On that same trip, Peter the bagel maker showed me a book that pictured large, dark French loaves, thick-crusted and dusty, ripping open where they had been cut with a razor before being baked in massive wood-fired ovens. I was drawn in by the images, I couldn’t look away—it was as though they connected with something in a life I had lived previously. I saw stories with lines deeper than the bread’s color and form. There is much in that combination of flour, water, salt, sourdough culture, and hot oven. A form rises to tell a tale that began in Mesopotamia when nomads collected grains from cereal grasses. Those grains, which were saved and resown—the ancestors of modern wheat—enabled humans to settle and form societies. Over time, the breads evolved from flat shapes to larger loaves; grain grinding evolved from hand-turned rotary cairns to water- and wind-powered gristmills; and masons learned to make domed bake ovens, which modern builders continue to copy. Civilization in an edible package, delicious in color and form, moved by hands from field to shape to baker’s peel; I couldn’t look away, I had to make those loaves.

I have to admit something about what happened next. I am not casual. I don’t do things half-interested or part-time. When I started running, I leapfrogged marathons and went straight to super-distances. I suppose it’s been this way for a while; work in classical music certainly reinforced the benefit of daily involvement and passion. The power of the heart muscle is undeniable.

I started by reading everything I could find on artisan baking. Baby steps and early questions . . . what the heck is the difference between a baguette and a bâtard? If at first I was a motorist, pleased to drive across a beautiful bridge, in time I developed the eyes of an engineer, seeing stanchions, guy wires, and footings, the structure and necessity of it all. I joined the largest bread trade organization in the United States, the Bread Bakers Guild of America, and found coursework in New York where I could supplement my reading. And I baked and I baked and I baked, keeping meticulous notes and eating the mistakes.

I baked my first sourdough loaves on terra-cotta quarry tiles at the hottest temperature possible in my tiny New York oven. I gently scored their raw skins with a utility razor and used an old piece of cardboard to slide them onto the smoking preheated tiles. I quickly steamed, pouring boiling water onto a pan in the bottom of the oven and slamming the door closed to retain as much moisture as possible on the expanding loaf. I checked its progress once too often and was rewarded by the bleeping scream of smoke alarms and the smell of overheated laminate cabinetry. The loaf rose well, jumping as it darkened during the bake. When the timer sounded I turned off the oven and let the loaf coast, drying further and setting the crust. Now, this is the part where the story should say, “I removed my masterpiece at the forty-fifth minute and placed it on a rack to cool while crowds gathered outside the manger to celebrate the arrival of bread baby Jesus.” In actuality, the birth was less spectacular. What emerged from the oven were misshapen forms—ripped where they should open gracefully, matte crusts that I had hoped would shine. Here was the product of my weeks of thinking and reading, growing my sourdough culture, and hoping like an expectant parent for my dream of dark French bakery loaves. When I look back at it, my work was leagues from being artisan. I was dejected. It may sound silly, but hope had been bound up in those loaves—I was searching for something and hoping I could find it there.

But then, as the oven cooled and the smell of my melting cabinets dissipated, something happened. As hot air moves from the center of a cooling loaf, traveling outward through crumb past crust and into the room, it picks up things along the way, releasing and exchanging, completing the transformation that began during baking as starches set and the loaf firms. As this happened an aroma perfumed the apartment, infusing everything. It was a dark, roasted smell; sniffing it, one could go on a sensory tour from bold coffee to toasting nuts, then over to malty sweetness and the flinty mineral hit of wheat and the lactic zip of aged cheese all in a noseful. A smile crept onto my face, my eyes widened, and I will admit to a kitchen dance . . . I had done it!

In all of the baking that I had done at home, I had never been able to achieve the flavor that I had tasted in loaves from great bakeries; there was always something lacking, some nuance missing. My bread had been good, and using a yeasted preferment had moved me closer to but not into the realm of what I had hoped for. Until now. The culture was the key, the complexity, the fermentation, the bake. The loaves were ugly as hell but they were delicious and they were from my own damn hands. I was doing something. I was alive and maybe headed home, back to handwork, back to heritage. Let’s make those loaves, but prettier.