It was on a train, bound for a weekend getaway to Fire Island, where I began struggling to define my relationship with bread.






For the past three weeks, I’ve been working through each of the fourteen steps of bread making with a variety of different breads each day; bringing each from its starting point as unique ingredients, through the various stages of fermentation and shaping, until the dough arrives at the perfect moment for it to go into the oven, where it becomes crust and crumb, taste and aroma.

The whole point of doing these things repeatedly and every single day, is that each time I do them, I absorb a little more knowledge of exactly how the tiny nuances of the process should feel, or look, or react. There is simply no other way to become good at the art and science of making bread – you must do it over and over in a very focused way.





You might begin to see how the masters who practice every single day still discover new things to learn about technique.





On Friday in the bread kitchen, surrounded by the organized chaos that comes with three teams of four people each working through their own schedules of baguette, bordelais, siciliano, ciabatta, olive bread, and brioche baking at the same time, I was pre-shaping (that’s the first shaping, the one that is followed by resting and then a second shaping and more resting before it can be loaded into the oven) a piece of dough in my favorite style (the round pre-shape), when I paused to think about why I love the round pre-shape so much.





With the round pre-shape, you start by folding the edges if a piece of dough inward and over one another, forming a pouch-like shape that you could pick up by the gathered edges. You then flip the dough over and roll it carefully against the bench with moulded hands that are both strong and soft, pulling the dough tight enough to create tension that will give the dough structure and prevent it from slumping into a puddle, but not so tight that it rips apart. I love how the dough feels in my hands when I’m shaping round, it’s something to do with the precision and perfection involved, and the speed to keep moving at an efficient clip.





This is just one small example, but it is helping me come to terms with how I’m feeling about all of this bread stuff; the meditative properties, the hard, physical labor, the mental preparation of being ten steps ahead, the heat of the oven on my face and hands and the satisfying feeling of shoving a wooden peel into the oven and getting to see the results.





When I arrived at the Fire Island house, I opened up my flour sack and pulled out some breads I’d baked that day. There were a dozen people staying with us and no one went hungry with all the French toast, burgers atop grilled ciabatta, baguettes smeared with stinky cheese, and hunks of crusty olive bread dunked in hummus. As much as I love the work involved in making the breads, the best feeling of all giving people satisfaction and enjoyment of eating bread made the way that all breads should be, but too few are. Even people who know nothing about bread can see and taste the difference.


I have no doubt that my relationship with bread with continue to evolve, but for the time-being, I’m having an unexpected love affair, which I hope will become more of a long-term thing.