by Carmella Guiol

The alarm went off at 10:30 p.m.  I had only been asleep for a short hour or so. I rose from my tiny bed, two mattresses pushed into a corner, and left the cozy barn room. I stopped for a spell on the back landing to take in the moon—but a wisp of light in the black sky—watching dutifully over our slumbering farm. The hens were hibernating in their red house on wheels, chuckling sleepily and shuffling endlessly to secure a space in the roost. Beyond them, the greenhouse glowed in the darkness like a fluorescent invertebrate, its belly filled to the gills with baby plants that still needed sheltering from the elements. The flat fields at the bottom of the hill were dark, but I found comfort in knowing that our vegetables were safe and sound, gently recovering from the virtuous work that is transforming sunlight into food. Of course, all of my fellow farmers were tucked away in their beds, exchanging spent energy for sweet dreams, which is probably what I should have been doing myself. And yet, there I was, alone and awake at this ungodly hour.

I wouldn’t be sleeping.

I made my way down the dark corridor towards the parking lot at the other end of the barn. I could have turned on the light, but I didn’t need to. My feet knew when to step over the missing stone and how to sidestep the crates of newly harvested potatoes obscuring my path. Outside the barn, a single lamppost stood guard over the frosty cars. It was still full-blown fall, with only the slightest whisper of winter in the air. The wind whipped around me testily, as if demanding an explanation for my nocturnal getaway, but I didn’t mind. As a native Floridian, I found cold weather enchanting, special. I marveled merrily at the first sign of snow while New Englanders griped and groaned as they dragged out their shovels.

I got into my car, switched on my brights, and warmed up the engine. I pulled out of the gravel parking lot, avoiding the ditches that I couldn’t see but I knew were there, and headed westward through the fog. I was headed to El Jardin, the artisan bakery where I had recently picked up a few overnight shifts. Several months before, a friend of a friend learned about my baking obsession and put me in touch with the head baker at El Jardin, Espiri, a sweet soul from Oaxaca. We clicked right away, two Latinos lost in frosty western Massachusetts, and I started making the late-night trek to the bakery whenever possible. He must have thought I was a bit deranged, eagerly volunteering to spend the midnight hours covered in flour, coaxing lumpy dough into the bread of life. But the truth was, I was enamored with everything about bread baking: The simplicity of the act. The magic of the rise. The healing of the heat. The aliveness of the loaf. I couldn’t get enough.

I remember the first time I came in, put on an apron, and stood at the plain wooden table. Espiri hauled countless buckets out of the fridge, each heavy with rising dough that peeked out cheekily from under the lids, as if threating to burst open and spill onto the ground. He popped the lid off the first one, heaved it onto the table, and turned it over. I watched with reverence as the bubbly white mass spilled softly onto the table, creeping toward every corner like rising water in a flood. Masa. Later, Espiri would feed the sourdough starter, la madre, with fresh flour and clean water, plunging his whole arm into the bucket to mix with all of his might. Again, I found magic in the way the thick white liquid began to froth and grow, the sleeping yeast coming alive before my eyes.

And I remember the first time I stood beside Espiri and learned to shape bread, adoring the feeling of the plump dough so supple in my hands. Alas, it wasn’t as easy as Espiri made it look. First he taught me to make a boule; I concentrated hard on rolling the mass between my hands until it became a neat little ball, rarely succeeding. That first night, most of my boules came out misshapen and weird, resembling footballs instead of softballs. Frustrated, I would fling my rejected footballs back to his side of the table so he could fix them. Effortlessly, his strong hands would form perfect boule after perfect boule, a motion that was second-nature to him having shaped several hundred breads six nights a week for the past five years. After boules, I graduated to the challenging batards, a longer oval loaf that I couldn’t seem to master for the life of me. Somehow, my fingers always got stuck in the wet dough, no matter how much flour I coated them with. But Espiri was a patient teacher, and the knowledge in those hands —priceless. Eventually, my boules became balls and even my batards started to resemble his own.

We spent countless late night hours talking about everything under the sun while our hands kept busy. Life in Mexico, his family, life in the States, politics, my life on the farm, my family back home. I shared frustrated stories of young love or funny anecdotes from the farm. He told me about his young daughter’s ongoing battle with a degenerative joint disease that had her wheelchair-bound at the age of five. Each week, he sent his checks southward to pay for medical visits and supplies, food, and schoolbooks for his children. Sometimes, in a rare lull while we waited for the dough’s final rise, he would log onto his Skype account and we would share a few moments with his smiling family through the screen.

When an opening came up for an assistant baker, he offered it to me and I didn’t hesitate. Friends said I was crazy—I was already working more than full-time as an apprentice on an organic vegetable farm—but I was over the moon about my new job. Over time, I learned the nightly dance, performed like clockwork with only slight variations. Eight grain, rosemary olive oil, whole wheat, country rye, French, maybe a specialty loaf with Kalamata olives or cranberry pecan if the next morning was market day. Each variety would get formed to their specific shape, never veering from the order, which determined how much heat each would receive when they had their turn in the oven.

There were only two turns in my fifteen-mile drive from the farm to the bakery. Corn fields and more corn fields. Maybe some tobacco plantations when you get far enough west. During college, several years back, a friend and I decided to explore the fields surrounding our campus, two city girls bravely embracing the bucolic countryside. In the land of forever tall corn stalks, we snapped off a few ears to steam in our dorm kitchen, giddy with guile. But to our surprise, the golden kernels were not sweet and juicy as we had expected. Instead, they tasted as if we had just bitten into a fibrous eraser. Bewildered, we ran to the one person who could explain this strange phenomenon, our friend Sam, the daughter of a South Dakota farmer, sputtering about the offensive corn. She laughed heartily at our ignorance; “It’s feed corn, you idiots!”

I passed the ghost-lit Volvo mechanic, my cue to turn off the road, and pulled into the nondescript plaza that the bakery shared with a pizzeria and a shop selling all things Buddhist. Prayer flags fluttered inconspicuously in the haze, strung up haphazardly between two Tibetan statues set up in the middle of the parking lot. I parked beside the white delivery van that would make the rounds first thing in the morning, bestowing our hot, crusty loaves to overly locally-minded restaurants, quaint coffee shops, and gourmet grocery stores. Espiri hadn’t arrived yet so I went around the back of the building to let myself in. Again, I maneuvered around the perpetual alleyway puddles that I couldn’t see but I knew were there. Around back, the moon lingered on the heaps and heaps of cut wood that fed our oven each day. Beyond them, the anomalous peach tree stood gnarled but strong.

The heat of the oven pulsated from behind the closed door; the fire had been raging since noon that day, bringing the current oven temperature close to 900 degrees. I reached around in the dark to find our hidden key and let myself in. The warmth that had been building all day rushed out of the room like a wave, and I savored it like I would a calming cup of tea. Perhaps this was my draw to the bakery—the oppressive tropical heat that reminded me so much of home.

Each time I walked into the bakery, I was always taken aback by the stark minimalism of the operation. This might have been another facet that drew me to the trade; I’m a sucker for simplicity. A solid wooden table in the center, two industrial-sized mixers gleaming beautifully in the corner, a refrigerator humming happily beside them, and the gaping monster mouth of the oven, into which we would feed hundreds of pounds of dough over the course of the night.  A few scales, a sink, Espiri’s trusty wooden peel, and several metal dough cutters. Under the table, giant white bins filled with northern flour. Nothing more, nothing less. And yet, we made magic in this room. Night after night, Espiri and his helpers performed the miracle of bread-making that humans have been partaking in for hundreds of years. The enormity of it was never lost on me. The dough in my hands felt like a homecoming, the first hint of bread wafting from the monster’s mouth, a celebration.

The room was dark except for the glowing coals percolating in the oven. I was alone in my reverence, basking for a moment in the calm before the storm. Then, I clocked in, flipped on the radio to the only station whose signal we received, tied my white apron around my waist, and began pulling buckets out of the fridge for another night of making magic.

Carmella Guiol is a writer and sustainable food activist living in Miami, Florida. She runs the Garden Grove Bread Company out of her kitchen and delivers her baked goods by bicycle. You can find more of her writing at www.renouncerejoice.blogspot.com.

1 Comment

  1. I love the mixture of concrete detail and your descriptions that bring in all of the senses. Plus, I get more from this piece every time I re-read it. Plus, breadddddd…..