Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (35 page)

Chad Robertson can name the very day that
bread baking first captivated him: the spring afternoon in 1992 when his class at the
Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, New York, went on a field trip to the
Berkshire Mountain Bakery in Housatonic, Massachusetts. This was the day he met Richard
Bourdon, a thirty-five-year-old “radical baker” from Quebec whose
whole-grain sesame
boule
and soaring, sexy spiel about the wonders of sourdough
fermentation set Robertson on his course in life.

This was not the first right-angled turn in
Chad’s twenty-one-year-old life, however. Growing up in West Texas, on rectangles
of sliced Oroweat bread, he had never given much thought to cooking as a career, much
less baking. (His father had, like his father and grandfather before him, worked in the
family business, making custom cowboy boots.) Chad recalls being “an obsessive
kid, the type who would keep daily charts of the weather.” As a teenager, he
planned to become an architect, but when the one and only school he applied
to—Rice University, in Houston—rejected him, he abruptly changed
course and decided to go to culinary school. “I figured if I could cook I could
always get work in a restaurant.”

For Chad the two most important things that
happened in culinary school were meeting his future wife and partner, Elisabeth Prueitt,
a pastry chef, and going on that fateful field trip to Housatonic. Over lunch one
afternoon during one of the shifts I worked at Tartine, he recounted the story while the
bulk fermentation bubbled along back in the bakery.

“It was weird, because in the van on
the way up there I had already decided that this was going to be
it
. I had this
fantasy of apprenticing myself to Richard Bourdon and becoming a baker. It made no sense
whatsoever; I had never met him or given much thought to bread. But I loved the idea of
this underground baker out there in the middle of nowhere, working through the night in
perfect solitude.” A restaurant kitchen is a hectic, loud, chaotic place, and Chad
had already begun to question whether it was the right place for him. A bakery is a
monastery by comparison.

Bourdon and his bread lived up to
expectations. “It was exactly what I had been imagining. I loved the atmosphere of
his bakery, this big, old, dimly lit brick barn on the bank of a river. The whole bakery
had the sweet smell of natural leaven. It was a new aroma and a new flavor for me. I had
never seen bread that wasn’t rectangular. And his bread was incredible. It had a
contrast between crust and crumb I had never experienced before, and this moist,
glistening interior. And then there was Bourdon himself, the radical baker! He had an
intense, sexual way of talking about fermentation, the invisible orgy of microbes he was
orchestrating. He wanted to take everything to the absolute limit: the super-wet doughs,
the long fermentation, the hard, dark bake. I loved the idea of this underground baker
pushing his doughs just as far as they could go. He was a guru.”

A few months later, I traveled to the
Berkshires to meet the bread guru. Richard Bourdon is now approaching sixty, and though
the passage of time had clearly mellowed him a bit (he’s relented, slightly, on
the subject of white flour), the man was still possessed by a Dionysian fervor about
bread, and fermentation, and wheat, which he mills himself fresh every day. Bourdon has
an ungovernable mop of gray curls and an open, expressive face that appears to have been
lined more by laughter than worry. He somewhat resembles Harpo Marx, and, like Harpo,
can get across anything he wants solely by means of his facial expressions and dancing
eyes. Unlike Harpo, however, Bourdon can also, in his faintly Frenchified English, talk
a blue streak, giving him a doubly powerful presence. In fact, the man would probably be
hard to take if he were not so charming and charismatic.

I filled several notebooks with
Bourdon’s soaring disquisitions on fermentation, a subject about which he has
developed a great many theories, some of them more susceptible to scientific proof than
others. A central one is that “souring” grains—fermenting them—“is not
a cultural but a natural, instinctual process. We humans did not discover it. All
indigenous peoples sour their grains, but so do many animals.” This particular
treatise took him all the way from Ghana to Greenland and then looped back around to his
front yard and ended back in his bakery.

“What do you think the squirrel is
doing when he buries acorns in my yard? He is not just hiding them! No, he’s
souring
them, because if he didn’t do that the nut would be
indigestible. Birds? They don’t just swallow seeds fresh. No! First they sprout
them in their craw so the enzymes can start to free the minerals. Animals instinctively
sour, sprout, ferment foods to extract the maximum nourishment from them while expending
as little of their own body’s energy as possible. That’s the iron law of
economy: Take the most you can from nature with the least amount of effort. So, instead
of doing all the work of
digestion ourselves, we let the bacteria do
it for us.” What he was describing sounded a lot like cooking.

“Now let us look at bread. It is the
same principle but even more clever. It starts with the flour mill, this big stone tooth
that chews the seed for us so we don’t need to break our teeth on it. Then the
sourdough culture breaks down the phytic acid in the flour, so the bacteria can get at
those minerals. (Because bacteria want all the same things we do, food and sex and
babies!) But bread is the most intelligent system for processing food, because it has
every
thing. It even makes its own pot! Put dough in a hot oven and the
first thing that happens is, a crust forms to trap the steam. The loaf becomes its own
pressure cooker! That’s what cooks the starches.”

For Bourdon, the problem with most bread is
that it is essentially undercooked, and therefore more difficult to digest than it
should be. This is why he favors long fermentations and unusually wet doughs. Wet dough
was the norm before the mechanization of baking. Human hands can’t handle dry
doughs very well (even if they are easier to shape, they are much harder to mix and
knead), and machines can’t handle wet ones at all. But they make much better
breads. Bourdon is fond of saying, “You would never cook a cup of rice in half a
cup of water.” Even more than flavor or beauty, Bourdon is after the perfect
nourishment that only the most thorough cooking can ensure. He came out of the
macrobiotic movement, and is something of a poet of human digestion. Which, he explains,
begins in the mouth the moment you bite into a bread.

“This is why the acids in sourdough
are so important! They make your mouth water, so the enzymes in your saliva can begin to
digest the starches. That’s how you can tell good bread from bad: Roll a little
ball of it and put it in your mouth. What happens? Does your mouth feel dry, like you
want a sip of water, or is it nice and wet?” The baker is the conductor of an
intricate symphony of transformation that takes
in everything from the
grass seed to the millstone, the microbial fermentation to the pressure-cooking, and
culminates in the salivation that a well-baked bread inspires in the mouth.

It was easy to see how a twenty-one-year-old
might come away from a few hours in Richard Bourdon’s presence convinced that
baking bread was the most important thing you could do with your life. The work put you
in direct, bodily contact with some of the deeper currents of the natural world, as well
as some of the oldest traditions of human community. Bread, as something
“made” by microbial action and human hands working in concert, falls
somewhere between nature and culture, which in Bourdon’s worldview exist not in
opposition to each other but on one glorious, Rabelaisian continuum, reaching all the
way from “the mindless fucking and farting” of bacteria to the sprouting of
acorns by squirrels to the civilized pleasures of breaking bread at the table.

Before the group left Bourdon’s bakery
that afternoon, Chad summoned the nerve to ask him about an apprenticeship. So began
five months of a brutal but life-altering internship, with Chad making the long drive up
to Housatonic every night after classes, working in the bakery from four until nine in
the morning, and then driving back down to Hyde Park for another day of classes. After
graduation, Bourdon wanted to hire Robertson, but had no openings. So Chad worked for
nothing but room and board, until a spot opened up. Chad ended up spending two years in
Housatonic, absorbing Richard’s passions and methods and ways with the wet
dough.

Richard recalls, “Chad was good at
everything, but he had a perfectionist streak. He would bake only three loaves wide, so
that each bread had plenty of personal space in the oven. And if the loaves didn’t
spring up nice and big, he’d be upset. Would call it a shitty bake. I’d say
to him, ‘Chad, don’t worry, it’s all good food!’ But that was
never enough for him. The bread had to be beautiful, too.”

After two years, Richard told Chad that it was
time for him to move on, that he had learned all he had to teach him. Richard no longer
remembers the conversation, but it seems possible that Chad’s perfectionism was
getting under Richard’s skin. That was certainly the case at Chad’s next
job, working for a former Bourdon apprentice named Dave Miller, at a bakery Miller had
taken over in Chico, in northern California. “Chad had very specific ideas of what
he wanted in a bread,” Dave told me, choosing his words with care. “And I
was trying to run a business.”

After a year that both describe as
uncomfortable, Chad and Dave parted amicably. Chad and Liz headed to southwestern France
to work with Richard Bourdon’s own mentor, a baker named Patrick LePort, whom both
Richard and Chad described as an avatar of wet doughs and whole grains and also
something of a mystic. Chad recalls that Patrick would take naps alongside his mixer,
because it stood on the precise spot where he had determined that the meridians of
universal energy intersected. After a year in France, Chad decided he was ready to
strike out on his own. In a house on Main Street in Point Reyes Station, in West Marin
County, California, he and Liz opened the Bay Village Bakers; they lived in back. Chad
baked in a wood-fired masonry oven built by Alan Scott, a legendary local mason and
baker, and over the course of six years in Point Reyes, he worked assiduously, even
obsessively, to develop what would become his signature bread—what he describes in his
book as “a certain loaf with an old soul.”

The first few chapters of Chad’s bread
autobiography had taken up the entire lunch. Afterward, we strolled back to the bakery
to shape loaves. We had mixed the dough before noon, one big batch in a Bongard mixer
that can hold and, by rotating its giant steel screw, slowly
knead 350
pounds of willful dough at a time. That morning I had helped Chad’s young
assistant bakers, Lori Oyamada and Nathan Yanko, empty fifty-pound bags of flour into
the mixer. Both bakers were a few years older than Chad had been when he worked for
Richard Bourdon, and both, it seemed to me, shared certain attributes with Chad. They
looked more like athletes than bakers, with muscled arms (elaborately tattooed, in the
case of Nate and Chad) and bodies sleek as cats.

I quickly came to understand exactly how
Lori and Nate developed such well-muscled arms. After the dough was mixed and given some
time to rest in the Bongard’s big stainless-steel bowl, it had to be lifted out,
an armful of dough at a time, and transferred to the five-gallon buckets in which it
would ferment. This involved rolling up your sleeves, wetting your hands and forearms,
and then plunging them deep into the pool of warm dough. By now the gluten was
sufficiently well developed to form gigantic, muscular sinews that would stretch but not
break no matter how hard you pulled them; after losing a tug of war with one of them, I
was forced to conclude that gluten is considerably stronger than I am. Lori showed me
how to pinch off a manageable length by squeezing my fist closed way down at the bottom
of the bowl. That made it possible to lift out a thick, ropy length of the dough, thirty
or forty pounds of the stuff per armful, minus the pound or so that adamantly clung to
the hairs on my arms. It took two or three armloads to fill a bucket.

The bulk fermentation was complete by the
time Chad and I returned from lunch, so, while Chad picked up the thread of his country
loaf’s biography, we got to work turning the bubbling white pools of dough out
onto the butcher-block counter for cutting and shaping. Using a dough scraper, Chad cut
two-pound chunks from the mass, weighed them on an old-time balance scale, and then
deftly rotated them with both hands against the floured wood surface until
they tightened into nice rounds. To keep them from getting chilled,
he gently pressed each shaped round against its neighbor, eventually forming a rolling
landscape of powdery white buttocks.