A Sweet Stop in Chama

Meet Wilder Bakeshop

By Briana Olson

“This story has been told,” Jazzmyn Cramer tells me, then pauses. It’s Mother’s Day, and Wilder Bakeshop’s open hours have come and gone, along with the morning. The cases have been emptied of their raspberry frangipane tarts and sugar croissants and cheese danishes; gone are the melt-in-your-mouth quiches and the signature pecan sticky buns. The customers, who arrive in such numbers that Cramer has to open a wide path between the door and the counter, have returned to the road or home to Santa Fe and Española and Pagosa and Chama itself. A lost world lives in her pause. So, too, does the genesis of this airy space—a space that feels, somewhat surprisingly, as if it belongs here.

The story is this: In 2018, Cramer and her then-partner packed up their Seattle life and headed south with the intention of building an off-grid home on a piece of land outside Pagosa. By then, Cramer had given up her dream of having her own bakery (she’d gotten into sewing, embroidery, fabrics, and natural dyes), but just two weeks after they’d arrived, her partner died in an accident. Everything changed—except, Cramer stayed. She stayed because she was curious, because she wanted to be able to grieve on her own terms, because of how much it would cost to move back to the Pacific Northwest, because she felt called to see the journey through. Six months later, she closed on this building at the edge of Chama’s tiny shopping district. “I had five grand that I put down, and it was everything I had.”

The first croissants this culinary artist ever ate were from a six-pack packaged in plastic, purchased with allowance at the supermarket in West Seattle. She was six, already versed in baking, and she recalls how she marveled at their making—how she wanted to figure out how to re-create them and how to make them last. Cramer’s obsession with cracking the croissant code evolved into a goal with a deadline: She wanted to open her own bakery by age thirty.

In Chama, she circled back to that goal. In true DIY spirit, instead of going to culinary school, she had effectively cross-trained throughout her twenties, working as a barista, a baker, a trainer, and a manager at scratch bakeries and serious coffee shops along the West Coast. From a young age, she says, “I loved the act of making food from scratch. I didn’t understand how magical it could be until I got into places that carved out a way for that to be sustainable, and use those farms and bring that produce from several hours away into the city.” As much as nuts and bolts, what she took away from stints at Seattle’s Grand Central Bakery and Petaluma’s Della Fattoria is a sense of wonder that still infuses her baking philosophy.

“I grew up reading a lot of historical fiction and loving that idea, and loving how much of my life felt like it could still be that way, even though we were in modern, suburban America. I think I just always loved real things, because they do feel so special, and they come and go as they do, and there’s a rhythm to it.” The fleetingness of food comes up more than once as we talk; Cramer is especially attuned to the fact that what is special is made so, in part, by its impermanence. This is perhaps natural for any baker, especially one working in an arid mountain climate. But Cramer is not just any baker.

“I didn’t know anybody at all,” she says, recalling her move to the region and the months before the bakery opened. “I literally had $156 and the mortgage was due on the tenth, and it was the third [of July 2019].” Aside from plumbing, electrical, and some of the tile work, she did much of the initial remodel of the building herself. Worried she might not have enough funds to pull it together, she didn’t advertise her opening. When the day came, she quietly walked out and hung up an Open sign, then waited. She was halfway through her thirtieth year. The case was full of butter and chocolate croissants, cherry galettes, lattice-topped apple baskets, blueberry cream cheese danishes. Her first customer arrived, stopping through on a road trip, then in came her second, a local. Someone bought a whole tray of apricot cookies. “I don’t know how it happened, but by 9 am, there was a line out the door.”

Having lived in southern France, I know that even there—even in Paris!—merely adequate croissants are turned out by the hundreds. My favorite pâtisseries were never the fanciest or slickest but always the smaller shops, the ones that marry mastery with the warmth and care that can only be found in an owner- or family-run business. Wilder Bakeshop is such a place. Cramer’s chocolate croissant, or pain au chocolat, stands among the best: delicate and airy but not at all brittle (no small feat in the high desert), with precisely the right amount of chocolate. Her selections lean sweet, but not overly so—think a croissant with light-as-a-feather lemon cream or a cheese danish with fresh strawberries—and savory offerings run from a staple ham-and-swiss croissant to a special with asparagus and goat cheese. The house sticky bun, made with croissant dough, homemade caramel, and pecans sourced from a Los Ojos farmer now based outside Las Cruces, is in a class above: elegant and flaky, the sweetness balanced out with caramel’s kiss of savory.

“Using real ingredients and it being fresh is what carried me through,” Cramer says of the first weeks and beyond, as she refined her recipes and timing. While northern New Mexico’s limited growing season means that sourcing local produce is piecemeal, Cramer seeks it out, purchasing rhubarb and asparagus from local backyard growers and red chile grown in Leasburg. This year, she is switching from King Arthur to organic flour from Oregon’s Central Milling. There’s a “certain flatness that’s predictable and shelf stable” that we’ve become accustomed to with store-bought products, Cramer says, and, in contrast, a progression of flavor that lingers when you’re eating real food made from fresh and less processed ingredients.

“You might not name it, but you can feel it,” she asserts after I draw a parallel between the attention to detail in baking and editing and comment on how much of that detail work can escape eaters and readers. Just as to be a good writer requires being a good reader, she adds, to be a good baker or cook, “you have to be a good eater. You at least need to be a curious and experienced eater.”

Agility is also key, whether that means pulling together a case full of pastries in the wake of a busted water main or finding a new source for eggs when a longtime farmer-partner passes away. Currently, Cramer sources eggs for quiches and egg washes from Trout Stalker Ranch, also in Chama. To use all the perfect ingredients would not be sustainable at a business level, she acknowledges, but she prioritizes the essentials—organic, European-style butter, for instance—and maintains a goal of bringing in more local produce. After working an inhumane number of hours each week during her first year(s) in business, Cramer has settled into a schedule that seems to align with the community and her aim to create a social space in this remote part of the state. 

“I like the stories that we tell, the stories we came from,” she says, describing the draw of origin stories and regional histories, such as the stories of nearby Tierra Amarilla she’s delved into. “How do we tell better stories? How do we reframe everything that we’re taught into something that maybe makes the world better or more beautiful? I like seeing paths of migration. I like seeing where people settle. I like understanding why people stay in difficult areas. Why are they there?”

“I’ll always be an outsider, but I don’t really feel that way,” Cramer says of her place in this elk-loving crook of northern New Mexico. She chalks this up, in part, to her honesty and openness, and also to having created something for everyone. One of her takeaways from Grand Central was to make food that you can eat every day. While not everyone can afford a fancy dinner out, a fine pastry is accessible. At the same time, she strives to take it beyond the utilitarian, to create a moment of reprieve on a hard day, to offer something that, without being scandalous, is extra.

The green chile quiche I ate on Mother’s Day, the wholeness of local eggs shining through, the filling a perfect balance of creamy and firm, fluffy and rich, felt like just such a gift.

2248 S Hwy 17, Chama, 575-999-5134