In this guest post, Graison Gill–a baker, miller, and educator who writes a newsletter called Sourdough Madrigals–talks about his search for the perfect loaf. Graison founded Bellegarde Bakery in New Orleans in 2012. He is consistently recognized as a leader in his field, and in 2020, the James Beard Foundation named him a finalist for the best baker in the country.
I admire Graison’s passion for sourdough, feeding the community, and freshly milled flour—his post resonates with me on many levels. It is a response to one of my favorite quotes by Jeffrey Hamelman, which is featured on the About page of TPL: “He strives for perfection, for the perfect loaf, secretly hoping never to attain it — for where would he go from there?”. In a way, reading Hamelman’s quote so many years ago spurred me to create this website. I hope Graison’s story and intellectual musings on the elusive “perfect loaf” inspire you as they have me.
Do you have scars? Marks of remembrance on your body from past sickness or pain, from the playfulness of childhood? From moments of carelessness when the kitchen knife slipped, or when the doctor said the scalpel was the only option, or when you thought you landed perfectly but the bone that broke said otherwise?
I have scars. From tin loaves I should have used oven mitts to decant. From being so eager to smell the bread that the hand I used to open the oven door received a heat blister the size of a small pita. I also have scars from scoring dough too quickly with a dull lame blade and from perfectly crusty but too-pointy baguette ends. I have scars from country loaves with ears sharp as glass, from that 50 pound bag of flour I dropped on my pinky toe, from the feather edge of a millstone that I pulled my thumb away from just in the knick of time, only to cut it on the mill’s rough steel in my hasty escape.
I was always afraid of anything that worked the first time.
Thomas Edison
Those are the visible scars. There are countless ones that I cannot see. Scars held deep in my body from all the intense, endless labor of mixing, kneading, dividing, shaping, and scoring. Mental scars from the overwhelming amount of ingredient measurements, autolyse calculations, proofing times, hydration levels, flour protein considerations, and all the other baking factors that cycle through my mind constantly. I have scars from fatigue: from staying up too late and getting up too early. And I have social scars: from saying no to too many party invitations, saying maybe to dates I knew I’d never keep, from missing dinner plans and concert dates. I have these scars because I always said yes to bread and all my impulses to make it better—what if I mix three batches side by side, what if I double the double hydration, what if I…just try this one more thing…will this make the perfect loaf?
I made my first perfect loaf on April 20, 2009. The day before, I arrived in New Orleans on a Greyhound bus. I was exhausted. Dirty, broke, and starving. My best friend was so stoned he forgot to borrow a car to pick me up from the station. So we walked three miles to his house, my rucksack so heavy with books it began to bend his Schwinn’s handlebars, in an afternoon as moist and humid as an oven just pumped with steam.
I came to town unsure of everything. I was 21, a dropout with a criminal record, a few broken promises, fewer plans, and a baker’s dozen of half baked dreams. The problem was that I was fascinated with so much—literature, music, ecology, social justice, permaculture—that I began to lose myself in the pursuit of them all. I was taking 99 steps in 100 directions, drunk with passion and angst and youth.
The city was still black and blue from Katrina. Graffiti from the National Guard was tattooed on each house, waterlines were still visible on a lot of buildings, collapsed houses sat on each block like dystopian sculptures, and it seemed everyone was mourning something—or someone—they’d lost. Everyone was living, alone and together, in this city of visible scars.
Within six months of arriving in New Orleans I had become a Louisiana Master Gardener, got a job as a rag rug weaver, volunteered at three social justice initiatives, was helping to renovate a house, worked as a barista, and partied full time. I thought that if only I could keep going, time wouldn’t catch up to me, that things would fall into place, that everything would make sense when I found Life’s Great Recipe that explained it all. Sometimes I wish that the younger me had the spoiler alert I am now giving you: Things don’t make sense. People don’t either. There isn’t a Great Recipe. But for me, bread came damn close to the clarity I was hungry for.
He strives for perfection, for the perfect loaf, secretly hoping never to attain it — for where would he go from there?
Jeffrey Hamelman
That perfect loaf began as a recipe. I was WWOOFing on a New Hampshire dairy farm in the winter of 2008. An old man, with a beard white as a wizard’s, gave it to me on paper that was weirdly colored and in a bold font, like those old print outs from MapQuest. “You might like baking bread. Here’s a recipe I like,” is all he said. I rediscovered it when I got to New Orleans, all crumpled and discolored from my travels, pressed between Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Giovanni’s Room. The recipe used cups and teaspoons, yeast and AP flour, warm water and table salt. I think it took about three hours from start to finish. The loaf itself looked awful, its color a mix between rainwater and newsprint. But as a first loaf, it was life-changing. And that old man had given me the most important map in my life.
In New Orleans I shared an apartment with a phone sex operator, my best friend the stoned busker, and a crossover country singer who has just left the Mormon Church. I slept on the back porch, on a generously stained suede sofa salvaged from Katrina floodwater. We didn’t have much to eat besides lentils, stolen condiment packets, and tap water, so everyone awaited my first loaves with gratitude: I felt like a priest during Mass as I handed out warm slices to the hungry flock. No matter how ugly or clumsy that loaf may seem now, the entire experience of making it was an epiphany: here was something, finally something, that was honest. Here was something that I made all by myself, with my very own hands, which I could trust. A whole new way of feeling the world had been born. In those early baking days, I felt like an alchemist. I’d measure the ingredients in a thrift store bowl, knead the loaf like a maniac, cover it with my cleanest dirty shirt, wait until it doubled in size, and then pan it. I’d study its proofing with awe—the swelling mass, the little bubbles, the water seeping from overhydration, the trembling as it reached the pan’s lip. Then I’d watch it bake as if the glass window on the oven was television (it was–we had no screens).
Within a few weeks I was obsessed with bread. With the mixing, with the shaping, with the measuring and scoring and baking. Mostly, I was in love with how just four ingredients—flour, water, salt, yeast—allowed me to make something alive and nourishing and beautiful. No matter that it was sticky, messy, time-consuming, and difficult to understand how it all worked. Baking those loaves was the first time I ever remember doing something without thinking of something else: I was present, right there, with that bread.
Time fermented quickly. I went from feeding my broke roommates to selling bread to neighbors. From there, to a cafe. Then a farmer’s market. And one afternoon that summer, with the cicadas droning and rain pouring, my best friend and I rolled the last of our tobacco with the rest of our weed on a random porch. When the owner came out, he reminded us we were on his private property. Then he took a few drags and in between coughing asked what we did. With bloodshot eyes and a nodding head he told me, “My friend owns an old bakery two blocks away.”
It was in between Piety and Desire Streets. Crenelated like a wedding cake, the color of Pepto Bismol, this soggy, moldy, and crowded building became my home for the next two years. It had two Blodget deck ovens the color of coal, a Hobart mixer older than my grandmother, and asthmatic fridges that whined and coughed from overuse. There were chickens out back, beer cans full of cigarette butts inside, mice in the attic, and a drip in the sink that never relented. I loved it for this ugliness and what it would allow me to create: more bread than my apartment ever would.
I shared the place with a few good old boys who made rum cakes (surprise, they needed more rum than the cakes), a vegetarian caterer, Dave Matthews’ tour chef, and self-named “pizza slu*ts.” Our landlord built the reptile exhibits at The Audubon Zoo and my rent was $250 per month.
Back then, social media meant MySpace. (Hi, Tom!) There were no YouTube videos about poolish, no influencers with bread tutorials, no group chats with other bakers. So I went to the library to learn how to bake. I typed “bread” into the catalog and aimed to check out anything I could find. But when I clicked to reserve the books I most wanted—Bread by Jeffrey Hammelman, Bread from La Brea Bakery, Tartine Bread—the computer simply said one thing: “Katrina.”
My mom did send me one book. The Village Baker by Joe Ortiz. It soon became more read than the Pope’s Bible. Cover to cover, table of contents to the index, I engrossed myself in that book. (A few weeks after getting it in the mail, I had to bind it with a rubber band to keep it together). But a book is not the best way to learn about bread. Baking is about touch, and it’s about how that touching feels. So though the recipes and drawings and anecdotes were great, they alone couldn’t teach me how to read the dough. I had to learn by doing.
First thing I did was buy a cheap scale to begin weighing all my ingredients. I found a half-broken meat thermometer to measure my water temp, and I scoured Goodwill for baskets of any kind to cradle my proofing dough. I began experimenting with bigas, with chefs, with pate fermenté, and rye sourdough starters, and fresh yeast (not dried). I tried shaping baguettes by pressing them between proofing boards, made couche out of starched kitchen towels, drove 2.5 hours away to get artesian well water. I mixed on low speed, on high speed; injected steam with garden hoses, atomizers, ice cubes. I bought all the flour in the bulk bins of health food stores. I hand mixed and no-kneaded, I punched down and didn’t punch at all. I baked on fire brick, masonry brick, on sheet trays. I autolysed for 20 minutes and 24 hours, scored loaves with wooden coffee stirrers, the blades crudely threaded through, because I didn’t know where to buy a lame holder.
As I baked more, there was resistance. Not just from the dough, but from the world. Friends were concerned with my obsession. Family told me to go back to school, get an internship, consider a mortgage, find a path and stay the course. But I held firm. Because from those first moonlight nights, when I was all alone touching bread, I was touched back. And I fell in love with that feeling. The feeling that I was getting at something–something that had a deeper meaning. Something with rules, and technique, and history. Something that slowly, but surely, began to love me back: baking was my buoy in life’s sea of madness and beauty and being young. Its rituals made sense. More than anything, bread allowed me to become who I wanted to be when I didn’t know who I was. Bread made me feel that I mattered.
I got better, I got busier. The first big batch of bread I sold took me two days to make. I leavened the dough in five gallon buckets, mixed poolish in the vegetable bins of a small fridge, brushed the bottom of each loaf with reverence as it came steaming out of the oven. I had to borrow a maroon Crown Victoria named Jolene to deliver it all. I drove Uptown with the windows down, Curtis Mayfield turned up loud, the smell of malt and wheat and honey from the still-warm loaves seeping into the fabric seats. I hadn’t slept; I hadn’t eaten; I hadn’t showered. And I don’t remember a time when I’d been happier. I got a check for $150 for those 100 loaves of bread. Rolling a cigarette an hour later, drinking the beer that was my dinner, I realized I’d spent $200 on flour to make it all. But it didn’t matter. I was a f*cking baker.
The final step in making a loaf of bread is scoring. It’s also called “scarification.” By slashing the dough right before it’s put into the oven, the baker controls the escape of the dough’s gasses. This scarring doesn’t affect the quality of the bread or its flavor. Its purpose is merely aesthetic. And therefore highly personal. For this reason, scoring is said to be the baker’s signature.
I look at the scars I have now. The one on my right hand from when it got caught in a running mixer. The one on my left leg from when I got electrocuted and thrown to the floor while trying to fix an oven’s thermocouple at 2 AM with a headlamp. The flour dust in my lungs, the calluses on my palms, the nerve endings in my fingertips that are all but dead. All of my scars–visible and invisible alike–are my signature. They’re proof that I am still here and that I love what I do.
Why do bakers want perfection? Because we want control. We want something that makes sense.
Making bread allows me to answer questions–about other people, other places, about myself–that otherwise I am too afraid (or too uneasy or unprepared) to ask. It does so by making words unnecessary. All the things I want to say I can say with bread: a loaf of bread is how I can tell the world who I am. Don’t we all want something in this world that we can put our signature on, something that says, “I EXIST”?
This is why, each time I bake, I want to make the perfect loaf. Not because it’s possible, but because that’s love: to give so much that you forget yourself in the giving. I became a great baker, not just a good one, when I understood that the human need to share and to create–no matter our scars, no matter the outcome–is perfect enough.
