Joe and Kathy McKeown took over North Bend’s George’s Bakery and Deli in 2003 and started selling their baked goods at the Carnation Farmers Market just a few years later. Baking runs in Joe’s blood: his grandfather was a baker, and many of Joe’s cousins found themselves as bakers too. After years in the bakery, Joe still says he loves baking, with a special interest in bread making. When you’re at the Carnation Farmers Market, you can always smell the sweet scents coming from the George’s Bakery booth. If you ever make your way to their North Bend shop, you can smell the bakery all the way down the block.
You’ll find delicious and sweet goodies at the George’s Bakery booth each week, with their trademark donut holes (the size of normal donuts), apple bread loaves, and giant donuts. Giant donuts actually started when Joe made ten for a farmers’ market years ago. Of course, they sold out, and the rest is history, and these monstrous treats are now a trademark. George’s brings out a variety of other baked goods, including apple and cherry pies, cookies galore, high-fiber bran muffins, and mixed donuts. Joe and Kathy incorporate local ingredients into their baked goods that they pick up at market: they use berries from Youngquist Farms and produce from Bautista, including asparagus, zucchini, lettuce, and peppers, which go into their asparagus quiche and garden rolls. Year round, their rhubarb for their strawberry-rhubarb pie comes from a local farm in Puyallup.
Joe and Kathy enjoy the Carnation Farmers Market and others like it as they are happy to see a revival in agriculture, and they like to be able to talk to local farmers and ask questions. Both Joe and Kathy think its fun to sell at the Carnation Farmers Market as well. As the market season extends this fall, be on the lookout for George’s Bakery’s fruitcake and pumpkin pie, and keep in mind that they take custom orders for Thanksgiving.