Batch to Batch: Acme Bakeshop takes on the Treasure Valley One Wheat Variety at a Time
Entering Acme Bakeshop through an unassuming door in a Garden City warehouse lineup, every cliché I’d ever heard to describe that experience walloped me over the head. That smell—yeasty, warm, humid—it was like coming home, like walking into a womb. Bread is of us, somewhere deep and undeniable. It made me want to curl up on the concrete floor with a blanket and take a nap.
I was excited to see this place. Owner Mike Runsvold and I had both inducted ourselves into the working world as teenagers at Pronto Pups, slinging the “Original Hotdog on a Stick” at the county fair. “It’s a natural progression, Pronto Pups to here,” he joked as we bellied up to the huge wooden baker’s table occupying the middle of the large, sparse room rimmed with wire racks, ovens, and a giant dough-kneading machine. A large pile of antlers in the corner caught my eye.“What are you doing with those?” I asked incredulously.
I have a lot to learn about bread baking.
Runsvold explained that he shares the space with well-known forager Chris Florence, or Sweet Valley Organics, in a symbiotic relationship that I learned is emblematic of his business style (Florence uses the bread shreds to make dog chew toys).
At 33, Runsvold has been baking for 16 years, first at a bagel shop, then at Zeppole Bakery and finally, at Le Café de Paris (now closed). He worked his way up to head baker at both of those Boise institutions before he decided he was ready to branch out on his own. Runsvold moved in December of 2012, and by April 2013, he was selling bread. At first, he just sold to friends and other folks who knew him from the baking scene. He’d deliver loaves to their doorsteps in those days until he became too busy with his growing restaurant accounts and farmers market sales to manage home deliveries. Once the Boise Co-op started carrying Acme bread seven days a week, he felt less guilty telling people he wasn’t going to drop loaves at their houses, and shifted gears to his wholesale and retail accounts instead.
“I’m a softie,” he admitted. “If someone wants my bread I’ll find a way to get it to them. I drove out to Ten Mile to deliver a loaf of bread to a woman’s house a couple times.” Now on average, he’s baking 100 loaves of bread and 300 buns each day, all for local consumption.
Local is a theme that runs through Runsvold’s business. He sources his flour from Canyon Bounty Farm in Nampa, from the Idaho Grain and Flour Mill in Donnelly, and from Shepherd’s Grain, a regional company that allows customers to trace the origin of each bag of flour back to the farm it was grown on. Utilizing these small-scale, singlefarm flours gives his bread a dynamic variation from batch to batch. “Every batch of flour is different, due to diverse conditions in the field it was grown in,” Runsvold explained, “which creates different breads.” His new Farmer Beth’s Turkey Red Brown Bread is one such example, an homage to Canyon Bounty Farm’s Beth Rasgorshek, who has found that Turkey Red wheat excels in her farm’s micro-climate. Runsvold has also been expanding his knowledge of working with naturally leavened breads, using a sourdough culture he’s been stewarding since July of 2012.
Runsvold surprised me by saying that he doesn’t feel bread is as durable as vegetables, and he struggles to figure out how to keep the perfect crust, which he describes as the difference between artisan bread and sandwich bread, during packaging, storage and transportation, claiming that, no matter what, it’s not as good after 24 hours. He’s got a point— produce growers have figured out how to pack, store and transport vegetables to maintain freshness for days, or even weeks. I’d never considered bread, the quintessential staple food, to be at all fragile.
This attention to quality and detail sets the tone for Acme Bakeshop. “Every time you touch the dough, you’re affecting it,” Runsvold advised. “You’ve got to touch it the right way.”
And touch it he does, waking at 1am seven days a week, to bake the freshest loaves possible for that day’s customers. He said figuring out how to have one day off a week is one of his goals for this summer.
“There are a lot easier ways to make a living,” he smiled. “If you didn’t love doing it there’s no reason you would ever want this job.”
Acme Bakeshop | @acme_bakeshop
Pronto Pups
Sweet Valley Organics
Zeppole Bakery | @zeppolebakery
Boise Co-op | @boisecoop
Canyon Bounty Farm
Idaho Grain and Flour Mill
Shepherd’s Grain | @shepherdsgrain
