The San Francisco Baking Institute

Before I stepped foot in the San Francisco Baking Institute (SFBI), I had never really baked a loaf of bread in my life. Well, to be honest, I did make a loaf of Irish Soda Bread with my mom for a school project in the second grade. But I really don’t remember too much from that experience, so I am not going to count it. So why did I sign up for two weeks of intensive bread training? Basically, because I needed to conquer my fear of mixing doughs and placing them in the oven.

I am not sure why I have been so afraid to bake. I haven’t had any baking disasters or anything especially traumatic, and the few batches of cookies and muffins I have made have always been edible (and sometimes quite tasty). I decided it was more about lack of experience than anything else, and I figured that if two weeks of training at the SFBI didn’t turn me on to baking then nothing would.

Luckily, two weeks of training (and over two hundred loaves of bread) has revealed the baker hidden deep down inside of me, and I have begun to conquer my baking fears. During the first few days I was easily at the bottom of the class, and I had the deformed/mangled baguettes to show for it. But then I think I began to get a feel for things, I got a little more comfortable and a lot more confident, and I really got into it. I found bread baking to be this unique combination of science, art, and a bit of magic.

It must have been something to witness, way back when, as the first leavened breads rose in a hearth. Nowadays I think we all take bread a bit for granted; it is something that we can quickly pick up at the store and smear with butter or slap together as a sandwich. Modern conventional bread is created by machine, whipped through centrifuges at intense speeds and never touched by human hands. It’s a sad thing to see rows and rows of tasteless, lifeless, loaves suffocating in plastic on the supermarket shelf.

Luckily, the last twenty years has seen the re-emergence of artisanal bread, made by people using traditional methods that have been utilized for centuries. This is the kind of bread I baked at the SFBI. While we selectively used some modern equipment (mixer, steam-oven), we always used all of our senses while preparing the dough and hand-shaping the loaves. After hours of shaping and fermenting, what came out of the oven was magical. The aroma was incredible, and you could pick up flavors like coffee, chocolate or forest floor (my personal favorite). Every slice could be eaten on its own, with nuances of flavor that made butter and spreads unnecessary.

I can’t say that I conquered all of my baking fears after two weeks, but I do think I have found a new passion. I plan to crank out some loaves this fall when I am back in a kitchen with a working oven (my current oven = not so good). I am looking forward to my future bread-baking experiments, and I can’t wait to share them on Feelgood Eats. In the mean time, I am going to be reading Wild Yeast, one of the best bread-baking blogs on the web. And of course, I’ll be buying bread that is made by local people who are working with their hands to change our food system one loaf at a time.

Tagged as: bread, whole grains