
Back in the early days of the pandemic, baking was big. It was hard to find flour or yeast at the grocery, and there were stories about how it was cozy, and one very pissed off mom who was mad about the bandwagon jumpers making it hard for her to find the flour she needed.
As the pandemic closed in on a year, and then went past a year -- s/o to folks staring down birthday #2 in lockdown, by the way -- I found myself getting more interested in baking. I can't go to Miami, but I can make a decent Cubano* at home. I can't go to New Orleans, but I can make a decent poboy at home. I can't go to New Orleans, but I can make a decent muffaletta at home. I can't go to New Orleans, or New York, but I can make a decent banh mi at home. There may be a pattern emerging.
All of these iconic sandwiches are controversial, like any good foodstuff, but I will argue, and I will be correct, that the easy part of most all sandwiches is the filling. All it takes is patience, and maybe a willingness to ignore government advice on sodium intake. Not all of these sandwiches are the same, and better fillings are better than bad fillings. I am looking forward to trying a Cubano with a thin slice of Alan Benton's finest in it, for instance. But the bread is the thing that makes or breaks the sandwich. The Cuban bread they sell at Publix is great for Cubanos and fine enough for poboys. I have not found a recipe for poboy bread that has seemed promising. But the KAF muffaletta bread recipe, oddly enough, is really solid, as far as the bread goes anyway -- the olive salad vs. gardinere conversation we can wait for an afternoon in the Quarter and four to nine beers. The Andrea Nguyen bread recipe in her banh mi book is very serviceable.
Recipes for the right bread are important, b/c there is nothing worse than a recipe for sandwich fillings that presumes you live in some sort of place with access to the correct bread. My friend Jack McKittrick coined the phrase "bread desert," and that's where I live, basically.
So I got more interested in bread so I could make sandwiches that would make me feel a little less trapped in the Upstate. Along the way, friend of the program Trillis also got the baking bug. He very kindly dropped a copy of the Forkish book on me. There are cookbooks that are designed to spark your creativity, and then there are cookbooks that tell you exactly what to do to get the desired result, and if you fuck up, it's your fault. Forkish is the second kind. It can be exhausting to cook out of this kind of book -- see also Judy Rogers' legendary Zuni book -- but if you put in the work, you get the outcome you wanted in the first place. It's not quite like asking if you'd rather play for Wayne Fontes or Bear Bryant, but it isn't not that. 
What I find very reassuring about baking bread is that it is about following instructions, rather than being creative. You might decide to go off-script and use Maggi instead of Worcestershire in your Caesar dressing, and it will probably be fine. For all of the mystique around baking, baking is, in a word, science. You count, measure weights and temperatures, and time things. Outcomes driven by empirical observations are hard to come by during a pandemic. My employer insisted it was going to "follow the science" on plans for the fall, until it didn't like where the science was going, and opted for a more "holistic" approach. I could go on. One leadership technique popular here is ghosting/gaslighting when you ask questions about university officials appearing unmasked at various ceremonies. More generally, in the words of the always estimable Holly Anderson, the prevailing ethos for those in power during the pandemic has been "they wanted to, so they did."
For some reason, when I think about baking bread, I think about what T. E. Lawrence said when he was asked why he liked the desert. Bread is clean, or at least there are fewer variables. You can treat people -- students, student-athletes, faculty, and staff like that, and maybe it works well enough that you can call it a success. But you can't fuck with flour, water, salt, and yeast like that. The pic at the top is a cross section of two boules from the same batch last weekend. The one on the left turned out with a nice open crumb b/c I proofed it correctly b/c I was paying attention, and following the instructions. The one on the right I overproofed, and it came out of the oven a denser than it should have. I am very lucky to have the time and resources to bake my own bread, and reluctant to turn my bougie hobbies into a parable, but reflecting on the last year or so, I will say that things seem go better when you follow the instructions and the science.
*Publix makes a very good Cuban bread, which is easier to buy than to make. I am not sure what I will do when I am in the land of better fillings and no Publix.
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