on the baker's stoicism

When Chad Robertson started baking bread, everything had to be perfect. The air, the temperature, the starter – every minute detail.

“When I was starting out I was superstitious about my starter,” Robertson explains in the bestselling Cooked. “I would take it on vacation because I didn’t trust anyone with it. Once, I took it to the movies with me, so I could feed it exactly on time.”

Of course, there were times when he got it wrong. Too dense, too lopsided, uneven score. Yet, at the end of the day, it was a man constantly seeking perfection in a seemingly imperfectable task. Addicting, right?

And while I’ve never tried, and thus can’t say I agree, Michael Pollan, author of Cooked, would second me. Throughout his many attempts to bake Robertson’s “perfect” loaf, and subsequently write a book on these attempts, Pollan realized that baking required something extra, something beyond the physical technicalities that Robertson ever-so stressed over.

A “negative capability” is what Pollan calls it: an ability to move through adversity and setbacks unfazed, a focus on the end product, not necessarily the struggles it may take to get there. Some 2,000 earlier, however, the Stoics would call it premeditatio malorum, literally meaning “the premeditation of evils.” Seneca lays it out for us: “Rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck. All the terms of our human lot should be before our eyes.”

There’s no right way to approach baking, and subsequently, your life before and after doing so. Pollan, the “Stoic”, saw the imperfections that lay ahead of his rookie baking career, and succeeded in making a loaf just perfect enough for himself. Robertson, however, is still a rigid perfectionist – and practically invented San Francisco sourdough along the way.

The ideal path lies not in choosing one method, one technique, one starter over the other, but finding a balance, a dance between the two. It’s often too late before we realize the interplay between aspiration and adaptation often yields the most satisfying results

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