Everyday Alchemy

Della Fattoria

On an evening in spring, Don, Jesse and I watched as two bakers slid loaves of bread on long paddles into the doors of the brick ovens which opened into the room. One person stood kneading dough into rounded loaves. It was the end of the day and baking time for the bread stretched longer, as the wood-burning brick ovens were fired up in the morning and cooled throughout the day. The air was warm and floury, the smell ambrosial. I was mesmerized. The bakers worked hard, moving the loaves around in the ovens, each emerging perfect. 

This was the Della Fattoria bakery, established by Kathleen and Ed Weber on their small ranch near Petaluma. We had come for an opulent and rustic dinner, served outdoors, but I remember the bakery tour best. The wonderful campagne loaves were a staple at our house. We generally bought them at our farmer’s market from Ed Weber himself, who might also come up with a philosophical comment Don appreciated. And of course, we sometimes bought the wonderful Meyer lemon rosemary loaf, or the pumpkin seed. These had all been developed by the amazing Kathleen.

Kathleen had worked with different types of sourdough starters, including those made from grapes. She experimented with fermentation times. The texture of her loaves was moist and held its structure, making wonderful buttered toast or avocado toast. It lasted a week if we let it! We took it for granted. Didn’t everyone have this wonderful artisan loaf available a short walk away from home?

No, indeed they don’t. Since moving to Los Angeles, we have made efforts to get good bread and, while nothing beats the Della Fattoria campagne, we have found some good ones. Don insists that when he first came down here there was no artisan bread. Some of the bakeries we have found have gotten started recently, but each is the result of someone’s passion for transforming simple ingredients into delicious breads. Here are my current favorites:

At Healthy Indulgence bakery, Tatiana Brunetti from the Ukraine makes wonderful sourdoughs which have great texture and taste. She keeps in touch with her sister who won’t leave the animals she cares for in Kiev. Alessandro Jung, a Korean American, learned the craft of bread baking at a halfway house for drug addicts.  He calls his bakery Out of Thin Air and is ever grateful for learning how to bake. We buy his breads at the farmer’s market as, at a different market, we buy Joseph Abrakjian’s breads from the Seed Bakery. All of these breads use organic flours, long fermentation processes and sometimes heirloom grains.

And these are just a few of the bakers we have found! Clearly Los Angeles has discovered artisan breads. But what does bread have to do with the inner life? To my way of thinking, everything matters. If you place one of these delicious loaves beside a loaf of sliced sourdough bought off a shelf in a plastic bag (which is dry and tasteless after a day or so), you quickly understand how passion, study and care add value to something.

As Christopher Alexander said throughout his long life, “our present cosmology has built into it a definite refusal to assert the importance of anything, a refusal to define any value, a refusal to define any human reality. It is value free.” But, as he points out, in truth, everything matters. When we make anything “we have the ability to make the world more alive or less alive.” This fundamental aspect of our existence “is there when we paint the front door. It is there when we lay out the plates for breakfast. It is there when we choose a location for a new freeway, and it is there when we decide to pick a single flower.” [The Nature of Order: Book Four: The Luminous Ground. Published 2004.]

Bread is a metaphor for life. The choices we make to sustain ourselves lead to feelings of wholeness both inner and outer. Our lives are all of a piece.

In 1968 I attended the Poor People’s encampment in Washington, D.C. I marched alongside large groups of people, slept in churches, helped clean the mud off my new boyfriend’s boots, and listened to concerts in which Pete Seeger brought out the old blues singers. I was fascinated by an older couple, slim, grey-haired activists in blue jeans and denim shirts, who baked delicious bread in coffee cans in a tent with long lines in front of it.

I didn’t investigate what sort of oven this couple were using, but the simple fact of distributing bread to hordes of demonstrators struck me as significant. They were using everyday alchemy to remind us of our wholeness, our equality, our fraternity.

Today we vote with our dollars, choosing the best food we can find to nourish our inner selves. Having a loaf of great bread around will lessen the necessity for sweet or salty snacks. It is worth the cost.

I haven’t done the research or taken the time to make great bread myself, though I do sometimes bake a little loaf to fill in. I do know what great bread is and am grateful to the Webers for the education.