Cascade Baking Company is a locally owned and managed community bakery located in historic downtown Salem. The bakery houses a brick oven handbuilt by the owners, Stephen Perkins, Debra Edwards, along with family and friends. Guided by the renowned oven builder Alan Scott, the crew built Cascade Baking's brick oven literally from the ground up. This style of oven is a re-creation of the old bread ovens still found in European villages.

Like the old-world ovens our brick oven has no internal burners. The oven chamber is heated by natural gas through a manually inserted natural gas burner. This unique hearth oven relies upon heat stored in the massive oven structure to bake our breads. This process reduces the daily consumption of natural gas by over 70 percent compared to other traditional gas-burning bread ovens.

Pictures of Oven Building Project:

 

 

 

As a community bakery we are committed to providing an array of breads and baked goods to satisfy the many diverse tastes of people visiting our bakery. We only use fresh, local ingredients and high-quality flours.

Our Philosophy

Cascade Baking Company is committed to fostering vitality in the local economy through local purchasing. We purchase our raw ingredients from local sources thus stimulating local economies. For example, we use only seasonally fresh fruit from local farmers and honey from the Willamette Valley. We are especially pleased to use flours certified through the Food Alliance. Shepherds Grain flour is produced by a group of family grain farmers located in Washington and Idaho. This group known as Columbia Plateau Producers has developed a high gluten flour perfect for bread baking. We also purchase organic, shade-grown, fair-trade coffee from local coffee roasters, Royal Blue Organics in Eugene, Oregon, who in turn purchases the coffee beans directly from a farmer's cooperative in Chiapas Mexico.