The Gossip in the Grain

A Housekeeping Email

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

Andre Dubus

Heirloom Spelt and Einkorn Baguettes, Poland 2024.

I’m shoving aside the normal post this month to share some news and updates.

Before that, I want to say thanks to everyone who takes the time to support my work: reading, clicking, commenting, sharing, unsubscribing. However you engage, I appreciate it. Really.

Since I began this blog in the Spring, my goal has and continues to be sharing stories—however pretty, however ugly—about bread, about wheat, about memory. I take the adage seriously that if no one is writing what you want to read, you must write it. That attitude, however flawed or fabulous, is what helped me build my bakery in New Orleans so many years ago when no one was making the bread I wanted to eat. 

These days, I’m stepping into a new life of old work.

I’ve left the project I built in London and am now focusing on teaching, consulting (this Fall I’ll be in Maryland, Phoenix, and Bermuda), and writing for my blog here and for my friend Maurizio over at The Perfect Loaf. I’m also going back to school to finish my Bachelor’s. At LSU Alexandria. Online, no less. It’s as glamorous as it doesn’t sound. (This Summer I did an independent study on the role of bread in the American Civil War. Knock yourself out by reading it here if you like footnotes and muskets).

Baguette Dough, France July 2024.

Through it all, there’s been tremendous personal changes this past year–some welcomed, some surprising, some brutal. No matter, my hands and my heart always return to bread: the mixing, the kneading, the recipes, the sharing. It’s my compass and forever will remain so.

I’m honored that this blog has 4,000 subscribers across 40 states and 44 countries. It’s validating and vindicating to realize that what I wonder and don’t know and want to know resonates with you. This connection is what has drawn me to art and writing and music since I was a kid. And it’s this power which wooed me when I found bread: not just the alchemy in the making of dough, but the stories we tell of the bread itself. For me, telling and hearing stories is how I feel someone without knowing them. And in this being reminded of how someone else is living, I’m reminded of being alive. Stories leaven our lives just as yeast leavens bread: without them, both are flat.

So I will continue to write. Not as work. But as a way to learn, to wonder. Sometimes as a way to forget. Mostly, as a way to remind myself of the things which keep us together, souvenirs to these moments we share.

If what I do has value to you, I’d appreciate your contribution–a yearly subscription is only $30. My goal is to have 500 paid subscribers by the end of the year. I’d be grateful if you can be in that number. I want to see if I can earn a part of my living, at least for the time being, without a brick and mortar bakery. So I’m trying my damndest to build a bakery with my stories and imagination. In the coming months, I’ll be adding some recipes to this blog for paid subscribers. And I want to launch a podcast on bread and stories with a friend in the new year.

I’ve taught about 2,000 students in 200 bread workshops in the past ten years. And I’ve got a few more planned for this year (links and info below). Every time I teach–whether it’s in Prague or Paris, Baton Rouge or Birmingham–I teach with stories. It goes like this: I find myself somewhere new and investigate flavor through local stone-milled flour. Then I design a menu, a map really, and use my techniques and experience to accommodate the flour’s flavor and strengths and weakness. With this blueprint, I show my students how to bake great breads. Many, many times the loaves we make together are beyond belief: the depth of flavor, the textures, the colors are radiant. Many students never expected that what we make was possible with their local flours—too many people told them it wasn’t possible. Even though this was how they wanted to bake bread, they seldom tried because of the dissuasion.

Sourdough Proof Check, Prague August 2024.

When I opened Bellegarde 12 years ago nobody wanted the bread I made. I’d cold call New Orleans chefs before service and get laughed out of their kitchens. Doors were slammed on my face, phones were hung up on me in mid-sentence “I’m making sourdough—”. If I was lucky enough to cross the barbed wire and get someone’s attention in the kitchen their responses were four-letter variants of NO. The bread was always too, too, too: dark, expensive, flavorful, chewy, sour, strange, crusty. I was disheartened and sensitive. But I kept going; kept waking, kept baking. And—for whatever reason—I didn’t change my recipes. I dug my heels into my soul and kept making the bread I wanted to make. I didn’t know it then, but I wasn’t making the bread for them. I was making that bread for me. I was trying—and mostly failing save a few incredible supporters—to tell a story about how I wanted to make bread.

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”
Robert Bresson

So in every class I teach, I tell students that bread is a self-portrait. Of where you’ve been, where you’re going. Mostly, it’s a mirror about where you’re from. Bread is the story bakers tell about ourselves.

There’s no better way to tell that story than by working with the flavors and flours which surround you. There’s not just power in this self-expression: there’s pleasure because bread is delicious. But no one will believe your story if you don’t believe it yourself. So I ask each student, before we start and before we leave, “What is the story you want to tell?”

Below you’ll find some upcoming classes. Please join me if you can. And if you have or know of a bakery which would like to host a workshop, please let me know.

• San Diego: October 20-21 2024

• With Maurizio Leo in Phoenix or Seattle. October 27-28 2024 (details to come)

• San Francisco: November 11-15 2024

• Sweden: With Sebastien Boudet, Mid-December 2024 (details to come)

• Poland: Early December 2024 (details to come)

  

  From Warsaw With Love, June 2024.