By 7:00 a.m. the bâtards, French loaves, and other early breads are out of the oven, cooled, and packaged in paper bags, and the baguettes are shaped. The dark breads have finished baking and the bread-packing station, right next to the oven, begins to overflow with racks and stacks upon stacks and baskets of bread, all queuing for a temporary home at a restaurant, market, or bakery counter before heading to your hand and mouth. In a matter of hours, bags of flour, goopy preferments and soaking buckets of grains, tubs of eggs and cream, bricks of yeast, and bags of salt transform from inedible to incredible, a feast of crisp crunch and deliciousness. This daily miracle is anything but common. There is life here; within the folds of this doing, there is something to see, to appreciate, to love.

We push the oven temperature even higher in preparation for baguettes. Their open interior, toasty, cracker-crisp crust, and oven-kissed cuts must bake just long enough to color but not so long that they dry out. Their ratio of crust to crumb (the relationship between the area of the outside and the area of the interior) is very high, allowing them to bake in a relatively short time: 21 to 23 minutes. Getting two hundred or three hundred baguettes, each individually cut five to seven times with a razor, through the oven can take an hour or more. The motions we make, the use of the transfer peel that holds the unbaked loaf as it is moved from the linen cloth (couche) to the canvas of the loader, the cutting, the slide of the loader, the steaming—these things become natural with time, ingrained, embedded in physical memory, a tai chi sequence of baking judo.

Around 9:00 a.m. we break for lunch, sitting as a team when everyone reaches a stopping point. The mixer looks up, the baker steps back, those at the bench scrape boards or sweep and begin to transition to the second part of the day. “How are you looking?” “Ready to sit?” Consensus is reached; maybe we throw a lunch pizza into the oven and then pause for a few minutes before returning to spend the remaining portion of our day shaping our breads that will be cold-fermented and finish our setup and “prep” work for the next day.

Slowly these tasks became natural, my skills improved, and I began to recognize landmarks on our daily route. I was a crappy baker, no doubt. I could barely shape and hadn’t even made my way to mixing or doing oven work, but I could tell good stories about my children, who provided daily opportunities for laughter and also tears over the challenges of parenting. There were bumps, to be sure. If I had known exactly where we were headed financially I might have been too scared to make the leap from our New York life. I lay awake one night in the throes of a panic attack, terrified that the decision to move was going to bankrupt us. But Julie began teaching voice and made enough to buy our food and we did everything we could to rid ourselves of extra expenses. At the bakery the word got out that although I was a novice baker I could run spreadsheets like a boss, and I became a fixture at financial and operational meetings. And I was willing to do any job; I drove the bakery delivery van one day a week, dropping bread off at wholesale accounts, restaurants, and groceries. Not my favorite task but I was willing to do anything possible to make myself valuable while waiting for some level of proficiency to show up.

As the day proceeds we look at what we have done, inspecting the quality of each bread, viewing it against our expectations, the previous day’s work, the bar we hold in our mind’s eye that separates mediocre from good or great. After a decade of doing this work I have yet to complete a bake day and take off my apron satisfied. I have come close, and to many, the things that I nitpick about may seem inconsequential. But this may also be the nature of craft; I can always improve, shape better, bake better, mix better. There is no arriving; perfection exists not for the maker but for the recipient. The perfect loaf and the misshapen one are celebrated in equal measure by my children as I come through the door holding everything in my arms.