How do you find meaning in your life when you know that you are just one tiny speck tooling around in a giant universe? What are the answers? How do you live with purpose? I don’t really know, but I sure have been spending a good amount of my time baking bread and that seems to do the trick.
I bake a lot of bread. I make it, bake it, and eat it. I think about it when I’m awake and dream about it when I’m asleep. I look for new recipes on my favorite bread sites. I have a tower of books on nothing but bread. My Instagram is filled with bakeries from around the world. I visit those bakeries when I’m traveling and spy on their ovens and their flour and their techniques.
I love the smell of it. I love the taste of it. I love what I can do with it. I love sharing it. I give it to friends and family. I send it to strangers in brown paper bags that I bought just for the bread.
To my wife’s dismay and against her wishes, I have taken over a large portion of the kitchen with breadbaskets, mixers, and flour containers. I get upset if my kids forget to put a fork in the dishwasher, but I have no problem with the mountains of flour piled on the floor.
I order my flour from a company in Utah called Central Milling. It costs more to ship it than it does to buy it. It comes in fifty-pound bags. I always know when it arrives because it lands on the front steps with a thud like an elephant taking a seat.
I have to drag it into the house like a dead body. Not that I have ever carted around a dead body, but I can only imagine it wouldn’t be easy. I feel good when I open the box and see the giant bag. It means something. It means that I bake. That I take it seriously. And that my wife thinks I’m annoying.
The other side of the kitchen is the bread box, a giant cutting board that is just for bread, and bread knives. A good serrated bread knife is a must. The sensual difference of a smooth slicing of a loaf of bread is palpable.
Baking bread the way I do is not easy. It’s a three-day process from the time I decide to make it to the moment I am stuffing a slice in my mouth. It can be complicated, there’s a lot that can go wrong, and I love every minute of it.
It begins by taking the sourdough starter out of the refrigerator and feeding it flour and water. Yes, feed it.
The sourdough starter is a living organism. It’s living yeast like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors that needs to be fed. You can create one of these pets by mixing up a bowl of flour and water and leaving it on the counter. Microscopic natural yeast that is flying all around us will enter the mixture and eat it. This becomes a mini ecosystem of yeast feeding and extracting gas. It’s believed that someone, probably in ancient Egypt, accidentally stumbled upon this process and this supercool baker made the first bread more than four thousand years ago.
I have two of these creatures living in Mason jars inside my refrigerator.
Although people name theirs, I have not. We were, however, featured on the cover of the New York Times food section when the prolific Sam Sifton interviewed my starter and me and sent a photographer to snap some shots of us. This caused confusion in my comedian friends, who thought someone had stolen my identity.
When it’s time to bake, they get brought out onto the counter and fed repeatedly for a couple of days, essentially putting the yeast into a feeding frenzy before it can be added to the flour for the creation of the bread dough.
My only regret about this lengthy process is that I don’t have more time to do this. My life has been so busy over the last two years that if I can get a week or two at home without leaving, it’s a luxury. It’s gotten to the point where I gauge my touring schedule by the amount of bread I’m able to bake. If there’s bread, I’m home and I’m happy.
My basic bread is a country loaf. A round, rustic-looking bread that is mainly malted wheat flour mixed with all-purpose white flour and a touch of rye. I bake these two at a time in cast-iron Dutch ovens that allow me to generate a lot of heat and steam when the lids are shut.
I also bake bagels, the best in L.A., and an olive loaf that is insanely good. Green and kalamata olives mixed with herbes de Provence and lemon zest. It reaches another level with cream cheese spread on it.
One of my favorite things to do with the bread is make the Gentleman’s Breakfast. It’s so good it will break your heart. The night before, you mix chopped garlic and diced anchovies into soft butter. The next morning, you pull it out of the refrigerator and spread healthy portions of it on toasted country bread. A fried egg on the side is optional. I’m telling you that a bite into this with some great coffee on the side is transformative, but I don’t recommend booking any meetings or romantic interludes that day.
Another favorite that might make your skin crawl but is heaven to me is to spread cream cheese on a thick piece of toast, spread sardines across, and top with capers and olive oil. Gadzooks, it’s delicious. It’s not as salty as the anchovies, but it has a natural, more fragrant taste and apparently is crazy good for you.
The kids love avocado toast, almond-butter toast, or just plain butter with scrambled eggs.
It’s the baking for others that makes the experience really special. With each step of the actual baking process, the oven door is opened and some baking-bread aroma escapes into the house. Everyone is alerted that something is being made for them.
Someone is baking bread that can be enjoyed and made into grilled cheese or a simple toast on the way out the door to school. Someone cares.
So, this is what I do. I fail. I succeed. I have glorious loaves that I’m proud of. I have flat failures that I quickly put in the garbage before anyone can see. But with practice things got easier and I developed an intuition about it all.
I know by the weight of the metal scooper in my hand how much flour will be measured out on the scale. I know the same about how much weight is in a cup of water, how long the dough has to rest. I know before it goes into the oven with very little variance how much it will rise. It is the knowing that has made this practice transformative.
Whatever you do and do well, your swimming, your running, your painting, these are more than hobbies, they’re an extension of you. The real you. The simple act of doing something well over time stirs up a part of your subconscious that even you may not be aware of. And make no mistake, that is nothing short of magical.
It’s magical because we’re dealing with unknowable parts of ourselves. Parts that are difficult to explain. I like that.
I love the writer Gabriel García Márquez, but I find it funny that when critics write about him they feel the need to describe him as writer of mystical realism. I see him simply as a novelist, and anywhere he wants to take me is just fine, and the idea that magic enters his work only tells me that he was open, truly open, to every aspect of the world, both seen and unseen.
Doing something that feels worthwhile and valuable taps into that same space. Of course, he also wrote about ghosts showing up and mingling with the living, but again, who’s to say.
I had the opportunity to travel around the United States and meet bakers in different cities. This was for a TV show called Baked that took me to some of the highest-acclaimed artisans of baked goods. I was struck by the similarities not only in the people but also in their stories.
Many were baking because it had been a craft in the family that was passed down throughout the years. But many more started off in another career that they thought was the responsible way to make money. But after baking as a hobby, they eventually became so enamored with the process that they all took a leap of faith and turned their passion into their career.
Over and over I heard how they left a job in IT or law or computer engineering and opened a bakery, and even though they may be working even harder, longer hours now, they are much happier. And not click-your-heels, phony Instagram happy but truly content from living a good, purposeful, simple life.
When we’re looking for purpose or a reason for being, the answer is really in the doing.
It’s not in the picture we post of ourselves on vacation, it’s in the sewing and hammering and cutting and sawing. It’s in the dancing and dicing and singing and sketching.
Start small. Start by helping someone. Start by loving something. And just start doing it. Whatever it is. Because that will turn into a passion and introduce you to a part of you you’ll be happy to know.
But what do I know? I just bake bread.