Third Time’s the Charm: An Origin Story
This is probably the third time in my life that I have tried to bake real bread. And today I’m more confident than ever ― I think I finally figured it out. But seeing that the third time was the charm, we should start from the beginning.
I have always loved to cook. I think this passion really developed during middle school summers where I spent hours at home with the Cooking Channel (it had just separated from the Food Network). I loved the personalities and knowledge available to absorb across the network ― from Alton Brown’s practical explanations of kitchen fundamentals, to Nigella Lawson’s charisma and creativity in describing her recipes. (There’s also a special place in my cooking vocab for Nadia G’s Bitchin’ Kitchen). These chefs were my guides as I explored the kitchen and slowly developed my own style through countless cooking projects and dinner parties with friends ― typical teenage years.
ONE. The story of my chef journey continues in different directions, but this is the first point where bread comes in. I really can’t recall my very first loaf, but I imagine it was a baguette. That sounds impressive for a first bread, but it was more a naive way of thinking I could recreate my favorite bread from the french baker at the farmers’ market. I found a simple baguette recipe from Kelsey Nixon which would become my go-to recipe.
They were alright. There is only so much flavor you can develop with commercial yeast and all-purpose flour, but fresh bread at home beats store-bought any day. I couldn’t compare to the farmers’ market, but mimicking the real process ― folding a coil into the dough, spraying the oven to help the crust ― gave my bread the potential to be great. It felt like my baguettes were in training to one day be worthy of the market. Until then, they were still delicious for morning toast.
TWO. Years later, inspired by Michael Pollan’s book and Netflix Original Series Cooked, I had a sudden desire to make/grow my own mother yeast. In my fraternity bedroom at UCLA. In time to bake bread when I would return home two weeks later. “Mother,” as I called her, did better as a Snapchat personality than as real yeast. I was fascinated by the idea of raising a living being out of nothing, that would later become real food. She would appear in my Snapchat stories with cartoon emoji eyes, executing an elaborate plot to kill me. Some friends and my mom (not to be confused with Mother the yeast) were concerned about my commitment to the narrative, but my current fascination with fermentation now makes sense in retrospect.
Mother’s bread tasted like “real bread,” but was too dense, and dry, and just felt homemade in the wrong way. My father took care of Mother when I was away for the summer. My anthropology thesis brought me to Bologna, Italy to study culinary traditions (also a long story).
During my fieldwork I was fortunate to spend one week as a WWOOFer at Caracol, an agritourism and bakery in the country where we had fresh bread every day, long meals under the stars, and too many roaming kittens to count. My host and resident baker Lorenzo patiently described to me how yeast works, how it becomes bread, and how I would make my own. I was intimidated by his seemingly 24/7 baking schedule, and decided it was not the right time in my life to take on bread baking. I told my dad back home that he could get rid of Mother (rest in peace).
In September, I returned to school and began to write my thesis about culinary traditions, work for a catering company and private cooking school, and took my first job as a personal chef. Cooking quickly became my life, but I had left baking on the farm in Italy.
Just months ago over winter break, a serendipitous opportunity presented itself to get hands-on experience with professional baking. My dad’s cousin Michael Faircloth had just opened a bakery in Lafayette near our home in the San Francisco Bay Area. He had worked for years in bakeries throughout Europe, taught courses in culinary school, and sold authentic French and Italian pastries to a cult following at his local farmers’ markets.
Having just opened La Châtaigne in December 2016, our family was eager to help him launch his business, and the constant help of aunts and uncles in the kitchen and at the counter made it seem like a professional family bake sale.
For one week, I woke up at 4am, took the train across the bay, and helped Michael and my Zia Teri bake croissants, and morning buns, and canelès, and cookies, and beautiful loaves of bread before opening. I mixed doughs, cleaned dishes, burnt my hands on kouign amanns, and shaped giant olive fougasses. I listened to Michael’s stories about French baking, spoke Italian with my aunt, drank tea while eating fresh croissants, and tried to soak up as much knowledge as I could.
I’m grateful to Lorenzo and Michael for generously and patiently offering their mentorship. Thank you for the explanations, wisdom, chance to try my own hand in the kitchen, and for seeing the humor in me cooking the wrong batch of tomatoes (sorry Lorenzo) and flooding your bakery (sorry Michael).
THREE. I left La Châtaigne with a burning desire to craft my own bread. Michael gave me some of his own mother yeast (I named it “Faircloth” in his honor), and I set out to acquire the equipment he recommended to me. For hours I read and reread Chad Robertson’s guide to basic country bread in his Tartine bakery book. The process seemed so long and mysterious ― in the bakery I had only experienced the same 5-hour window of the bread’s lifetime each day. Now I was about to be responsible for an entire bread lifecycle. I was intimidated thinking back to Lorenzo’s explanation of the 24/7 commitment, but this time willing to prove I was capable.
If there’s a life lesson here, it’s that the moment I gained the confidence to bake was when I accepted that I would make mistakes. This feels silly to write — we’re talking about bread after all. But in my mind I had not yet made the distinction between one loaf of bread and a full-time commitment. I didn’t know if I would have enough time, or patience, or skill. It could go horribly wrong.
But wait ― the best part is that it is just bread. How wrong could this go? There will be another loaf. That’s one of my favorite things about cooking: If the worst thing that happened to you today was the quinoa came out soggy (true story), it was probably still an OK day. And since humans have to keep eating, there will always be a tomorrow for the quinoa.
The journey of a baker began with a single loaf. Two actually ― both named “Abernathy” as the first of of my Westworld Baking Trials.
I remember being mesmerized by the sourdough bread coming out of my oven. Taking a step back I realized that the culmination of my baking experiences created a loaf that was suddenly farmers’ market-competitive.
Abernathy was a miracle. But it was also ten years in the making, at least as a recurring theme in my life. I just couldn’t have foreseen this when I was spending my summers with Ina Garten and Giada de Laurentiis.
Baking was something I had approached from different angles. Given up. Tried again. Not in a “persevere and you will succeed” kind of way. More of a “revisiting an old book to find new meaning” experience. And here we are. Talking about the story I had thought was just some high school reading, not realizing the impact it would have on my life. An adventure, a love story, an instruction manual, and a life lesson in bread.
This post is part of “Notes on Bread” — an ongoing story about my life in sourdough. Be a part of Zach’s artisanal food journey at Centro Città.
