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Baker's notes

On Monday and Wednesday last week I hosted accomplished bakery owners for short visits to the bakery. Our oven was the primary reason for both visits, and the visits only reinforced my feeling that buying this oven was a good decision, since having guests such as this both increases my knowledge of baking, and gives me a new perspective of what bakery ownership is about.
On Monday morning the owner of a successful bakery and café in Providence RI called Seven Stars, stopped in with his head baker for a couple hours on their way to Montreal. My connection to Seven Stars goes back to 2002, when one of our first interns, Caroline moved up from Providence and her job at Seven Stars to work here. I had only heard stories about the bakery and had never set foot in the place until 2006 when they hosted a baker’s gathering in late October of that year. It was at that event that I first got to see the Llopis oven, and my conversation with Jim, the owner, has been ongoing ever since. Jim graciously came and coached me through my first bake in the new oven back in August, and has offered advice on all sorts of issues since then.
Wednesday evening brought a first time visitor to the bakery. About two weeks ago I received a call from someone I had never met, but whose name sounded familiar. On the phone he introduced himself and said he knew Michel, the man who owns TMB equipment which sells the Llopis ovens. Glenn said that he lives in Hardwick MA and would like to swing through some time and see the operation. After extending an invitation, I sat thinking about his name and felt sure that I had read it somewhere in a baking book. Flipping though the pages of a coffee table type bread book, there was Glenn standing in his bakery in California. Reading the profile of the bakery, I learned that he employed over 200 workers, and among his many achievements was being one of the three members of the 1996 world cup of baking team USA. I would be lying if I did not acknowledge that I felt a bit self conscious about the less professional aspects of the bakery compared to the kind of operations these two come from, but they both had only nice things to say, and if they had any judgment about how things are done around here, they hid it well.
One of the more interesting discussions for me was hearing about the daily operations of these two much larger bakeries. In Jims case, Seven Stars is mostly a retail bakery and café, open seven days a week all year, with a full line of breads and pastries. They have a sparkling new production facility and two retail outlets. The production floor is active in some way twenty four hours a day. On busy days they’ll produce thousands of loaves of bread and pastries. Orchestrating the smooth operation of such a business is no small feat, but Jim seems to have put together a capable staff, and his business is thriving. One interesting side note was that coffee makes up full third of their sales. In fact Jim only half sarcastically said that they could probably phase out bread completely and be just as profitable.
Glenn has sold his bakery in California and now works for a large wholesale bakery in New Haven. The numbers he ran through describing the operation he now manages were really staggering. Forty thousand pounds of flour in one production cycle (18 hours), a conveyer oven that is over 50 feet long, mixers that hold up to five hundred pounds of dough. It was all quite amazing to hear, and yet he was just as comfortable talking about our miniscule operation, and actually offered to come and bake for me if I ever needed the help.
My thoughts since these two visits last week have mostly been about how insignificant my bakery is when it comes to the business of feeding people. It hasn’t been a negative line of thought, just a good reality check. Don’t get me wrong, I’m so grateful that an operation such as this can still succeed, and that many of the small food businesses I support can also succeed, but when it comes to feeding the masses, the reality is that all of us “little guys” are pretty much irrelevant. From the vegetable grower planting a quarter acre of this and a half acre of that, to the small dairy or chicken farm, to the two person bakery, while we can hope that our products are valuable to our small group of customers, our fraction of the overall food economy is incredibly tiny. I don’t know which type of business, the micro, or the industrial will have an easier time adjusting to the changes in the economy that seem to be rolling our way, but one thing is for sure, it would take many thousands of small operations to produce anywhere near the output of our large scale industrial food system. The New Haven bakery Glenn manages makes our total annual bread production in one busy night. (110,000 pounds of dough) Operations of that size and larger dot the country by the hundreds, and while between ten and fifteen percent of that production goes to waste, the rest is sold and consumed by all of us. At it’s best the movement to support local, small scale producers is inspiring and hopeful, but when I think about it with this new perspective in mind, it all seems a little quaint and naïve. But don’t stop ordering just because we’re irrelevant, we still need and appreciate all the support we can get! Have a good week. noah

Baker's Notes

There is a good deal of camaraderie between bakers. Regional gatherings and now online chat lists host bakers from bakeries of all sizes from all over the world. In general there is little confrontation and people are happy to contribute advice about everything from bread formulas to business planning. Even bakers who sell in the same market get along well. Last week on a web list of bakers that I participate in, a difference of opinion led to quite a heated dialogue about etiquette, opinion and attitude. I’ll describe the basic disagreement, but the real reason I bring this up is that it encapsulates an important human conflict.

Baking is truly an international craft. The lineage of baking techniques goes back centuries in several countries, and each tradition has both unique and shared practices. Because of this international heritage, baking terms that describe the same thing, have English, Italian, French, German and probably several other national versions. No baker would claim that the terms from one country are superior to that of another country, but having so many terms to describe basically the same thing, makes for a lot of confusion. For example, the term sourdough has the following counterparts in English and French alone: starter, mother, leaven culture, levain, chef and sponge. It is obvious how one baker’s sponge could be another’s “chef”, but without standardization, who’s to know? Before I go on, let me just say that bakers are not the hopeless bunch of idiots that this mess makes us out to be. When it comes to calculating bread formulas, we use an almost universally accepted mathematical system referred to as “baker’s math”. Since the ingredients are expressed in percentages rather than volume or weight measurements in baker’s math, anyone from any country can compare two formula’s side by side and get meaningful information very quickly. There are only two or three different ways that bakers use “baker’s math”, so compared to the mess in the baking lexicon described above, that’s nothing.

Now back to our story. A home baker asked on the breadbaker’s web list last week if anyone had ever come up with an accepted glossary of definitions for the many baking terms bandied about in such groups. A couple matter of fact responses came back stating one source or another, and then a long post came in from a baker in Australia that addressed the issue in a somewhat sarcastic, a little crude, but to many of us, hilarious way. There was a little profanity, a few anatomical terms, and some remarks about religion so a PG-13 to R rating was advisable, but as far as I know, no children follow the latest flour price trends on the breadbaker’s list. Several of us thanked him for the comic relief given the current state of the baking trade, and then those who were offended chimed in. Accusations came in about everything from his crude language, to sexism, and religious intolerance. In his defense, his american wife posted a comment about how incredibly dangerous it has become in the U.S. to say much of anything potentially controversial without someone howling. After the moderator of the group posted the group rules, it was made clear that several of the posts broke policy, but the whole affair got me thinking about more than just this case, and that is where my larger point lies.

As a group of adults, it seems to me that the a member of the breadbaker’s group aught to be able to say a few swears, mention human anatomy, and even be a little offensive from time to time and not have people jumping up and down in disgust. What fun is it to be ruled over by a set of laws that one is likely to find in an elementary school? This is the argument of one half of my brain at least. The other half can’t help but bring up the long history of thinly veiled, and not so thinly veiled hate speech that was and is still used as a method of oppression, and abuse all over the world. Whether racist, sexist, homophobic or any other form of discrimination, I think most people agree that such speech can be genuinely hurtful and ought to be controlled in some way especially in public spaces.

In my opinion our Australian baker was not speaking hatefully about Christians, women or French people, but obviously others felt differently. To take another case that people reading probably remember, I had mixed feelings about the Don Imus debacle last year around this time. I personally never much liked his show, I thought he made a very stupid comment when he referred to an entire basketball team as a bunch of “nappy headed -----“, but in my opinion the public outrage shamed him as he deserved, the issue was brought into the light and aired out, and he apologized. What followed was a tangential, polarized nationwide shouting match that perhaps revealed underlying tensions about race in America, but the discussion was carried out in a dysfunctional way which was destined to not really address much of anything. Having the whole thing end with him being taken off the air because sponsors were pulling out rather than listeners voting with their "feet", to me illustrated that Mr. Imus had been turned into a symbol rather than a flawed individual like the rest of us, and whether he was sorry or not was no longer relevant. I could bring up a half dozen more similar examples from this political season alone, but instead I’ll let you think a moment about how the dilemma plays out on all levels, from the personal to the international. I challenge anyone to come up with a workable solution that can be applied objectively. Thanks for the orders, have a good week. Noah

Baker's Notes

Baker’s Notes: Along a different but related line of thought as last week, I've been contemplating human understanding again this week. What got me started was an article about global warming in a monthly publication. Before I get to the specifics though, a bit about how I arrived there.

In addition to the fact that we humans explain the way we understand the world to work in mechanical terms, (as I wrote about last week) we also generally prefer condensed versions of more complicated issues. For example, few of us fully understand how the immune system works, but in general we understand that it helps us to fight off disease, and we leave it at that. When this affinity for the concise is extended to other parts of the world around us, it tends to narrow subjects into one or two dimensional, agree or disagree problems. Arenas that are victim to such reductionism abound. Whether it be science and the environment, health and nutrition, business and finance, or geopolitics and policy, we are bombarded with one or two sentence summations of very complicated issues, and more often than not given action plans that "experts in the field" recommend. Taking hold of the rallying cry of the day gives people's passion an outlet. One need not look far to find passionate people espousing a particular take on any or all of the subjects above. With the amount of information available to all of us, It's understandable that we seek condensed and simplified versions of the stories in the public discussion. It would take a whole team of researchers to evaluate even half the issues in a balanced way and put them all into context for an individual to discern with reason, and that's assuming that the team of researchers refrained from subjective interpretation, a very unlikely scenario. What this leaves me feeling is that the more time I spend trying to be open minded, the less willing I am to be completely convinced of anything.

My example here is the article about global warming I mentioned at the beginning. I am not a climate expert, and I don't want to pick any fights here, but my basic understanding of one aspect of emissions led me to make this argument. I accept that global warming is happening, and I am becoming more convinced that human behavior is a cause of this warming, but I think the approaches to addressing the emissions problem are at times laughably inadequate, overly simplistic, and in some cases just plain incorrect. In the particular article I read last week, it makes very specific suggestions about what actions we can take to reduce our carbon footprint. One of the headings was something along the lines of: "Food, how to change your diet for a cooler planet”. In the few paragraphs that follow, the reader is told that livestock and dairy cattle produce huge amounts of methane and co2, and that transporting and processing all of the food from these animals adds even more to their carbon footprint. The recommendation is to reduce the consumption of animal foods.

There's no question that modern, large-scale animal agriculture has a negative impact on everything from animal welfare to ground water supplies. I agree whole heartedly that as practiced, the vast majority of animal foods produced in this country and to a greater and greater extent around the world cause an undue burden on the environment. Where the article is just plain wrong is that it draws no distinction between animal husbandry as practiced by conscientious farmers all over the world, and industrial animal food production. While it requires a more nuanced understanding of the subject, anyone who is willing to learn a bit about what well managed ruminant animals do for soil fertility, plant diversity and carbon sequestering will arrive at a very different conclusion.

Properly cared for ruminant animals do not require grain. By eliminating grain from the diet, there is no need for the expansive acres devoted to corn and soybeans, which devastate soil vitality. Well managed pastures are a dense carpet of biomass, meaning that from the very first warm days in May when the grass greens up, to the last days in October when the frost gets heavy, various grass and legume crops form a thick carpet of carbon capturing plants, something no annual vegetable crop can match since fields must be plowed, planted, cultivated and harvested all in one season. A well managed pasture absorbs rain better than cultivated fields, thus minimizing erosion. Animal products purchased directly from farmers by the end user require little packaging, transportation, or processing.

Taking an Imaginary tour of two farms brings this issue into clear focus for me. The first farm is a vast flat expanse. Row upon row of a single crop grow in all directions as far as the eye can see. Small windblown plants grow out of cracked, compacted soil. Once harvested, the farm products are shipped to processing plants that break the foods down, and turn them into an array of packaged foods, which can sit on store shelves for months or years. The second farm is green and lush, rolling pastures are divided by trees, birds fly between the hedgerows and a small pond at the edge of the woods. A herd of cows casts long shadows as they walk towards the barn for their evening milking. If we were to abandon animal agriculture completely, the first farm would be our primary source of protein, (soy and legume) and fat, (vegetable oil). If we reject the industrial food model and commit to supporting local grass fed dairy and beef operations, there is a chance we will still have the opportunity to get these foods from the second farm.

Since I’m not a zealot, I don’t stand on street corners and hold signs about my opinions, but I do get upset when the popular press takes aim without making distinctions at all forms of animal agriculture. It’s very late, so you’ll have to excuse me if I’ve offended anyone. Thanks for the orders, and have a good week.