About Bakeshop & Kim Boyce

Kim Boyce trained as a pastry chef, first apprenticing with Sherry Yard at the original Spago in West Hollywood and later working closely with Nancy Silverton at Campanile in Los Angeles. It didn’t seem that baking could get much better than that, but when she left the professional kitchen to start a family, it did.

Determined to create delicious cakes, muffins, breads, tarts, and cookies that her kids (and everybody else) would love, she began experimenting with whole-grain flours, and found they brought so much more flavor, texture, and color to the plate. It was a life-changing epiphany, and her James Beard Award-winning cookbook Good to the Grain is the happy result. Boyce’s cookbook broke the mold for whole-grain baking. By teaching home cooks that you can have your rye flour cake and eat it too, she’s opened up a new world for bakers interested in heirloom, whole-grain flavors.

You can find Kim most days at her retail and wholesale bakery, Bakeshop, open since 2011 in NE Portland. She has since been a James Beard Award semifinalist for Outstanding Baker in both 2016 and 2019, and has contributed to Bon Appétit, O, NPR, Portland Monthly, Whole Living and the Los Angeles Times.

Good to the Grain

Baking with whole-grain flours used to be about making food that was good for you, not food that necessarily tasted good, too. But Kim Boyce truly has reinvented the wheel with this collection of 75 recipes featuring 12 different kinds of whole-grain flours, from amaranth to teff, proving that whole-grain baking is more about incredible flavors and textures than anything else. The cookbook proves that whole-grain baking can be easily done with a pastry chef’s flair. Plus, there’s a chapter on making jams, compotes, and fruit butters with seasonal fruits that help bring out the wonderfully complex flavors of whole-grain flours.

Praise for Good to the Grain

“Boyce started playing with a variety of flours when she took a break from restaurant kitchens and wrote her first cookbook, Good to the Grain, a whole grains baking bible that won a coveted James Beard Foundation Award this year.” — O Magazine

“What’s not to love about coppery rye pretzels, buckwheat scones filled with intoxicating fig butter or rich multigrain popovers? Some recipes can’t avoid the health-food-store association, like quinoa porridge (get over it: it’s delicious), but the whole feels modern and tasteful. Lovely and inventive, Boyce’s book is more Martha than Moosewood.” — NY Times Book Review

“This is the book we’ve been waiting for. A cookbook that takes all those incredible flours with names like amaranth and kamut that have started appearing in stores, and tells us what to do with them.” — Food52

“This isn’t about healthy baking…it’s about discovering the incredible flavors and textures that whole-grain flours have to offer.” — Fine Cooking

Good to the Grain is available to buy at Powell’s or on Amazon.com.