On Tinkering and Repetition Each day, trying to get it perfect. A common question people ask is don’t I get tired of doing the same thing, the same way, every day? What is it about baking that the answer is no, I don’t? If it were something else, I’d get bored. But this doesn’t feel like work to me, in the way earlier jobs did. There is a zone I enter into, a chamber of fulfillment, that comes as a result of doing the same thing every day, trying to get it perfect. Of course, there is always the urge to tinker, and sometimes I find a way to do something better, and that gets incorporated into the routine. Early on, tinker was about all I did, searching for the maximum complexity, the perfect crumb, that nutty flavor, a long, pleasant aftertaste. But during that period, I didn’t really know my bread completely so that I could immediately be certain all the ways a change affected the end product. So, there are stages. First involves a lot of tinkering until the product is good. Then, there’s repetition, and subtle adjustments, every day, trying to get it perfect. Thomas Keller, the great chef/owner of The French Laundry, writes about how he made Hollandaise sauce every day for two years at one of his first jobs in a kitchen, each day, trying to get the hollandaise perfect. The craft gives a lot of pleasure. I learned a long time ago that I like to feed people good things. In Michael Ruhlman’s book, The Soul of a Chef, he observes the detail of the operation at The French Laundry, in search of the it that makes The French Laundry maybe the finest restaurant in the country, and I remember his description of a woman who asked to see chef Keller to tell him that it was the best meal she had ever had. Imagine how good it feels to be on the receiving end of a compliment like that! To create food consistently at that level requires an obsession with perfection, a soul level connection with food, and a total respect for the raw materials that extracts the maximum they have to offer. But there’s another level too, that to me just seems like I am centered and living my destiny, to do something as well as I know how to do it, always trying to do it better, and giving people a fundamental pleasure with the result of my labors. There are degrees of mastery that I equate to stages good actors and musicians go through, where once past the point of concentrating to know the lines, the movements, the parts, the harmonies, they can begin to develop full expression. The part or the music no longer work them, they play and develop the part to where it becomes an expression of themselves, to the point that their Hamlet is their Hamlet – same lines, but uniquely theirs all the same, in the way they express the part. In baking and cookery, many practitioners will never do more than execute a recipe, just like in Shakespeare, many performers do no more than speak the lines. In baking bread, every stage offers its own satisfaction. I like watching the dough form as the mixer develops it. I enjoy that tactile sensation that goes with dividing the dough by hand and hand shaping every loaf. I like the action of scoring the risen loaves with the blade, a subtle action that requires a deft touch and thousands of repetitions before it’s done right – it’s easy to score too deep, too light, not angled enough, and with soft doughs the blade can catch; scoring also needs to take into account how fully proofed the dough is, and scoring some breads poorly allows too much gas to escape, resulting in a bread that is denser than it should be. I love the blast of steamy, bread-smelling hot air that comes from the oven when the bread is unloaded, and the sounds of dozens of loaves all singing in their crackly soprano, still baking, happy to be there on the finished bread rack. So, no, I don’t get tired of it at all. Not at all.