A Body of Work

Teaching Whole Grains at my Alma Mater

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

Theodore Roethke

The author as a baker, one week before leaving for SFBI. New Orleans, 2011.

I’M STUCK in traffic on the 101, listening to an eighteen minute Grateful Dead song on fm radio. I roll my window down and smell eucalyptus trees, griddled corn tortillas, brine in the thick marine layer, and an acrid chemical reek from the countless sourdough bread factories which line the freeway. The outside air is cold, the clouds above me are thick as meringue, and I feel a flush of ease. Maybe a chakra opened, which seems possible and easy, in this early morning California coolness. 

As I take my exit Jerry Garcia and the guys are still jamming, like they’ve always been, stoned and groovy and free. And now I know it’s unmistakable: I’m back in San Francisco. 

THIRTEEN YEARS ago I made the same drive on the 101, listened to the same song on the same radio station, and took the same exit. Back then I was driving my 1998 black Chevy S10 named Alistair. The truck bed was tented with an ocean blue tarp and everything my 22 year old self considered important was beneath it: Gil Scott-Heron records, knitted socks from my grandmother, unframed art, my mom’s old Cuisinart, some really good Moroccan hash, a four drawer walnut dresser, and my sourdough starter. I left Louisiana a week before with my best friend. I was going to the country’s premier baking school–the San Francisco Baking Institute (SFBI)–to become a baker. 

He came along for the ride and we were a good team. I was underfed and overeager, my sideburns were long, my temper was short, and most of my shirts were stained.  He was incredibly perceptive, incredibly lazy, and a better driver. He wore a ten gallon suede hat from a thrift store in Baton Rouge and its brim crashed into the windshield every time he reached forward to change the CD. He rolled us Bugler cigarettes, carefully managed our supply of beef jerky, told myths about his hometown in South Carolina, and never paid attention to our maps from AAA. The car smelled like an ashtray and a boy’s locker room because somewhere in Texas the a/c shit out. Then somewhere in Albuquerque we got into a fight. And by the time we left Joshua Tree, we’d made up. California can do that to people. 

A COUPLE of years before attending SFBI I arrived in New Orleans on a Greyhound Bus. I started baking as soon as I got there and what started as a curiosity soon became a compulsion. I fell in love with how by combining such plain ingredients–flour, water, salt–I made this most incredible thing, this loaf which was warm and fragrant and moist and real. I was captivated by how much mystery there was in bread. More than anything, I loved its reward: my heart raced with anticipation as I opened the oven door, that nearly finished loaf of bread looking back at me, smiling almost. 

At the end of my first summer in New Orleans I rented space in a commercial kitchen. Instead of making four loaves a day, I was now able to make 40: I sold my bread to a restaurant, farmers markets, neighbors and coffee shops. But despite all the baking I did, what I knew about bread and what I wanted to learn were poles apart because I was self taught: I knew what kind of bread I wanted to make, I just didn’t know how to become the baker who made it. 

Last party in New Orleans before we left.

SFBI IS a big, cavernous space, like a theater with all the seats taken out. It’s frigid in the morning (“colder than a well digger's ass” Sonoma County resident Tom Waits would say), when that South San Francisco marine layer sneaks in through the vents and door jambs and cracked windows. The ceilings are about 30 feet high, webbed with 25 years of dust and soot. There’s a bank of ovens and mixers against one wall, about 1,000 proofing baskets against another, fridges the size of small cars and proofers and butcher block tables and enough pallets of flour to feed an army. 

During my six months at SFBI I was taught to make everything. Cinnamon rolls, apple strudel, fresh fruit danish, a wedding cake (mine was inspired by Lorca’s Blood Wedding), oatmeal raisin cookies. We tempered chocolate, burned butter, split vanilla beans, reduced apricot glaze. The air was always buttery with baking croissants, with the sweat of the fifteen other students, with the yeast of brioche and perfectly crispy danishes. And the room was always noisy with pans clacking, students clapping at a triumphant ganache, the collective yum of a delicious slice of pie. Or it was thick with the deep silence of a disappointing recipe. 

I’ve forgotten how to make those sugary recipes. All I remember–all I cared about then and now–was the bread. Sourdough baguettes, spelt with dates and walnuts, ciabatta with green olives and fennel, poppy seed rye, whole wheat tin loaves, fougasse with lardons and shallots…we must have made 1,000 loaves of bread a week. After school I’d come home bone-tired, filthy and hungry and frustrated and inspired. 

SFBI TAUGHT us to use all five senses while learning the craft of bread. As the dough mixed I looked for proper strength, measuring its extensibility or elasticity by watching it stretch or shrink in my grasp. During shaping, my hands measured the dough’s character: was it strong or soft, was it wet or dry, cold or hot? I smelled preferments and sourdoughs for proper acidity–my nose in mixing bowls like a bloodhound’s. I listened for a crackling, golden crust when bread was removed from the oven–was it singing, or whistling, or groaning as the steam escaped from its 200* insides? And I learned how to taste bread (never when it was hot, only when it was cool). Was it crunchy, was its custardy? Was it toothy, was it damp, was the texture smooth or coarse? As all sixteen students chewed and nodded, nodded and chewed, as our instructors passed around thin slivers of the day’s bake. “What,” we were asked, “is its mouth feel?” 

Bread is nothing more than fermentation and fermentation is nothing more than time and temperature. At SFBI we had to take temperatures of the flour, the water, the air; we had to write down times and atmospheric qualities in the room; we had to measure how much the sourdough grew from one hour to the next. After all the noticing, we had to understand when time and fermentation met. This nuance is the baker’s great skill. 

WHEN I began to make bread, I was addicted to the results: I wanted to pull perfect loaves, beautiful loaves, and bold loaves from the oven. But at SFBI I began to understand that bread is a process, not a product. Though bakers are always seeding tomorrow’s loaves with sourdough from yesterday’s dough, we always have to be here, in the present, to perform and control and notice this alchemy. 

For many years of my life, I was numb from pain and anger. Underlying this all was the fear of being hurt. In order to reduce the fear and my shame, I tried to control the outside world so that on the inside I couldn’t be hurt. But my tactics allowed the pain to ferment. 

If I wanted to be a good baker, I had to know what the dough was saying. And the only way to know what the dough was saying was to be honest with myself: if I was going to understand bread, I had to be vulnerable. Slowly, grudgingly, I began to notice the grace and tenderness of bread through all my five senses. But it was the touch which got me most. 

For ten hours a day my hands touched and shaped and kneaded bread: the gentle curve of a taut boule, the gassy slackness of a resting baguette, the strong, angled edges of a batard, the yielding body of a fully-proofed fougasse, the dry firmness of a couronne. On them all I had to use my body, its presence, and its gestures–the torque in my wrist, the twisting of my torso, the firm planting of my feet, the nerve endings in my fingertips–to know when and how to form the dough into bread. And in all this touching of bread, I was touched back.

WHEN I graduated from SFBI in the Fall of 2011, my sideburns came with me. I took a job at a bakery in Steinbeck country. Shifts started at 6pm and on busy nights we baked 2,000 loaves, entirely by hand, on two brick and steel wood-fired ovens the size of the Airstream trailer I slept in. 

Our bodies were wet and damp and sticky and cramped as we danced in a whirlwind of soot and hot oak coals and plumes of ash and flour from that dragon of an oven. The creaky wooden floors bowed beneath our clogged feet and groaned under the weight of the trolleys loaded with fully-proofed dough. We filled the room with cursing and yelling and jokes and eardrum-damaging music: The Prodigy, The Meters, Frankie Knuckles, Bad Brains, Primus. Five pairs of hands would flour and score and load 200 loaves into the oven with 15 foot peels, one by one, one by one, our movements a choreography between the Bolshoi and a mosh pit. 

When we had a few minutes to spare, we’d share a quick smile and a cigarette on the porch. The midnight air around us was cool and clean. Willows were weeping, dark eucalyptus trees were swaying, a dairy cow was sleeping standing up, and acacia were blooming in the moonlight. I fell in love then with these moments, when us bakers have the whole world to ourselves. 

We stubbed out our cigarettes and went back inside like sailors returning to a submarine. And we did the whole thing again. Shaping, loading, slashing, baking, cooling. Five bakers, fifty fingers, two ovens, one moon, 2000 loaves: everything and all of us held together in a fragile web of gluten.  

AT THIS wood-fired bakery I was touching bread every day. But unlike at SFBI, this place had no rules. We didn’t use thermometers or fridges or pH meters or keep notes: we didn’t respect the rules of fermentation. The answer to questions of why or when or what were often answered with a confident shrug as if to say “that’s the way it is.” The loaves were beautiful: the color of varnished wood, pockmarked with rum-soaked currants and roasted walnuts, meyer lemon zest and fresh rosemary and California olive oil weeping through their split crusts. But the recipes were holy, immutable, fixed like the Old Testament. I could read them, I was allowed to make them, but I couldn’t change the way I touched them. 

I always planned to return to New Orleans to open a bakery after graduating from SFBI (except for the five minutes when I considered a job offer as a drug runner). I missed home and that feeling only grew when I spent my one day off a week on the banks of the Russian River underneath the Redwoods and a fiasco of red wine. I loved my friends in California: these bakers, dressed like pirates with earrings and tattoos and long dirty hair. I loved how we lived at night like bats, baking in that hot and tight womb of a bakery. But I wasn’t making my bread, I wasn’t innovating, I wasn’t expanding on what I learned at school: I was falling into someone else’s vision of bread. And I didn’t want to stay asleep in their dream. 

So with my casual impulsiveness–a little habit of confusing recklessness with honesty–I packed up Alistair and left the same way I came. The a/c wasn’t fixed, the rubber gasket around the driver’s window was loose so rain showered in and I said a hard goodbye to a girlfriend I loved very much. Then I drove back to New Orleans, alone, with the same ocean blue tarp and everything my now 24 year old self considered important: a few more Gil Scott-Heron records, knitted socks from my grandmother, unframed art, my mom’s old Cuisinart, none of that really good Moroccan hash but some really good Humbodlt kush instead, the four drawer walnut dresser, and my sourdough starter. I was ambitious, I was righteous, I was scared. And I believed in myself.

Somewhere behind Alistair were two POD storage units I’d crammed with 20,000 lbs of half-broken equipment I’d bought at a wholesale bakery’s fire sale. I made the check out in pencil a few days before I drove off and all along Interstate 10 my mind and my hands itched with ideas on how I was going to use it.

ALL I wanted when I opened Bellegarde was to make bread. I wanted to make delicious, hand-hewn loaves on a scale that would challenge me, tire me, and push me. So against the advice of everyone I told what I was about to do, I did what I wanted to do: make a huge amount of hand-made sourdough bread six days a week. It’s too risky, they said. The bread’s too dark, they said. The bread’s too weird, they said. The bread’s too flavorful, they said. Good luck was the chorus and euphemism for this won’t work out.

Yet it did. The dream was leavened and the dream grew. Staff came, new used equipment came, customers came. Moments melted into months, months fermented into years. I became busy: I became known, respected, pitied. And soon I became bored. 

I was making the same four doughs, day in and day out. I knew them better than I knew myself. Flour, water, salt, sourdough: mix on first speed for ten minutes, fold three times at 45 minute intervals, shape into 900 gram balls, ferment overnight in a cold fridge. Rinse and repeat the next day: scale, portion, proof, bake, cool, deliver. This bread was good, to many it was great. But to me it was just a recipe. I felt marooned on its cul-de-sac.

AT SFBI we had a textbook as big as the Bible and three binders with hundreds of recipes each. When flicking through those pages once back in New Orleans, looking for some inspiration on how to quench my creative thirst, something stuck out at me. The main ingredient in all the recipes was FLOUR…white, plain, lifeless, inert. 

In class we learned about different types of chocolates, various kinds of sugar, nuts, fruits, salts, and creams. All these ingredients had different purposes, names, stories, uses, and flavor profiles. But whether I was looking at a recipe for carrot cake or ciabatta, the main ingredient was always, just, simply…flour. 

That was it. This was the splinter which nagged at me. I was working with an ingredient–my most important ingredient–which had no flavor, no identity, no differentiation from one batch to the next. I was so serious and committed to time-honored methods of autolyse, of slow and cold fermentation, of hand-work throughout the bread-making process. But my methods didn’t match my ingredients: the white flour I was using–and taught to use–had no origin, had no source, had history. It had no story. 

Nourishment around the table is not only a matter of filling one’s belly but of taking part in a daily ritual that celebrates and confirms a sense of belonging to the food and to long, recurrent traditions of a place. 

Paul Bertoli

My journey of working with freshly milled flour began when I took $500 in waded farmers market fives from my sock drawer in that walnut dresser. I responded to an ad on Craigslist for a “Flower Mill.” I drove to the suburbs and bought the thing–lipstick red, with steel rotary plates and a small throaty motor. I immediately bought wheat berries from the bulk bin of a health food store and filled the hopper. What came out had a texture between pencil shavings and couscous. But when I reached my hand into the bowl I placed beneath the stones, my ears ringing with the motor’s whine, my hand touched fresh flour. I rubbed it between my fingers. I brought it to my nose, put it on my lips, and felt it dissolve on my tongue. It was warm and fragrant and fatty and moist. It was alive. 

And so was I. 

That little red mill became the gateway drug into my milling habit. Within a few months, I’d bought another tabletop mill. Then one which stood on its own, its motor louder as a motorcycle. And in 2016, I bought the first mill Andrew Heyn of New American Stone Mills sold. 

In my bakery flour was no longer a product. It was now a living, fresh ingredient. Full of vitamins, minerals, fats, amino acids. And like the best chefs, we used the whole animal–all parts of the wheat went into our bread. Our loaves went from being good to becoming great: like Dorothy, Bellegarde was thrust into a technicolor Kansas. I was finally able to say what I wanted with my bread because my main ingredient was living and breathing and fresh. It had its own flavor which I didn’t need to hide with sourdough or poolish or inclusions. 

SFBI taught me The Rules: How to maintain a clean and organized workspace. How to mise, how to scale, how to build a recipe, how to be aware and mindful and proactive. They taught me how to taste bread, how to slice bread, how to score bread. How to maintain an economy of motion, how to manage inventory, how to autolyse. SFBI, in short, taught me the alphabet of bread. In turn, they taught me its language and how to speak it. But they didn’t teach me how to say what I mean. That was never their job. 

Using freshly milled flour–ground from wheat I sourced directly from the farmers who grew it–allowed me to say what I meant. And mean what I said. Like great cooking, using fresh flour forced me to understand flavor. But instead of reacting to it, I learned how to respond to it: I allowed flour, like any other fresh ingredient, to speak for itself. And now, I wasn’t just feeling bread. I was thinking about it too. 

THIS IS why I was listening to The Dead, stuck in traffic on the 101: because I returned to SFBI this past May to teach a class on whole grain milling and baking. It was the first time I’d been back since graduating in 2011. For five days, alongside my former instructors Mac McConnell and Miyuki Togi, I shared my journey and passion and experience in recipes, in techniques, in lecture, and in demonstration. But mostly, the language I used and the points I made were said with warm, freshly milled flour. I made it clear to students that good bread, great bread, is all about self-expression. It’s in the feel, it’s in the touch, it’s in the rules. But really it’s in the way you tell a story with your ingredients.