How I accidentally wandered into the world of baking bread.

I’ve always been fascinated by “ingredients”. I revel in the process of isolating a single culinary element, then spending weeks boiling, broiling, braising, burning, blanching, and beating it until I’m confident in my understanding of its every quirk and feature. There’s something beautiful to me about taking something that seems simple and ubiquitous, and discovering its capacity for astounding complexity. This fascination is often in practical opposition with another of my personal obsessions.

I’m also a compulsive sharer.

When I have something truly wonderful and delicious in my possession, I can’t help but give some to everyone who I think may appreciate it. A fresh bag of coffee gets split up into tiny sample-size mason jars, a bar of single origin chocolate will often end up with each individual square wrapped up in parchment, half of a new bottle of scotch will be decanted into suspicious little blue bottles, then these tiny gifts will promptly be distributed to friends and acquaintances with discerning palates.

This is all well and good, but totapuri mango sashimi, glazed pork belly tacos, smokey cucumber daiquiris, and rock steak (steak made on a rock) doesn’t travel terribly well. Whenever I cook something good enough to share, I generally find myself too limited by time, temperature, and technology to share with friends who aren’t presently sitting at my bar or table. This dilemma is what eventually nudged me towards the craft that I had for years described as “Meh, not really my thing”.

I’ve always avoided baking. I like bread, but the process of actually baking the stuff just seemed so drastically divorced from what I love about cooking. To me, making food is like making music. Bringing together an ensemble of complementary components which together evoke a feeling or tell a story. Baking by comparison seemed like a sterile, formulaic process where outcomes are defined by a recipe, rather than creativity or intuition. I developed this opinion when I was a teen, eating primarily mass-produced, pre-sliced, plastic bagged loaves. That bread didn’t have soul, it was a utensil, a way to carry legitimate food to my mouth. As I got older I started eating better breads, but I never thought to reexamine my feelings on baking. Eventually, my wife started experimenting with making these beautiful, delicious, fragrant loaves of sourdough rye and suddenly something just clicked.

Good, honest, real, bread is little more than a single, bizarre ingredient. Think about it, how do you make a loaf of sourdough?

Add water to grass seed dust. Leave it out for a while. Smack it around periodically. Add heat.

If you do that with a whole, minimally modified grain, the resulting product has all of the necessary nutrients to sustain human life indefinitely. That’s all it takes to make a workable product, but spend some time getting to know the grain and the perplexing ways it reacts to water, time, touch, and temperature, you’ll quickly learn to summon a crunchy, chewy, sweet, savory, acidic, aromatic, nutritious creation out of almost nothing. It feels more than a little bit like magic. Delicious, highly portable, magic.

It’s a familiar feeling. In a former life, I spent almost a decade brewing and studying coffee because I was enchanted by how a little seed, when roasted, crushed, and mixed with water could produce the one of the most chemically diverse things in my kitchen. This was amazing to me. I became obsessed with learning every intricate detail about how an unremarkable mountain bush produces an elixir that fuels the world. I spent a decade on this fascination and I still feel like I only scratched the surface. To this day, my morning cup of coffee is a daily reminder that the world is almost impossibly complex and compelling. Just as it was with coffee, grain and bread has sparked my curiosity and astonishment at the synergy between nature and the quintessentially human pursuit of the exceptional. This time, I’m glad that the product of my curiosity can easily be sliced up and shared.