A few years ago our first daughter was born. We all kind of know how that happens, but when the idea, and the baby, starts to take form inside another body the reality of it might arrive at you differently. It came to me with baking bread.
Somehow, to be(come) a father I absolutely needed to learn how to bake bread, good bread, at home.
I had mixed and baked a few loaves with fresh yeast, I also tried different ways of doing it. But it was always average tasting, looking, and not much fun altogether.
But I needed to fulfil that (primordial?) need to feed, take care, and be there. Learning how to bake with sourdough was my way to prepare to get ready. But (of course) I wasn’t; I mean bread was ok by the time she was born, but it’s something else to be ready to be a parent.
Only through doing it many many times, and I mean baking, I learned that baking is not only a practice of attuning to the way the others that make the bread are, but also a sort of therapeutic process that involves time, care, new sensibilities and attentions.
I went on to be a baker opening Panicuocoli (now closed) and a father to a second child.
I only recently have been able to restart my home-baking after refusing to touch dough for months after shutting the bakery doors. Call it trauma, recovery, reassessing, or burnout; yet baking is still therapeutic, eating your own bread is still the most liberating experience, and seeing how everyone else in the family enjoys it is the best encouragement to keep fermenting.
I’ve been thinking for a long time I would like to write about bread, its meanings, bread culture and cultures. And as I started baking again, I also started writing.
This is a very short way of telling a longer story, that goes tangentially in many directions, but it’s a start