Hearth healthy

If you happen to visit the Great Harvest Bread Co. on Mangrove Avenue, as I did on a recent Friday morning, and the owner asks, “Would you like a sample of our Cinnamon Swirl bread?”—say, “Yes, thank you,” and try not to drool as the warm cinnamon goop sticks to the wax paper he hands you. Only the mission of trying out a range of morning goodies kept me from buying seven loaves ($6.75 each) on the spot.

Owners Wade and Shelley Overson have set up the bakery for maximum enticement. Right at the entrance of the store, there’s the cutting board with the day’s fresh items, plus a variety of soft butter spreads ready for samples. The big rotating oven is right in the open, churning out fresh bread all morning onto large wire racks behind the counter. And, through a flour-dusted window in one corner, you can watch the Montana hard red spring wheat as it’s ground into the day’s flour.

I picked up a medium cup of Peet’s Major Dickason’s Blend coffee ($1.70) to go, a blueberry bran muffin ($2.25) and for variety’s sake something called a vegetarian “meal wheel” ($2.45). The coffee was good (not brewed quite as mud-dark as the Peet’s Coffee shop’s, which was frankly a relief), and the cinnamon-roll-shaped vegetarian meal wheel—made with the bakery’s Old-Fashioned White dough and potatoes o’brien(!) mixed in—was a tasty little invention. It pulled apart easily, revealing bits of sweet onion and the aroma of bell peppers and mild chilies. The bran muffin was infused with honey and sweet blueberries and had a decent, hearty texture.

As Great Harvest’s morning sensory overload begins to fade, the bakery shifts into the other half of its personality, that of a sandwich shop. Though its does offer grilled Panini sandwiches, this isn’t a standard sub-style operation. The lure for this comfort seeker is the fact that you can get your sandwich home-style, on freshly sliced bread.

I visited for two lunches over the past couple weeks, picking up a build-your-own sandwich to go from the Mangrove store (half-sandwich, $3.85) with salami, provolone, lettuce, mustard, mayo, oil and vinegar on Old-Fashioned White; and at the Forest Avenue location I sat down for Bobby’s Roast Beef ($6.30), with cheddar, lettuce, red onion, tomato and a mild horseradish sauce on the Honey Whole Wheat. I was out the door in less than five at Mangrove, and despite a massive rush right at the sandwich-hour cutoff on Forest, the counter staff was quick and pleasant.

Both sandwiches provided what I came for: fresh ingredients in sensible proportions, presented in easy-to-eat school-lunch triangles. The bread was impossibly fresh, the veggies were crisp and flavorful, and the meats and cheeses, while not of premium flavor, were substantial-enough foundations. If I had one thing to do over, I would have left the vinegar off the first sandwich—too messy.

Buy-local Chicoans might not be too eager to spend their money at a bakery chain, but Great Harvest isn’t like many other franchised companies. The atypical “freedom franchise” setup puts limited requirements on franchisees—just display the logo, bake the signature Honey Whole Wheat bread ($4.90 per loaf) and grind fresh flour every day. Beyond that, individual bakeries are free to create, decorate and market any way they choose.

The setup appealed to the Oversons, who wanted out of rainy Seattle, where Wade worked as a crab and salmon fisherman.

“I had enough of coming back to Seattle from Alaska in the rain,” said Wade, so he sold his salmon boat and permit, moved to Chico, and 11 years ago the couple opened the Mangrove store, followed by the Forest and East Avenue stores over the next several years.

My personal downtown-centric migration patterns nonetheless rarely stray toward any of the stores. So, it usually takes the regular seasonal gifts—like a golden, round, cinnamon-flecked loaf of Cinnaburst ($6.75)—to rekindle the primal need for the comforts of home and remind me to make the detour for something fresh.