baking

Seeking Stillness for the End of the World

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“The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.”
– Marcel Proust

All you can do some days is keep going.

I come into the kitchen and assess the production list for the day, keenly aware of my struggles to lose weight again.

Next comes reviewing the banquets for the day and make sure I block out time to individually decorate and tray the desserts people paid for, knowing that people I called friends are agitating for my death (intentionally or not) because I’m a Jew.

I build out the list, grab ingredients, and start mixing the day’s breads, fully conscious that my government is a joke and that folks like me are continually convinced to focus their ire on each other than the higher-ups with every reason to keeps us all angry and hateful all the time.

I make my silly little pastries, bake my silly little breads, and carry on like none of it is disappointing and hurtful and frustrating and sad. I do it because I know someone out there IS disappointed, hurt, frustrated, and sad, and what I make can be the One Good Thing that they get to enjoy today.

I can grieve. I can rage and piss and moan and cry… but not when I’m baking. There’s someone else’s day at stake then, and it’s not mine to ruin.

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An Object Lesson in What Matters

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I was sitting in the break room at the winery, having just finished my lunch. It was a chilly, sunny day, and the break room has a really nice window that looks out on the terrace, the waterfall feature on the grounds, and beyond that over the valley.

I was debating how to best pull off the rest of the week, crank out a new bread recipe for my chef’s latest special, and what kind of desserts I should do for the seasonal menu change. I was grateful for the distraction. The toxicity of social media around the Israel-Hamas War was still trickling through despite me pulling back. When that many lives and that much culture is on the line and the generational trauma of two entire peoples is simultaneously triggered, there’s too much at stake for it to be managed through TikTok videos, memes, and idiotic flame wars- but here we are.

It made my heart hurt, and my mental health required me backing off, so I’d resolved to do what I’d always done when feeling pained and powerless- feed people, and put good things into the world that weren’t there before.

Then my phone rang. It was my wife, nearly in tears. Life was about to provide an object lesson in Pain, Powerlessness, what we do in the face of it, and the things that mean more than posting “the right things” on social media.

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Something Like An Update

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Hello everyone!

This week won’t be as heady or heavy as my previous posts have been. “It can’t rain all the time,” after all. Besides that, some version of whatever had Emily laid up for the last week or so has moved on to me. I don’t want to skip another week though, so instead I’m gonna pump myself full of DayQuil, chug broth, step back from the shitshow the world is being, and tell you about a project I’ve been working on and how you can get involved!

So… much… white space.
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The Secret Ingredients of Good Baking

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Coming into a new restaurant to take control of an existing menu and program is an interesting experience if just because of the line that gets walked between tradition and innovation. Telling a new cook who keeps talking about “the way it was done at their old place” that it doesn’t matter- they’re here now, we do it this way, you will too- gets a twist when you step in at a level of creative control. “Make it new…” but not too new.

The house bread at my winery cannot be radically changed- too many people love it, it’s too embedded in the menu. Well and good. The cookie recipes, however, and especially a Canele recipe that only one person could ever make work well? Those required the addition of creativity and craft to make them work better and BE better.

No fancy new ingredients. No strange chemical or additions. The best “secret ingredients” are techniques- and the very best ones aren’t even that.

A baker in a black apron and with a black background dusts flour over a lump of dough on a small baking bench.
Photo by Klaus Nielsen
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A Needed Break

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It rained last night. The tiny puddles on the furniture of the screened-in patio tell that clearly enough, and there is still the smell of petrichor in the air beneath the smell of pine in the pre-dawn humidity. I’m back on the East Coast, visiting my in-laws in South Carolina, and the weather of the southeast is both oppressive and comforting- like an old friend who can’t help but keep mentioning how much both of you have changed.

As the previous two weeks of work came to a close- preparing for a massive event, the increasing tempo of business, and preparing my small team (and the kitchen itself) for my absence- I dragged myself into the first of two too-cheap-for-their-price plane seats and quoted the Magnus Archives again. “I have done my work well, and none may ask more of me.”

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