Escaping mastery, knit socks, and sourdough loafs

Yeast and flour and tomatoes and wool.

A quote from Bread and How To Eat It: A Cookbook by Rick Easton was going around earlier this year. Easton, a professional baker, writes, “Personally, I think people who bake bread at home are nuts. It’s time-consuming. It’s inefficient. Home ovens aren’t designed to bake bread.” Easton goes on to argue that people should buy bread from their local bakery instead.¹ The quote ruffled feathers, understandably so. It is a grumpy sentiment. Though I can’t disagree with its logic, it made me consider why I had started to bake my own.

I skipped past the Covid sourdough trend, preferring instead to watch skincare YouTube and, when I was feeling energetic, write a novel. I live near Saraghina Bakery where, for many years, I bought the bread I ate every day. They bake an Italian-style sourdough miche using organic flour. I would buy their whole wheat and pick it up, along with fresh sheep ricotta and a coffee. I tasked Skylar with the bread-slicing chore—once, their olive loaf sent me to urgent care for five stitches.

I started sourdough baking two years ago, long past the flour shortages and viral TikToks. I bought the Tartine book and glanced through it once. I lackadaisically followed a few baking Instagram accounts, but mostly, I found a sourdough recipe from a non-glamorous food blogger and stuck to it, making it every week. I started reading more about bread, too, but it wasn’t obsessive or urgent; it was just a part of life I was curious about, the same way I read books about regenerative agriculture as a content city slicker. I examined photos of over-proofed crumb and read about baking percentages, but my interest in bread is like my interest in salt or seeds or lentil farming; something I’ll read handfuls of books on but nothing I would quit my job for.

I find bread baking to be manageable. It’s sort of like doing the dishes or making coffee at home. It would be more “convenient” (and more efficient to use Easton’s terms) if I didn’t do it myself, but not so inconvenient that it’s a problem. The chore of baking bread—occasionally a magical experience, other times simply a task on my to-do list—is just not that big of a deal.

This isn’t a critique of Saraghina’s or delusional praise of mine, I hope, but I have a hard time tasting the difference between the bakery’s loaf and mine. Theirs is darker and larger, with a better crumb. I’ll readily admit their baguettes are better, but my artisan loaf tastes good, pretty much as good as the bakery’s and obviously more than the grocery store’s. It hasn’t taken me much pain to get here, either. I’ve learned how to shape and score better with time, and a bread proofer afforded more precision. I’ve only had a few disappointing bakes and one loaf go straight to the compost, which was only recently when experimenting with freshly milled flour.

Recently, I was watching Chef’s Table, the Netflix documentary series on navel-gazing chefs—this season on pasta and noodles. While watching, I was thinking about my bread and “mastery” and its marriage to identity, as in: I am a baker, I am a pasta maker, I am a chef et cetera. I wondered what it means to make pasta, perfectly nice pasta, and not be a “pasta maker”—to be free of whatever that might mean.

I appreciate masters of craft. I seek out bakeries and marvel at the technique and creativity of their bakers. Still, more often than not, the concept of mastery, of “being the best,” has kept me from continuing an interest and sometimes even writing about it, which, ironically, is its own identity. I wrote in my journal not long ago, “I am not a writer; I am an artist who writes.”

I recently learned how to knit. I knit half a scarf and then started on a pair of socks, a rather delusional first project. The socks are knit top-down, a vanilla sock style with fingering weight yarn on 2.25mm DPNs. It took me 12 weeks to finish one sock. What I had always thought was a passive disinterest in knitwear was overpowered by an urgent desire to do something material with my hands and, in the process, I discovered how much I like to knit. A few sticks and string, and suddenly, I had fabric.

Knitting has given me a new perspective on design and construction, too. I observed the heel flap, the cuff, and the gusset of a sock for the very first time. I lived for 32 years and never considered the gusset! When I see industrial fashion knitwear in the wild now, I see how a skilled knitter could execute it with better material and care. This curiosity is familiar—one I typically feel toward traditional foods, like yogurt or bread. How wonderful not to go another 32 without learning about yeast and flour and tomatoes and wool, and that I don’t want, or need, to achieve mastery over them.

I am not going to become a textile influencer. I don’t dream of starting my own bakery; hell, I don’t even dream about baking a perfect loaf. What we aspire to make isn’t what we have to aspire to be, especially if that means eschewing something both as nuts and as humanly elemental as baking bread.

I am not a baker; I am a person who bakes.

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That’s it for 2024! I’ll return in the new year with part two, about my laidback approach to sourdough. Thank you for subscribing to Home Food! You all have been a bright spot in my year. I have a new (additional) project called Saltine that I will be starting in January, subscribe if you’d like. 🍞

1. This quote is but a short blip in a unique, lovely book. I appreciate that it may inspire people not interested in baking at home to enjoy and support local craft.