Five Types of Bread Bakers

There are at least five kinds of bakers.

The Beginner. The beginner assembles flour, water, salt, and yeast, kneads, follows the directions for rise and bake times and is either pleasantly surprised by the result or befuddled by the failure.

A dough that got away from me.

The Home Baker. With practice a beginner starts to recognize that dough has personality. Making bread isn’t quite like making soup or cake. Knowing when a dough has been kneaded enough, whether it is too soon or, alas, too late, to put into the oven, how the temperature, size, and shape of a loaf dictate bake time, and what a reasonable amount of time to wait before slicing all improve with practice. As many loaves begin to emerge, the home baker experiments with batards, miches, boules, pizzas, bagels, and buns, whole wheat, spelt, oatmeal, or rye breads, sunflower seeds, walnuts, or pepitas.

Seven grains: whole wheat, spelt, with whole grains of millet, rye, wheat, oats. With whole, organic red potatoes.

Artisan. The artisanal baker has training. He has put in years of practice. After thousands of loaves her hands develop intelligence. I have watched artisans communicate with doughs through their fingers. Without even looking with their eyes their hands tell them when a dough needs extra handling, if a pre-shaped dough is ready for final shaping, if a rising dough has arrived at the precise moment when it should be scored and placed in the oven. Their scoring is precise and reliable. Their razors never snag and their doughs blossom into designs that deserve frames and spotlights. An artisan can manage a deck oven or wood-fired oven and working alone can sequence a dozen different kinds of breads: miches, batards, baguettes, and large country loaves.

Danish Rugbrod.

Commercial. Commercial bakers mix doughs in large mixers. They calculate the effect that water temperature and mixing speed have on the final dough temperature -- a large-scale spiral mixer, for example imparts frictional heat: the longer and faster it runs, the warmer the dough. Knowing things like final dough temperature on a hundred pounds of dough lets a commercial baker calculate rising time to the minute. Their breads are consistent and predictable and in exchange for predictability they, unfortunately, give up something on taste.

Food Industry. These guys control most of what Americans eat. They deal in quantities of flour that flow in tons. They worry about food safety and the marketability of new trends. Sourdough is touted for its health properties, real or imagined. Gluten-free is a growing market sector. Yeast is just an ingredient to be added like calcium propionate or ascorbic acid, something that ensures that every loaf is like every other, regardless of whether it is frozen and trucked across the country, is the bun on a fast-food burger, or the crust on a frozen meat pizza. Bread is a delivery vehicle for something else: a sandwich, a speedy lunch, a basket-filler at a restaurant, a competitor on a crowded supermarket shelf, or a partially cooked loaf that is headed for the in-story bakery to reheat. I have met a lot of these guys, and they have all been men, and they could just as easily be selling life insurance, textbooks, or an automobile muffler.