Baked Alaska: Juneau’s Wild Oven bakery opens a retail storefront in Lemon Creek
- Laurie Craig
- Oct 11
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 12
Wholesale supplier to stores in Juneau and Sitka now offering goods to customers on Saturdays, planning to expand to other days soon
By Laurie Craig
Juneau Independent
This story has been updated with additional information.
Aficionados of fresh breads and pastries are getting fresh incentive to rise on Saturdays with Wild Oven, a purveyor of sourdough breads sold at Juneau and Sitka grocery stores, opening a retail storefront at its Lemon Creek bakery.
On Saturday, Oct. 4, the typically wholesale business first opened its bakery to retail customers by offering fresh-from-the-oven loaves, croissants and pastries in a 900-square-foot space formerly occupied by Panhandle Produce on Commercial Boulevard.
A line of customers queued outside the front entrance shortly after the 11 a.m. opening. The scent of cinnamon and sourdough drifted in the morning air. Within the first hour, the chocolate eclairs had sold out, but fresh almond croissants were plentiful and warm as they were pulled from the oven by pastry chef Stephanie Cutshall. Sandwich bread and artisanal loaves rested on rolling racks for customers to purchase.
Wild Oven owner Eric Oravsky was hustling to fulfill orders while an employee operated the cash register. Customers’ heads turned at the sound of the commercial bread slicer as it whirred a loaf into perfect slices and slid a bag around it. With a twist of the top, the baker handed it to a waiting consumer.
Oravsky moved the longtime downtown business to Lemon Creek in March of 2024, relocating industrial baking equipment from a 750-square-foot basement in an old house to a commercial space with easier access for receiving pallets of ingredients, loading products for customer deliveries and providing more parking for staff and customers.
Although Oravsky, 38, studied photojournalism and linguistics in college, he learned the art of baking during a summer job at Bernice’s Bakery in Missoula, Montana. He traveled around the West, spent two seasons at McMurdo Station in Antarctica as a baker, then came to Juneau at the suggestion of a friend to photograph whales. He landed a job with a local guiding company, then eventually started his own guiding business with a partner in 2014.
“I wanted to do something that was more community-focused,” he said.
Oravsky started Alaska Bakehouse in 2017, preparing only bake-at-home croissants. In 2021 — “in the middle of the pandemic,” Oravsky said — he bought Wild Oven. Until last week his baked goods customers were exclusively wholesale. While those outlets continue to be the bulk of Wild Oven’s sales, he hopes to add two more weekly retail storefront days and bread subscriptions soon.
“We have things we need to refine and we’re going to continue to make it better with better production capacity,” Oravsky said on Thursday as two of his employees efficiently measured and speedily rolled puffy fresh dough for burger buns and sandwich loaves.
Finding the right location for a bigger bakery than the early basement bakery at Third and Franklin Streets was a challenge. The Lemon Creek place became available in early 2024, so Oravsky moved his existing equipment at that time and purchased more. He gradually added local restaurants to his list of wholesale customers.
Asked why he chose sourdough for his baked goods, Oravsky said “the biggest part, I find, is the flavor.” He prefers sourdough to commercial yeast for the rich flavor, nutritional benefits and lack of need for preservatives or additives. Also, sourdough breaks down flour enzymes, which may make the bread easier for gluten-intolerant people to eat, he noted.
Sourdough is an Alaskan tradition. “The famed Klondike Gold Rush of ‘98 not only started one of the greatest stampedes, it firmly established sourdough as the most popular and practical food for the pioneer and prospector,” wrote renowned hostess Ruth Allman, a Juneau legend herself, who operated the House of Wickersham for decades serving Flaming Sourdough Waffles to guests around her uncle James Wickersham’s dining room table on Seventh Street in Juneau’s Chicken Ridge neighborhood. Her hand-lettered and illustrated cookbook “Alaska Sourdough,” written in the 1970s, remains popular today.
The name became synonymous with hardy pioneers. Sourdoughs were the old timers; cheechakos were the newcomers. The fermented yeast was carried in a small pot close to the miner’s body to prevent freezing in bitter winter temperatures.
Oravsky’s sourdough starter came from “old mushers in Fairbanks,” he said, whose names are lost to history.
Starting a business can be as challenging as keeping a sourdough pot alive and bubbling. Baker Oravsky praised the business assistance he received from the Juneau Economic Development Council (JEDC).
“All the equipment I was able to buy here was with JEDC. It was a huge, huge help and it made a lot of this possible. They have a number of different mechanisms. For me, it was loans,” he said. “I think people would be surprised how many businesses here in town have utilized JEDC resources at one time or another. They and Spruce Root are two big drivers who have the resources and knowledge to help.”
The assistance inspired him and other local food producers to consider a couple of options for all to derive mutual support.
“We’re all trying to solve the same problems. One of them is delivery and distribution. We’re not quite big enough to use larger suppliers, but we’re also kind of too big,” the bakery entrepreneur said. “So we’re starting to look at how we can consolidate resources. We’re looking at launching a business that will support smaller businesses, potentially a separate business that is really just to support small food producers, where whatever you are as a business owner you can focus on where your strengths are,” Oravsky added.
Another aspect is developing a business incubator for others to get started in businesses like his bakery. They hope to offer an opportunity for startups to produce and test their products for a few months before incurring debt or making major decisions.
When Oravsky bought Wild Oven from Daniel Martin, Oravsky was the sole baker while his one employee, Jack Tullis, helped with mixing, forming and packaging. Now his team of four to five employees processes dough into baked goods. On Saturday, Oct. 11, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., they plan to offer bread, four flavors of croissants, plus ham and cheese croissants, a small cookie form of an eclair, pumpkin spice palmiers and fresh tagliatelle pasta.
And plenty of chocolate eclairs, pastry chef Stephanie Cutshall said.
• Contact Laurie Craig at lauriec@juneauindependent.com.
