Tabor Bread: the Monday einkorn and why Saturday is buckwheat

We got to SE Belmont on a Saturday morning and walked into Tabor Bread the way Portland bread fans have been walking into this shop since Tissa Stein opened it in 2012 — ready for naturally leavened loaves, local grain, and a counter that empties if you linger.

Tabor Bread is the Sunnyside bakery that made “local grain” a real Portland sentence. Stein started it in a former medical office at 50th and Hawthorne as one of the city’s first retail bakeries to mill its own flour and bake in a wood-fired oven, and for a long time that mill-and-wood story was the whole identity of the place. After Camas Country Mill got more consistent, the bakery let the millers mill. After the 2021 heat wave, the wood oven came out of rotation because the heat and the smoke just did not feel right anymore. The shop later left the Hawthorne house for a Belmont storefront, Stein retired, and baker Rebecca Tosdevin took over in 2022. Out of all of those changes, the thing that did NOT retire is the bread: Oregon and Washington wheat, long fermentation, and sourdough that tastes like the grain instead of a sour-candy trick!

Walk up to the Belmont counter and we can also see the room doing exactly what a working bakery should do. Dark-crusted loaves sit on the rack with peel marks still pressed into the bottom, the kind of deep brown that looks almost mahogany under the lights, and the crumb inside those loaves is open enough for toast but sturdy enough for a sandwich tomorrow. A few small tables catch the morning light. The case glass is crowded with sourdough-forward pastry — cookies, laminated things, the occasional chocolate babka — and the whole shop smells like warm wheat instead of sugar. It feels super neighborhood, not styled, and that is exactly why we keep sending people here!

If Saturday is why you came, ask for Mountain Bread or Buckwheat Sesame. If you want einkorn, that is Monday. The country loaf is still the daily we tell first-timers to grab for the week. Einkorn is an older wheat, nuttier and a little fruitier than a standard country loaf, and Tabor has been baking with it — along with kamut, spelt, and red fife — long enough that it is part of the house grain list, not a special.

Then look at the case, because Tabor has always run a wider board than bread alone. Pastries, cookies, lunch, and even dinner some nights now, with the sourdough habit leaking into the sweets in the best way. We have seen a chocolate babka with real backbone, a chocolate croissant that is not for people who want “just butter,” and rotating laminated things that pick up the same grain funk as the loaves. If a seeded or rye loaf is sitting there looking like it has a spine, that is a very legal second loaf, and we have taken both more than once. We are not handing you a rigid pastry script — we are telling you to read what is actually out that morning and stay on grain if grain is why you came!

Know this before you go: weekend loaves sell down by late morning, because a naturally leavened bakery bakes a finite number of loaves and then is done. If Saturday is your only window, do not swing by after errands. Make THIS the errand! The Hawthorne-to-Belmont move confused a few of us the first year, but you should not be confused now. Look for the Belmont storefront in Sunnyside, get in line, ask what grain is in the loaf you are holding, and leave while the paper bag is still warm. We keep coming back because you can taste the mill and you can taste the time, and those peel marks on the crust are how the bread actually got here!

Want the short version? It’s on the Tabor Bread page.