In the course of our Green Chile Chronicles in Santa Fe, we visited a lot of bakeries to see what they might be doing with the state’s signature vegetable. The upshot was that we ate a lot of biscochitos, the official state cookie, but mostly struck out on green chile baked goods. (More about those biscochitos later.)

Then one day we took a different walking route returning from a visit to the state capitol building’s astounding art collection. That’s when we discovered Sage Bakehouse (535 Cerrillos Road, Santa Fe, NM; 505-820-7243; sagebakehouse.com). The artisanal bakery, a fixture in the City Different since 1996, even serves breakfast and lunch in a small cafe on the premises.

Santa Fe has enough museums and art galleries to make any reasonable person’s eyes glaze over, but for our money, the Capitol Art Collection might be the best. Founded in 1991 and getting new work all the time, the collection focuses on modern and contemporary New Mexico artists working in a vast range of styles and media. It’s free to the public 10 a.m.-4 p.m. weekdays. The piece at the top is one of a series of tryptychs showing prehistoric landscapes of the region.

The collection is so broad that it stretches up and down the halls and around the rotunda of the circular building. We actually had to visit twice to see it all, and we still have a lingering suspicion that we missed something important on a secondary wall outside of a hearing room.

But whatever art we missed at the capitol was compensated by some green chile gems at Sage. For starters, we took home a delicious loaf of green chile cheese bread, which is exactly what it sounds like — bread studded with chopped green chiles and cheese. The subtle surprise, however, was a white bean soup with green chile butter. The butter floated on the surface of the filling, puréed soup, imparting a surprisingly strong chile flavor. It was proof that green chile can be an accent rather than the star.