Ruminant or human, the advantages of being able to eat grass are many. Grasses occupy some two-thirds of the planet’s landmass and, among plants, are especially good at collecting solar energy and transforming it into biomass—“primary productivity,” in the ecologist’s jargon. Before we learned to eat grass directly, we availed ourselves of its energy by eating the ruminants that could eat grass or, sometimes, the predators that ate them. Yet second- or third-hand is a wasteful way to eat grass. Only about 10 percent of the energy consumed by an animal passes up the food chain to an eater of that animal. (Among other things, a lot of that energy is “wasted” by the animal in trying to avoid being eaten.) In fact, for every step up a food chain (or “trophic pyramid”), 90 percent of the food energy is lost, which is why big predators are so much more rare than ruminants, which in turn are so much more rare than blades of grass.
Even as Paleolithic hunters we ate whatever grass seeds we could gather, but figuring out a way to consistently get enough of the little things to make a staple meal represented a momentous development for our species. (It may also have been an obligatory development, since we were running out of grass eaters to hunt.) Learning how to eat lower on the food chain gave us access to more solar energy than ever before, and by doing so allowed us to create many more humans than would otherwise exist. Agriculture—which consists mainly of growing edible grasses like wheat, corn, and rice—is our term for this revolutionary new approach to getting food from the soil and the sun.
In working with edible grasses, our ancestors concentrated on collecting and eventually planting the biggest, most easily accessible seeds, since the seed is the most energy-dense part of the plant, and the only part that a single-stomached creature can readily digest. In time, the plants evolved to gratify our desires, developing ever-bigger seeds and refraining from “shattering”—dropping off the plant—in advance of harvest. We in turn altered the environment to suit the plants: tilling the soil and defending them from competitors—trees, weeds, insects, pathogens.
The new relationship between grasses and people led to evolutionary changes on our end, too, notably the ability to produce the enzymes needed to digest the starch in grass seeds. Yet the seeds of even these domesticated grasses go to some lengths to protect their precious cache of nutrients (intended to nourish their offspring, after all, not ours) and so require some degree of processing to unlock them, whether by soaking, grinding, boiling, toasting, acidifying, alkalizing, or some combination of these steps.
These rudimentary forms of “food processing” worked well enough for the first few thousands years of the agricultural era. Depending on the region, various kinds of grass seed were toasted on a fire or ground between stones and then boiled in water to create a simple mash—a porridge. The inert mush that resulted might not have made for inspiring meals, but it was simple enough to prepare, and nutritious enough to eat, providing us with the energy of starch as well as some protein, vitamins, and minerals. To make these mashes more appetizing, people would sometimes spread them on a hot stone to cook, creating a kind of unleavened flat bread.
And then, one day, once upon a time somewhere in ancient Egypt, probably about six thousand years ago, something seemingly miraculous happened to one of these porridges. We don’t know exactly how it happened, but some observant Egyptian must have noticed that a bowl of porridge, perhaps one off in a corner that had been neglected for a couple of days, was no longer quite so inert. In fact, it was hatching bubbles from its surface and slowly expanding, as if it were alive. The dull paste had somehow been inspired: The spark of life had been breathed into it. And when that strangely vibrant bowl of porridge—call it dough—was heated in an oven, it grew even larger, springing up as it trapped the expanding bubbles in an airy yet stable structure that resembled a sponge.
It must have seemed a miracle, for a food to double or triple in volume on its own, or at least appear to (prefiguring, perhaps, the miracle of the loaves that Christ would perform four thousand years later). Though that increase proved to be an illusion—the volume added was only air—the reality, once tasted, was almost as impressive. The food had acquired a whole range of interesting new flavors and a delicate texture that made it much more interesting to eat. Bread! In time people would discover that the new food was also more nourishing than the mash from which it was made, so in that sense the miracle of the multiplying loaves was real. No longer mere cooks—putting fire to plants and animals, or boiling them in water—the Egyptians were now the masters of a far more complicated (and in some ways more powerful) technology for transforming nature into nourishment. So was born bread baking, the world’s first food-processing industry.
I really love good bread. In fact, even bad bread is pretty good. I’d much prefer to eat a slice of fresh bread than a piece of cake. I especially love the contrast between a rugged crust and a moist, tender, alveolate interior—the “crumb,” as I’ve learned to call it, now that I’ve been hanging around bakers. Alveoli are what bakers call the pockets of air that make up the crumb. The gases trapped in those curvaceous voids carry much of the aroma of bread, that rich complex of scents—roasty-yeasty-hazelnutty and faintly alcoholic—that, to me, is more captivating even than the smell of wine or coffee. Though I see no reason why I should have to choose between them, since bread goes so well with both.
One reason to bake bread is to fill your kitchen with that aroma. Even if the bread turns out badly, the smell of it baking never fails to improve a house or a mood. People trying to sell their homes are often advised to bake a loaf of bread before showing it. The underlying idea here is that freshly baked bread is the ultimate olfactory synecdoche for hominess. Which, when you think about it, is odd, since how many of us grew up in homes where bread was ever baked? Yet somehow that sense memory and its association with a happy domesticity endure. The trick has helped move quite a few houses.
To fill my house with that wonderful air is not why I took up baking, however. Nor was it to eat good bread, a desire that today can easily be gratified by simply buying it from one of the many good bakeries that have sprung up in recent years. Baking is one case where outsourcing the work to professionals has served humanity pretty well for much of the last six centuries. (Except, perhaps, during the last century, aka the Wonder Bread Era, a notably bad time for bread.) No, I began baking bread as a way to learn what I could about how it is made and what it means to us—its enduring uncanny power. Few things are as ordinary as a loaf of bread, yet the process by which it is made is extraordinary—and still something of a mystery even to those who study it or practice it every day.
Compared with earlier and simpler methods humans have devised for turning plants and animals into foods—the roasted chunk of meat, say, or pot of stew, either of which an individual or a small group can pull off—a loaf of bread implies a whole civilization. It emerges only at the end of a long, complicated process assuming settlement and involving an intricate division of human, plant, and even microbial labor. In addition to an agriculture and a culture of milling and baking, the loaf of bread depends on a nonhuman culture as well: It won’t rise without the active contribution of some highly specialized living creatures besides the baker, the miller, and the farmer. The work of these yeasts and bacteria is the reason that the airy loaf of bread coming out of the oven cannot be inferred from a wet mash of powdered grass seed in the way that, say, a pork roast or stew can be inferred from a pig. By comparison, the delicate spongelike structure that rises in a loaf of bread to trap the gaseous waste products of those microbes has the complexity of an emergent system: something that is much more than, and qualitatively different from, the sum of its simple parts.
I took up bak
ing because I was determined to know bread. If I somehow managed to bake a decent loaf along the way, great, but my impetus, quite frankly, was more journalistic curiosity than a deep-seated desire to bake my own bread. I simply wanted to get a feel for the process by getting my hands into dough at home and in any bakery that would have me. I had little reason to believe I’d be, or ever become, any good at it.
To the contrary. I had baked one or two loaves years before with only middling results, and had concluded baking was probably not for me. As a form of cooking, it seemed way too demanding—of exactitude and of patience, neither a personal strong suit. Baking was the carpentry of cooking, and I’ve always gravitated toward pursuits that leave considerably more room for error. Gardening, cooking, writing, all are roomy in that way, amenable to revision and mid-course correction. Baking by comparison seemed unforgiving, not to mention mysterious. Leavening dough depended on managing unseen and unpredictable forces. The recipes looked daunting. Messy, too. Plus, all the books and the bakers I consulted told me I would need to buy a kitchen scale to measure out ingredients. In grams.
But I would do it for the book, to learn whatever I could about this most extraordinary ordinary food and gather enough material to write about it. Then I would put away my scale and move on to other things.
That’s not what happened. Long after I gathered all the material I needed to write these pages, I’m still baking. In fact I’ve got a loaf in the oven now, and another proofing in a basket. I can’t seem to stop. I’ve come to love the feel of the dough in my hands as it develops, the way, on the third or fourth turn, the inert, sticky paste begins to cohere and then gradually become elastic, as if sinews and muscles were forming inside it. I love (and a little bit dread) the moment of truth when I lower the oven door to discover how much “oven spring” (if any) my loaf has achieved. And I love the muffled static the bread emits while it cools, as the interior steam crackles the crust during its escape, filling the kitchen with that matchless air.
And yet the breads themselves, while occasionally handsome and flavorful, have never quite lived up to the expectations that the baking process, with its admixture of magic and possibility, seems to inspire. The Next Loaf always promises to rise higher, taste more complex, caramelize more gorgeously, alveolate more idiosyncratically, and throw a more distinctive “ear” where I scored it. So there came a point in my education as a baker when an image of the perfect loaf took shape in my head. This was not just a visual image, either. I could imagine how this ultimate loaf would smell and taste and feel in the hands, too, the precise ratio of weight to volume—said volume having been exalted by a most spectacular oven spring. Now I’m not sure I’ll be able to put away my kitchen scale until I’ve actually baked, and tasted, that perfect loaf.
The best bread I ever tasted was a big country loaf shot through with holes the size of marbles and golf balls—easily more air than bread. It had a tough hide of a crust, very nearly burned, but held inside a crumb so tender, moist, and glossy it made you think of custard. There was something sensual about the strong contrast between these two realms—outside and inside, hard and soft. The bread was so powerfully aromatic that, had I been alone, I would have been tempted to push my face into it. But I was at a dinner party in Oakland with people I didn’t know very well, so I limited myself to eating as much of it as possible and asking questions about it. One of our hosts worked in San Francisco and had stopped by a bakery in the Mission District to pick it up on his way home. It seemed that the bread made at this bakery didn’t come out of the oven till late in the afternoon, which explained why when I first tasted it the bread was still slightly warm.
When I started baking bread, this memorable loaf loomed large in my mind, as an unattainable ideal, perhaps, but a loaf to shoot for anyway. By then I knew the name of the bakery—Tartine—and the name of the baker—Chad Robertson. (I live in a part of the world where bakers can be celebrities.) Here and there I picked up bits and pieces of intelligence about the man. I heard that the reason the bread came out so late in the day was that he was a surfer; he wanted to keep his mornings free in case the waves were good off Ocean Beach. (This turned out to be only slightly apocryphal.) I read that he baked just 250 loaves a day, and refused to bake more, even though on most afternoons a line of customers snaking down Guerrero Street snaps up all the loaves before they have had a chance to cool. People phone ahead to reserve a loaf.
So it came as very good news when I learned that Chad Robertson was publishing a book that would reveal the recipe for his iconic country loaf. I managed to get hold of an advance copy of Tartine Bread. It was an unusually handsome volume, bound like a textbook with a cover that somehow managed to be simultaneously hard and soft—like his bread. I cracked the big book open, my sense of anticipation rising. It quickly collapsed, however, as soon as I began reading the “basic recipe.” The recipe started on page 42 and didn’t arrive at the point of putting a loaf in an oven until page 69. Along the way were plenty of helpful pictures, mostly of dough but a few of Robertson himself shaping loaves. He looked to be in his thirties, slender, bearded, and monkishly intense. After the twenty-seven-page recipe came another ten pages titled “The Basic Loaf in Depth,” a scientificoTalmudic explication of the principles behind the recipe. I was daunted. This was going to be a project.
Yet even if I had felt dauntless enough to jump in on it right away, I couldn’t, not according to the recipe. I needed first to build a “starter”—a culture of wild yeasts and bacteria to leaven the bread, a process the book said could take weeks. Why not leaven the bread with instant yeast from the supermarket, as in most bread recipes? Robertson explained that a sourdough culture contributed not just air to a bread but much of the texture and the flavor—precisely what I felt was missing from my earlier efforts to bake bread. So, if I was really serious about this baking project, a starter was apparently somewhere in my future.
It would be a few weeks before I felt sufficiently mentally prepared to embark on my Tartine loaf. In the meantime, I built up to the undertaking by wading out into what turned out to be a deep, fermenting pool of online chatter inspired by the recently disclosed Tartine recipe. TheFreshLoaf.com, a chat group for amateur bakers, was abuzz with reports on people’s earliest efforts to bake the legendary loaf, and on Facebook, somebody had started a page (“Recipes from Tartine Bread”) to help hobbyist bakers struggling to master the recipe.
I noticed that most of the posts were from men, many of them sounding less like home cooks than twenty-something computer geeks trying to master a new software platform. (I found out later than in fact both the Web site and the Facebook group had been started by young Web developers.) Only a few of these amateur bakers had ever tasted the bread they were striving to emulate, but this didn’t seem to slow them down—they had seen pictures and video. They posted pictures of their starters, Tupperware containers bubbling over with masses of pearly glop—or, all too often, masses of grayish slime that stubbornly refused to bubble at all. They compared notes on “feeding schedules” for their starters as if they were caring for new kittens. Portraits of finished loaves of every size, shape, and alveolation were posted, sometimes as boasts, other times as plaintive cries for help.
“How do you adjust when it’s very humid?” went one. “It’s 88% humidity here and I just experienced some impressive TBF.” It took me a few visits to the page before I figured out that “TBF” was short for total bread failure. (PBF meant partial bread failure.) Someone else was struggling with a “cavitation” problem, and posted a cross-section picture, known in this subculture as a “crumb shot,” of a loaf disfigured by vast caverns of air that had formed directly beneath the crust.
/> The chatter of the online bakers made me only more anxious about the prospect of attempting a Tartine loaf. Here was exactly what I worried about: baking as carpentry or, even more intimidating, computer code. Yet when I finally sat down to read through Robertson’s entire opus, I was surprised to discover that the recipe read nothing like code. Instead of a precise set of instructions, he offered a fairly casual, open-ended set of guidelines. Sure, he specified how many grams of flour and water and starter to use, but after that, the recipe was more narrative than numbers. It left a lot up in the air. Robertson made ample allowance for the vagaries of weather and humidity, flour, and even one’s personal schedule.
Robertson encouraged bakers to be observant, flexible, and intuitive. Rather than specify exactly how many hours the bulk fermentation stage should last, he offered a few indicators of dough development to look and feel for: Does the dough feel “dense and heavy” or “cohesive”? To someone accustomed to computer code or carpentry, this sort of advice must have seemed frustratingly vague and subjective. “If the dough seems to be developing slowly, extend the bulk fermentation time.” Okay, but, by how much?! Robertson refused to say. “Watch your dough and be flexible.” He talked about dough as if it was a living thing, local and particular and subject to so many contingencies that to generalize or make hard-and-fast rules for its management was impossible. Robertson seemed to be suggesting that success as a baker demanded a certain amount of negative capability—a willingness to exist amid uncertainty. His was a world of craft rather than engineering, one where “digital” referred exclusively to fingers.