My gateway drug
It's official: I've hit the point of no return
On The Cusp is about becoming the next version of ourselves. That means experimenting with the breadth of our interests, exploring the depths of anything that captures our imagination, and learning to embrace uncertainty along the way.
Welcome! This is letter #66.
In July, I welcomed a new family member into my home: a fragile baby sourdough starter. My little one arrived courtesy of King Arthur Baking Company via FedEx, and I immediately got to work trying to keep her alive.
When she appeared limp and unresponsive despite multiple feedings, I called the King Arthur Baker’s Hotline (yes, this is a thing!) for emergency advice on resuscitating her. And once she’d made it through her first days, I learned how to switch into maintenance mode with weekly feedings. When I traveled abroad, I even enlisted my brother for babysitting duty.
As the months elapsed and my starter maintenance efforts continued, you might reasonably assume that I was also…baking sourdough bread.
But it took me three months to work up the courage to attempt a loaf, in part because when I cracked open the spine of my Tartine bread book—the one that begins with a forty-page master recipe—I was too overwhelmed and intimidated to make the leap from “sourdough starter caretaker” to “sourdough bread baker.”
I only made that shift when I found a recipe that’s as foolproof as it is approachable (thank you, Alexandra Stafford, for making everything pizza- and bread-related so much easier!), at which point I couldn’t believe I’d waited so long to jump in. Soon, I was turning out sourdough baguettes, boules, and pizza dough rounds with abandon.
When it came to my obsession with breakfast pastries, I didn’t want that same trepidation to take hold. I wanted to jump in with both feet, which is why I started spending my Fridays volunteering at Midsommar Bakery. There’s a lot to do, which means no time for second-guessing yourself! When I arrive at the door of the Norwegian fraternal organization where they prep for each Saturday market, I’m buzzed in, I hang up my coat, and then I start pitching in wherever help’s needed.
On my first day, when I was especially tentative—worried that I was in the way, that nobody would like me, that I was asking too many questions—I busied myself with the most concrete of tasks: weighing out ingredients gram by gram. But by the end of the day, I felt like I was waving goodbye to old friends. There’s no faster way to build camaraderie than by making something together, especially when backed by the soundtrack of Adele heartbreak ballads that everyone is singing along to.
As the weeks passed, I took on new responsibilities. Now when I pull up on Friday mornings and park behind the beige sedan whose bumper sticker reads “I touch your food,” I’m quietly steeling myself for oven duty.
I start by checking the hanging thermometers in each of the kitchen’s four ovens, making the necessary adjustments, and setting up my system of timers, cooking thermometers, oven mitts, and squares of tinfoil: basically, everything I’ll need to ensure golden-brown results across the hundreds of buns and braids that need to be shepherded through the 350-degree heat. I whisk a batch of egg wash while the first trays start rising in the warm, humid proofing oven, then locate and centralize containers of pearl sugar, candied pecans, and sliced almonds to adorn each bun.
At least three other people are busy rolling out gigantic rectangles of dough, spreading them edge-to-edge with various fillings, and cutting and shaping buns of equivalent weight. Others are mixing up batches of chocolate-oat balls, Swedish hallongrottor (raspberry caves), slicing apples, and washing the hundreds of dishes that get produced on any given bake day. But when I’m on oven duty, my station requires my single-minded attention.
Every few minutes, a tray needs to be egg-washed, topped, turned, temped, or otherwise prodded at and inspected for the appropriate level of proofing or doneness. The frenzied pace means that Friday’s hours pass like minutes.
Clearly, I had jumped into the proverbial deep end when it came to the Scandinavian-style buns Midsommar specializes in. But I was equally fascinated by the tricky laminated doughs that croissants and danishes are made from. I needed an entry point for making those doughs, one that would help me avoid the stalling that had compromised my sourdough bread journey for (who’s counting?) three months.
I found that entry point in San Francisco.
This year, my family celebrated Thanksgiving three weeks early, gathering in a Bay Area rental atop Twin Peaks on the first Saturday in November. With spectacular views and an extra-long dining table, it was the ideal place to gather around a turkey and fixings while avoiding all holiday-related travel headaches.
I slept in a tiny, adorable boutique hotel on Divisadero, meeting up with my family each afternoon for walks through foggy Golden Gate Park and along the stunning cliffs at Lands End, sharing cones of Greek fries at Souvla and rides in the driverless Waymo cars that haunt San Francisco’s roadways.
But each morning before we met up, I went in search of the city’s most delicious laminated pastries, arriving at some bakeries on foot and others via multiple bus transfers, snapping up treats like Butter and Crumble’s espresso praline cruffin, Kantine’s cardamom morning bun, and b. patisserie’s pumpkin kouign-amann.
Our last joint outing was to Omnivore Books on Food. Somewhere in the shop’s floor-to ceiling cookbook stacks, I found Sarah Kieffer’s 100 Morning Treats, which boasts an entire section of laminated pastries built from “cheater croissant dough,” so named because the recipe breaks a lot of rules. (For all you pastry nerds out there, the laminating butter gets slathered onto the dough at room temperature, rather than manhandled into a butter block while chilled.)
But I’d been looking for a beginner-friendly entry point—a gateway drug—into making laminated pastries, and Sarah’s book presented one on a platter.
Two hours north of my house, nestled in Washington’s Skagit Valley, is a small town named Burlington. Through a series of interesting coincidences, it became home to the second outpost of King Arthur’s in-person baking school in 2016. When I saw that they offered a three-day class teaching the art of homemade croissants, danishes, and puff pastry, my seat basically sold itself.
The day before I left for Burlington, I tried my hand at Sarah’s cheater croissant dough. I figured the experiment would help me show up for class feeling a bit more prepared, like the experienced classmates I was sure to be surrounded by.
By the time I finished the recipe, I’d become comfortable using a stand mixer, rolling out and measuring neat rectangles of dough, identifying the difference between book folds and letter folds, and chilling my materials in the exact Goldilocks amount that was needed between turns.
I dropped off a dozen orange-scented morning buns and kouignettes at the hospice house where I’m now a volunteer baker, then drove north. I was still a rank beginner, but now I had confidence that I could hold my own.
From noon until sunset, Monday through Wednesday, I reported for baking school duty, where we blitzed through the process of making four different doughs and a myriad of fillings for the treats we’d be carting home: a potato galette, a dozen mini palmier cookies, apple turnovers, croissants, pain au chocolat, vol-au-vent filled with mushrooms and heavy cream, and danishes stuffed with different combinations of jam, cream cheese, almond paste, and apple butter.
Each time a pastry emerged from the oven, I was newly bowled over: a pale sheet of dough one eighth of an inch thick had ballooned into a towering, tantalizing thing through some combination of butter, science, and magic.
A gateway drug is a habit-forming slippery slope, one that funnels you deeper into a lifestyle that, eventually, you might find too irresistible to leave.
On Wednesday night, as I steered my Honda Civic back through the rainy dark of Thanksgiving Eve traffic in Seattle, four boxes of pastries teetering on the passenger seat beside me and an enthusiastic glow lighting my face, I knew for certain that I’d hit the point of no return.
As always, I’d love to hear from you. What’s captured your imagination lately?
Warmly,
Maddie
So fun to read all of this, Maddie! I love how you wholeheartedly approach your many interests. Your loaf of sourdough is gorgeous as are all of your pastries. Thank you for sharing all of your adventures. So inspiring.
❤️. Challenge accepted!