Ode to Baking by James Parker (reproduced with full permission)

A couple of years ago, I was browsing through the Bread Bakers Guild of America website, when I saw this fantastic piece of writing that another baker (Matt Rosier, now of RVA) had shared with the author's permission. It was penned by Atlantic staff writer James Parker, and appears in his book "Get Me Through The Next Five Minutes: Odes To Being Alive".

Google tells me that Parker is "known for his unique voice that is both spiritual and salty." I'm not sure that's what I took away as I read the words, but I know what I felt: heart-filling joy, a sense of belonging and seen. I was pretty sure that other bakers would find similar delight in his words, so I too sought Mr Parker's permission to share the piece with Sourdough Geeks readers. He generously agreed. So here, in something of a departure from our usual blog content, is the quite wonderful celebratory essay: 

Ode to Baking

by James Parker

How they fascinated me, the beautiful bakers.

Strutting around in their aprons, making jokes, slapping and prodding and sniffing the rising dough, the ever-changing dough—amazing to me, the familiarity with which they touched it, the rough intimacy—with a fine aristocratic powdering of flour on their cheeks. And so brainy, too. "Hey Duncan, what does apocryphal mean?" Duncan, head deep in the industrially large mixing bowl from which he is cutting out heavy, claggy handfuls of just-mixed dough, replies instantly: "Of doubtful origin."

I can't do it in my kitchen. Or I could, I suppose, but I don't. No interest at all in baking bread at home. Nor do I give a toss, particularly, about the kind of bread I eat: white, brown, writhing with raw health or stuffed with additives, if you can toast it, I'm in. But I loved, loved, loved being a baker.

They trained me, God bless them. With forbearance and grumpiness, the bakers of Clear Flour Bread in Brookline, Massachusetts, turned me into one of their company. Was I any good? Ask my baguettes. Ask my olive rolls. Ask my goddamn Rustic Italian loaves. The bread judges the baker.

Baking is not mystical—it's scientific. Get the recipe right, do what you're supposed to do, and something pretty close to the desired outcome will be achieved. But of course it is mystical, like everything else. The condition of the baker’s soul is alchemically involved. As above, so below. A jolly baker with a clear conscience is going to have a better bake, and produce tawnier and juicier bread, than his chafing, pissed-off colleague.

Also: did you know about wild airborne yeast? An invisible, activating agent that lives in the atmosphere like the grace of God? It’s real.

The dough is on the move. At all times, all over the bakery, you feel the pressure of its mutability: it's rising, it's rising. Or it's collapsing, because you fucked up. It’s a small window, the moment of perfect proofedness, plumpness, oven-readiness, fruition.

The baker touches the dough, tests it with her fingertips, feels the energy quiver under the fragile skin, the ballooning cells, the gassy bounce of its interior expansions, and makes the call. Too early and the bread will warp hysterically in the oven; too late and it’ll lie there in protest, doing nothing.

Baguettes, are you ready to go? Did the baker cut you properly on the loader, giving you those three diagonal slashes, one after another, zip-zip-zip? If the razor went too deep, you'll fall apart, slump sadly open. And how much steam do you need, for a nice glossy crust? The baker hits the button, floods the oven deck with a gash of vapor—for how many seconds?

Now stand back, baker. You're as ancient as Egypt, and you're also Andy Warhol in an apron, mass-producing your art object. Baguettes in glowing dozens, repeating editions and series of baguettes, out of the great oven and onto the metal rack. How do they look? How do they sound? A field of grain right before the harvest will give off an audible creak or tick of readiness, as the loaded stalks gently rub against one another. At the other end of the process there’s the fine, fuse-like crackle of a row of handsome, brittle baguettes, cooling on the rack.