop, so there’s variation with how the grain mills, because I mill my own flour, and how it bakes with the sourdough bread. I spent a lot of effort in figuring out spelt and whole grain. There’s even a whole routine in finding wood that’s cut properly for the woodfired oven. It has all these facets to it, but it’s a nice intersection between agriculture and food.
What is your favorite good to bake, and why?
That’s definitely a hard question I get at the markets a lot. I certainly only bring foods I like to do. Any of the sourdough stuff is interesting because there’s the process of nurturing a wild culture along with mixing the dough. I have a 7-foot long wooden peel, so a skill set I had to learn was loading and positioning things properly. It’s definitely a slow food kind of thing.
What is your most popular baked good?
Most popular is probably whole grain honey wheat, a basic pan loaf. Lots of local grain, it depends on how my crops handle.
How is your bakery unique?
I always felt like I have an engineering mindset, so I try to figure out the right kind of sustainable mindset for the process; what kind of energy and inputs I need. The woodfire oven is a sustainable resource. I don’t have a mixer, it’s all hand-mixed. I’ve got some solar heated water and solar electricity, and I transport my goods to the market by bike. I’ve tried to figure out how to do this in a sustainable way with the local crops. And it takes longer to find the right farmers and get them
to work together, but it’s a great long-term project.
Why the name?
I like having a good animal mascot. We have box turtles around in our area, I had a box turtle as a kid, and no one else in the world decided to name their bakery Box Turtle Bakery.
The made my day! So proud to see this article about Abraham Palmer, of the Boxed Turtle Bakery. Congrats Abraham!
I really enjoyed reading your post and I appreciate your amazing work. Keep it up.
Very nice post! Thanks for sharing and keep up the great work.