Pierce County Bread Shed Brings Sourdough Loaves and New York Cookies to Tacoma

A former science teacher spent a decade shepherding students through labs at Harbor Heights Elementary School. Then her family staged an intervention of sorts. At a birthday gathering on Fox Island, relatives started chanting. "One night at a family birthday, they were all chanting, 'bakery, bakery,' and I was like, 'all right, it's time,'" Alex Howe recalled. That moment gave Salty Fox Bakery its origin story, and on April 4, the black A-frame shed with a turquoise door at 488 Third Ave. opened for its first weekend of orders.

Howe had been baking since childhood, learning technique alongside her mother and later running bake sales in college that, she said, always sold out. The leap from classroom to kitchen wasn't entirely impulsive: she found inspiration in micro-bakeries operating across eastern Washington and learned she could legally operate under Washington State's cottage food permit system, which allows home kitchen bakers to sell directly to consumers without a commercial facility.

Rather than rent commercial kitchen space, Howe and her husband Zach built the A-frame structure themselves, working from plans they found online. She describes the result as a "cozy, woodsy Nordic-style bread shed," and it functions as a self-serve pickup point where customers can collect pre-orders placed online or walk up to browse whatever is on display that day.

The rotating monthly menu reflects the range Howe has built over years of home baking. April's offerings include a sourdough sandwich loaf, cinnamon rolls, New York-style chocolate cookies, and tea cakes in two flavors: lemon vanilla and lemon lychee lavender. The sourdough loaf anchors the menu, but it's the New York-style chocolate cookie, thick and deeply flavored in the tradition of the city's iconic walk-up bakeries, that has drawn attention beyond Pierce County's sourdough faithful.

Fox Island is not the only spot in the South Sound experimenting with this format. Lucky Seven Goods operates a similar micro-bakery concept at 14405 35th Ave. NW, north of Gig Harbor, suggesting the model has found fertile ground in communities that want artisan-quality baked goods without the overhead of a traditional storefront on either side of the transaction.

Howe is posting weekly menu updates to Salty Fox Bakery's social media and website, where pre-orders can be placed. The shed itself can be easy to miss, which is why she offers a simple landmark: look for the black shed with the turquoise door.