Three Bakeries

Part Three: The Breaking of Bread

There were at least a dozen ways in which my last bakery, the Baldwin Hill Bakery, was unlike both of the others that I worked in during my decade-long life as a baker. For example, the way that we made sourdough was in the Belgian tradition rather than the French or Italian, and this involved a much more arcane process than either. When a batch of the sourdough starter was fully fermented and before it began to regress and become slightly alcoholic, one of the two bakers on shift would leave the main room of the bakery and pass through a curtain of plastic hanging strips that separated the bakery room from the small room that held the slicers and the small retail area of the bakery. Just off of this room through a double door was the desem room. In this tiny, ultra-clean, temperature controlled room were two European style mixers, one with a fully “cooked” batch of starter that we were working from, and the other with a starter in progress. From the ripe fully mature starter you would scoop several handfuls until you had something about the size of a soccer ball. Into this you would knead more flour, as much as it would take, making a stiff mass of dough that was supersaturated both with the wild yeast cells that leavened it and with the flour that would feed the yeast for the next several hours. You then wrapped this dough tightly in sterile white cotton tablecloths and bound it up tight so that under pressure it would be compressed and heat up slightly and hasten the fermentation of the dough. This, for the next twelve hours, was referred to as the football, as it resembled in size and later in shape, a soccer ball (we had borrowed all of this from the Belgians, to whom a soccer ball is a futbol). The football would be left on the small kneading table or propped in a corner of the mixing room and left to its chemistry, and it would cook and swell and press against the constraints of its binding and slowly transform into super-yeast. After twelve or so hours we would unwrap the football, peel away the leathery skin of the dough, scoop out the sweet, fruity center of it, and use that to make another two hundred pound batch of starter, desem (dáy-zum) in Flemish, which we, because we were after all Americans and it was our right, mispronounced dée-zum. Each five-hundred pound batch of whole wheat or rye bread was leavened with a bucket of desem, twenty pounds of it or so, depending on the time of year and the outside temperature.

Another way that Baldwin Hill was different was that bread was all we made, and only in one shape, the round loaf. The owner was also not a capitalist in the truest sense of the word, and he was not interested in maximizing production. Where any of the other bakeries that I had worked in would have developed products to make in the long idle periods between batches of bread, necessitated in part by the need to fire the wood-fired oven back up to baking temperature, at Baldwin Hill we did nothing much during these times. One of us would sometimes carry in more flour from the adjoining trailer where it was stored fresh from the mill just up the road, or would check over the math on the charts to make sure the numbers were coming out right for the week, and always we would be checking on the state of the batch under steam in the proofing room adjacent to the oven or shaping the next batch of two hundred loaves. But every process at the bakery had been taken from a bakery in Belgium that had been at it for decades, and the processes were perfected and highly efficient, and so there was still a lot of extra time, always at least thirty minutes and sometimes close to an hour between work periods.

The main difference, though, was that the oven was wood-fired, and a wood fired oven is an amazing thing, especially one designed to bake nearly two thousand loaves per day and ten to fourteen-thousand loaves per week. The oven was eight feet across, about that high, and twelve feet deep. The baking chamber itself was a narrow shelf at about hip height, no more than fifteen inches high, and the full twelve feet deep. Beneath the floor of the oven was the firing chamber, essentially a giant woodstove with no chimney but instead a hole directly into the baking chamber. Above the baking chamber, enclosed tightly in firebrick held in a scaffold of heavy angle iron, was sand, approximately four hundred cubic feet of six hundred-degree sand. This was the great heat sink of the oven. The oven had to be fired after every load to recover from its low temperature of two hundred and seventy-five degrees or so, back up to baking temperature, but the sand would cool less than a hundred degrees from the last firing on Thursday or Friday afternoon to the start-up on Saturday evening. For a year I was the start-up baker, and when I came in at six P.M. on Saturday night to begin firing the oven, I could stand twenty feet away from it out in the middle of the room and feel that enormous mass of heated sand radiating out at me.

At the heart of all of it was fire. The fire itself was made with ash wood when we could get it, scrap lumber from the Adirondack baseball bat company in upstate New York. It came to us in bundles of milled sticks, three feet long and an inch or so square. It was the most beautiful wood to burn—you would simply toss in a full bundle, still tied with twine, then break the ties with a long metal poker with a hook on the end to loosen the bundle and then open up the dampers at the back of the oven and with a great leather gauntlet of a glove put the fire diverter in place over the chimney hole and close the oven door and go read a book for thirty minutes. The diverter was a massive fabricated sheet steel cowling that received the flame from beneath and bent and spread it out across the oven floor so the heat was more or less evenly distributed throughout the baking chamber. Ten minutes into the firing you would briefly open the door to change the position of the diverter, and the sight of that great concentrated sheet of fire spread out along the floor of the oven was always awe-inspiring. But with the heavy door shut there was almost no indication that anything at all was happening. The temperature of the sand, displayed on a dial mounted on the wall next to the oven, would rise by a few degrees. The roar of the fire would be inaudible behind the massive copper and firebrick door that was lowered and raised on steel cables by an electric motor. When we shut down the firing and pulled the diverter from the oven, it would sometimes still glow orange for a few minutes, especially along its welded seams, and it pinged and snapped as it cooled as if still longing to be in the fire.

Then we would wait again, at least twenty minutes before we dared put a load of unbaked bread on that oven floor. We left a fan-shaped area empty on the loading tables that corresponded to the area closest to where the fire emerged from the diverter, but even then we almost always burned a handful of loaves. The bread itself was so substantial that we took care of light, surface burns with a wire brush, the kind you use to scrape paint from a wall or rust from a fender, and in this way could get the burns down to three or four per load. A local pig farmer came once a week on Saturday morning and took away hundred-pound flour sacks filled with burns or with broken or otherwise damaged loaves.

The loaves themselves were magic, and the magic was the oven’s. Sometimes a batch would go into the oven looking doomed, 1½ to 2 inches high, almost a puddle, and it would seem that it would be a very good week for the pig farmer, but ten minutes later when you cracked the oven door for that first look they would invariably have shot up to their full four glorious inches, maybe even five on a good day. Oven-spring, that amazing thing that happens when yeasted dough is placed in the heat of the oven, that moment when hundreds of thousands of yeast organisms that sense they are finished and have begun to slow their rate of reproduction are suddenly awakened by fire and find that they have in fact one last flourish in them. They must sense too, in some cellular way, that they don’t have much time left, and that they will not after all end with a whimper, the long anaerobic slide into sour-smelling vinegary alcohol, but instead with a bang, lifting the whole enterprise gloriously into the flame long enough for something else to take over, the long gluten strands of the wheat desiccating into a superstructure, the architecture of the finished loaf.

We would raise the door and swing the architect’s lamp into place and see the gracefully humped backs of over two hundred perfect loaves all slightly joined now but easily broken apart at the seams with a deft flick of the long-handled baking peel, and we would begin hauling them out into the light and lining them up on wheeled cooling racks. Always there would be one undersized loaf made from the last remnant piece of dough which we would break open and eat, knowing full well the havoc that hot bread would play with our stomachs almost instantly. Still, this is what we worked for. You could not take a knife to this bread hot—it was too moist and full of steam, and a knife edge would turn it gummy as it sliced through. It had to be broken, and broken would release an aroma into the air that was almost enough in itself, so thick it was almost nourishing.

During this final year of my baking life I grew more and more restless, for reasons that I could not fully understand. I was fighting for a small raise that the boss would not give me, though I made less than the other bakers and had more responsibility. The way that the work was organized was also dissatisfying in that all of the bakers worked in teams, and the teams were largely static. I worked five of my six shifts each week with a woman who was going through a nasty divorce and was depressed, and complained the entire time we were not working about her soon-to-be ex-husband. She had also been working at the bakery for many years, and was sick of it and feeling the need for something new, and so complained too about that. She gazed out the window a lot. She talked incessantly on the phone with a new friend she had made, and the tenor of this talk drove me from the bakery barn and out into the yard or to the woodpile to read. I was withdrawing back into both myself and into an old stance toward work, a resistance that I had never felt toward baking until then. I’d grown up with and around people who hated their work and who talked incessantly of hating their work, and I could not stand to be around it again after so long away.

I began to dream of alternatives, and within a very short time had decided to go back to graduate school for a teaching certificate. It has never seemed strictly true to me that those who cannot do, teach. It has, however, sometimes seemed to be the case that those who cannot figure out what to do, teach, and this was the case with me. I drifted from work that had for a brief time captivated me into work to which I would ultimately feel captive. There were moments in my teaching life that were as gratifying as taking a load of perfect baguettes from the oven, but they were scarce. There are almost no such moments in my life as a college administrator. All of the good that I do now, when I do any, is at some remove from the work of my days, which largely consists of meetings, and phone calls, and email. I gaze out the window a lot. There is no song behind the work, no narrative, and likewise it has no aroma, no heft, and though it is so easily broken, nothing emanates from the breaking.

Coda
In my second year at Clear Flour, one of my four housemates decided to move out of our group house and into a place of his own. His room was the smallest and cheapest of the four and it adjoined mine, and I somehow worked out that I could have his room and mine for only a small increase in rent, and I turned this room into my first real writing room. I refinished the wooden desk that my boss at the cracker factory had given to me, one of his father’s old bakery desks (it’s the desk I’m writing at now). I bought my first electronic typewriter and filled a small bookcase with my most precious books and began, in that room, to feel like a real writer. That is to say, as Marge Piercy writes, the real writer is the one who really writes, and here for the first time I really wrote. Since this coincided with my learning the art of baking bread, I wrote quite a lot about baking.

I had been dimly aware all the way back to my second year of college of the problem with many writers. They wrote beautifully, or powerfully, or eloquently, but often about nothing, or next to nothing. I suspected, but was too incurious or afraid to explore it fully, that I should be studying something other than writing and literature, something real—botany, or geology, or even linguistics— and then later, through writing about that thing I knew deeply, learn the real craft of writing. I had for some time been longing for that thing. My mind had always been the mind of a generalist, a dabbler, a dilettante. I was a student of surfaces, even shallows, but never depths. Depth took a kind of patience and steadiness and attention that I did not possess. Suddenly, I did. I read articles with names like “Mixing and retention qualities make wheat doughs unique” (Dr. Carl Hosenay, Bakery Magazine, March 1985), replete with passages like:

What then makes wheat flour unique when compared with other cereals? The rate of diffusion must be much slower in wheat flour doughs. One of the factors affecting diffusion rates is viscosity. In dough with hydrated gluten, the viscosity is very high. Therefore the dough has a low diffusion rate.

I collected books of bread recipes and read them the way I had previously read only literature. When I traveled I visited other bakeries and carried a small pocket notebook with me to jot down notes about wheat hardness and water temperatures and proofing times.
During one of these visits I came to my last bakery, the Baldwin Hill Bakery. To this day I can only fathom part of what fooled me about the place. First, the bakery was located on a former farm, the bakery itself in a large converted barn. Secondly I was in love with a woman who lived just up the road. Mostly, though, it was the bread itself. It was an ultra-pure product—whole grain, milled on site, fully organic, artesian well water. I’d grown weary of white bread and of its precious connoisseurs. I thought I was choosing the proletarian, macro-biotic, real food alternative. But the bread there, I soon learned, was product—mass-produced, each loaf the same size, the same shape, practically the same recipe. It should have been the ultimate, the culmination of my baking career, because I had always thought that good work was just that—good work. I thought that the work defined the goodness.

I came home every day and peeled off my flour-stiffened clothes and lay them down like a body that had betrayed me, then took them up again in the morning. I should have noticed when the lover left me what had happened, that I had passed from loving something to despising it, and she saw it reflected in my face and fled. What she saw, of course, was that the same thing might happen, perhaps even was happening, with her. I thought the betrayal was hers, but I see now that it was mine. Thirty years later, and I see most mornings in the mirror the same face that she would have seen. I’ve learned this, and it goes against every story I ever told myself about work and about myself: it wasn’t the work alone, but doing the work in the company of people who also loved the work. I never wanted to work for a company, but company is what I’ve longed for during most of the intervening thirty years, the quiet and purposeful gathering every morning, my co-workers and friends sleepy and scrubbed and swaddled in their crisp white aprons, and yes, the smell of something nourishing rising up to meet us, but nothing without us.