In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (12 page)

I
was leaving the gym on Capitol Hill one cold, wintry afternoon early in 2010 when I checked the messages on my phone. Alice Waters’s office at Chez Panisse had called. “Yeah, right, who was this anyway?” I wondered, running through a list of potential pranksters in my head. It was improbable that one of the most influential restaurants in the country, run by a woman who had propelled the local foods movement, the trend toward school gardens, simple fresh cuisine, and more, would be calling me.

But when I called back, I got Waters’s assistant, which was the first surprise. The second was that Waters would be hosting a charity dinner in Washington and wanted to serve my bread. Turned out the baker she’d had in mind couldn’t make the event, so they had asked a chef in Washington, Barton Seaver, whom they should get. He had suggested me.

“We hear you bake the best baguette in D.C.,” Waters’s assistant, Sarah Weiner, said.

“Well, yeah, I won a contest,” I stammered, “but, you know, I’m just a home baker. The most I’ve ever baked for was for Thanksgiving dinner, maybe twenty people. How many people are you talking about?”

She said they were hosting about forty people at a $500-a-plate dinner at Bob Woodward’s house in Georgetown. The event was in a week. As she continued talking, I wondered whether I could actually bake that much bread, or whether I’d really want to. Up until that moment, a dozen years into my obsession, I’d baked only for my family and friends and my own curiosity; it was never meant to be anything more than that. Here was my chance to turn pro, and the first gig was with Alice Waters!

“Yeah, can I get back to you on that?” I said.

 • • • 

T
he call was of course validating, even flattering, Alice being Alice. But it was not the kind of call I had been waiting for. All I had done was bake bread two or three times a week, and then begun to write about it. Even the baguette contest I participated in nearly a year earlier had more to do with putting my bread up against pros than turning pro myself. When cookbook author Joan Nathan said to me, “It’s great you won, but what can you do with it?” I had no answer for her. It hadn’t occurred to me to do anything at all.

But I did know of Waters’s love of good bread, which almost seemed to equal her passion for a great salad. One of her earliest bakers, Steve Sullivan, had worked at Chez Panisse and went on to found Acme Bread, a notable bread company still going strong. (It was Sullivan, incidentally, who gave Nancy Silverton the idea of using grapes in her starter at La Brea Bakery.) Waters had also championed other bakers in the San Francisco Bay Area, like Chad Robertson at Tartine.

These bakers seemed part of a dynamic local bread ecology: they worked hard, trained apprentices, and in this way seeded more bakeries. Michel Suas, a baker who arrived from France in the mid-1980s and who started the San Francisco Baking Institute, injected another bout of energy by teaching many aspiring bakers. The Bay Area and nearby Marin and Sonoma counties might now be home to the richest concentration of artisan bread bakers in the nation, reaching a kind of culinary critical mass. But northern California wasn’t alone. I’d found aspiring hubs along the coast in Maine, in Vermont and Massachusetts; in New York City; in Asheville, North Carolina, which in my unscientific estimation might have the highest per capita concentration of artisan bread bakers in the nation; in Portland, Seattle, and the Twin Cities and many more in places that I’ve yet to visit. Sadly, I wouldn’t put Washington, D.C., on that list, though it does have a couple of standouts. I’ve found that where there is a dearth of good bread, you occasionally get a superlative baker holding up the flag, but it’s rare. Mediocrity, in other words, can nurture its own culture because there aren’t enough customers who demand a good loaf. The Bay Area, though, had great bakers in spades, in part thanks to Waters.

I had met a few of these bakers over the years. Their breads had little to do with San Francisco sourdough, for which the area is still known, and far more to do with what I’d call a post-sourdough movement—one that eschewed that acidic taste in bread, cultured mild-tasting
levain
, and in many cases baked in wood-fired ovens. It’s an approach I’ve tried to master over the years—minus the wood oven. The goal is a loaf that you can rip into with your teeth, but which also has a soft, pliable interior crumb. It has a dark crust that crackles when you bite into it, and where the slashes, the
grigne
, burst open in an inviting way. This bread is imperfect but captivating, and I continue to view it as somewhat magical no matter how much I learn about the method.

I know, by now you’re rolling your eyes, but the proof really is in the eating, or in the favorable comment from one of my daughter’s nine-year-old friends. Breaking away from Lego to rip off a piece of a loaf, this young girl said, “Sam, I don’t like bread. But I like your bread.” She was eating a sourdough country loaf that had been fermented overnight—a simple, rustic bread that riffed on the West Coast tradition I’d picked up from bakers. Over the course of a couple of years, after my baguette expeditions and that unexpected call from Waters, I visited many of these bakers for the first time.

 • • • 

D
ella Fattoria, in Petaluma about an hour north of San Francisco, is one of these bakeries. It’s known for its dark, Italian sourdough loaves baked in two massive wood-fired ovens and then sold around the region and at the bakery’s café in town. The bakery itself sits outside of town, an open-air, shedlike building next to a ranch-style house where Kathleen Weber, who founded the business with her husband, Ed, lives. Turning up their driveway one sunny morning in mid-May, I found it hard to tell that the place was a business—it felt more like a farm with one-story buildings, a garden, and a long wooden table underneath a large oak tree, where popular ranch dinners are held. In this complex, it’s easy to spot the bake house, with its screen doors, old wood plank floors, and smoke curling out of the chimney.

Kathleen Weber didn’t start out as a professional baker, but rather a home baker like me. She had a healthy obsession about dough and often baked loaves, bringing them to friends’ homes for dinner. Her guidebook at the time was Carol Field’s
The Italian Baker
, a classic that has influenced many bakers. Weber then took the short step from baking recipes out of the book to building a wood oven on her deck, with Alan Scott. At the time, he was the most influential builder of brick ovens in America and he happened to live nearby.

You know this trajectory: she bakes bread for a chef’s olive oil tasting event, eventually gets an account, and before long is working day and night to fulfill orders. Her husband, Ed, would fire up the oven at dusk. She would mix the doughs at night, baking them the next day. “I was on fire,” Kathleen told me over a soup and sandwich at the couple’s Della Fattoria Café, also in Petaluma. “I had things just come to me. Coming home one day I had Meyer lemons and rosemary in the car and thought they would make a wonderful combination.” She mixed the two in olive oil, tucked them into a sourdough bread, which was slashed open just before baking, to reveal the oil mixture—a bit of sea salt crumbled on top. When I bit into it, I got a hit of citrus, salt, olive oil, and rosemary all at once. The bread’s still one of her best sellers. In the beginning, she was having a tough time meeting demand, but Michel Suas of the San Francisco Baking Institute told her, “It’s a good problem to have.” He sent up one of his teachers, Lionel Vatinet, another superlative French baker, now at La Farm Bakery in Durham, North Carolina, who taught her to work faster. “He would hold a stopwatch while I was shaping loaves and with each one, he would have me cut the amount of time,” Weber told me. Now the bakery’s much bigger, with a team of four bakers and numerous accounts. Ed Weber often can be found manning the bread stand at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco on Saturdays or tinkering with the two ovens in the open-air bake shed, which long ago replaced the oven on the deck outside their house.

Monday morning wasn’t terribly busy when I arrived, and I couldn’t find anyone around the bakery. So I just opened the screen door and let myself in to look around. The fires were roaring in the two brick ovens that line an outside wall, the bread-baking baskets that would later hold the rising bread were all neatly arranged on shelves, and the butcher block tables where the loaves were shaped were clean and empty, ready for the day’s activity. Compared with other bakeries I’ve visited, this had the feel of an outdoor kitchen, though the volume of loaves would rival others I saw, from Paris to San Francisco. While I was snapping pictures of the weathered, soot-marked ovens, and the fourteen-foot-long wooden peels, Richard Hart poked his head inside. He was then the lead baker, a Brit in his mid-thirties, who had trained as a cook in three-star restaurants in London but now was tending to wood fire, dough, and handmade bread.

We said hello and he immediately began mixing the day’s doughs, measuring out
levain
into plastic bins, and then adding flour and salt, talking to me as he worked. He said he had burned out on kitchens in fine dining establishments, including one of Gordon Ramsay’s in London. “So the portrait of him on TV, the abusive chef, it’s true to life?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” he replied. “If the sous chefs were not nasty to the cooks they were fired, and I just had it with that kind of atmosphere, I had to leave, it was making me evil. I started to get angry—and I’m really mild mannered.” At a friend’s recommendation, Hart first took a job at the vegetable-centric restaurant Ubuntu in Napa Valley, uprooting his family from London to northern California, and working forty hours a week instead of the seventy or eighty hours he had before. “I suddenly had all this time,” he said. So he began visiting Della Fattoria on his days off, curious about their sourdough bread and wood-fired ovens. “I mean, you’re baking bread like they did one hundred years ago, who wouldn’t be amazed?” he said. “Regardless of what it took, I had to get a job here.” Within a year, he had joined the bakery staff and soon Kathleen put him in charge.

Hart had an easygoing manner, but after a few days I could also tell he was incredibly hardworking. In this business, bakers are always moving from one task to another, and Hart never stopped. By the time the rest of the bakers showed up that first morning, the pace noticeably picked up. Multiple doughs that Hart had mixed were being shaped, nestled into baskets, or slipped into linen
couches
to rise. The dying embers were swept out of the ovens, then the hearth was mopped out with a wet towel at the end of a long pole. Everyone seemed to be working at a pace just short of a jog. They plowed through hundreds of pounds of dough, shaping them quickly into round
boules
, torpedo-shaped
bâtards
, and finally baguettes. I jumped in and helped form the loaf with rosemary, lemon, and olive oil, which was spooned into a slight well in the dough. Turning it over and rounding the loaf with my hands, I stretched the skin of the dough taut with my pinkies on the underside of the loaf. The oily mixture flowed through the loaf as I continued to shape it, eventually ending up on top, visible through a translucent skin of gluten. Under Hart’s watchful eye, I kept at it. The dough felt familiar, pliable, and easy to manipulate. I made a few loaves and plopped them into cloth-lined baskets to rise. Hart wasn’t displeased with the outcome. Or, I should say, I didn’t screw up, which is what most bakers worry about when an outsider arrives to join in, an amateur no less.