The Current - Baker Daniel Leader on the pleasure of sourdough

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

The baker Daniel Leader is a pioneer of artisanal breadmaking, but he says his early loaves were more like paperweights. In a conversation from last month, Leader shares what he learned about his craft along the way, and why baking bread can feel like meditation.

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This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. It is a big news day. How about something not torn from the headlines? Let's travel back in time, not so long ago, a time when we were faced with an unprecedented challenge, one that left us isolated and in search of distraction. Like so many self-isolating people, I have taken to making my own bread. This, my friends, is a yeast leavened, fresh from the oven, full of love, comfort-inducing, carb-loaded, COVID coping mechanism.

I was obsessed with baking sourdough bread, and if anyone wanted some sourdough starter, I would be happy to gift them some. We've really been missing community during social distancing. Making bread for others has kind of become our little way of loving them from afar. We can't come see you, but hey, here, have some bread. The pandemic helped drive home that idea that a shared loaf of bread provides a lot more than just sustenance. Daniel Leder has known this for decades. He's the founder of the Bread Alone Bakery in upstate New York, pioneer of what we now call the artisanal bread movement.

40 years ago, when he was selling bread out of the back of the family station wagon, organic flour wasn't yet a thing. Many people hadn't even heard of sourdough, let alone tasted it. Now thousands, if not millions of loaves later, Daniel Leder is sharing what he has learned about his craft in our relationship with bread in a new book.

It's called A Slow Rise, Favorite Recipes from Four Decades of Baking with Heart. I spoke with Daniel Leder in December. Here's our conversation. Are you a toast person for breakfast? A hundred percent toast person. And actually, I make my toast in a very special way. I have a an Aga cooker and I have this like, it's a little bit of like a rat cage and I put the bread there and I put it directly on the burner. So I get like nice caramelized edges when I'm making

my toast. I can smell your kitchen already, oh my goodness. This is such an interesting book because, as I said, it's filled with recipes, but it's also the story in some ways of how you ended up doing your life's work. And this starts for you with a book. Tell me about the book that opened your eyes to bread making. Well, I was in college and I was working as a breakfast cook in Madison, Wisconsin, and one of the first US food co-ops was there. And there, next to a bin of whole wheat flour,

was Edward S. Bay Brown's book, The Tassajara Bread Book. And there was something about this paperback book with a simple loaf of bread and jam on the cover that spoke to me. And there was something about this paperback book with a simple loaf of bread and jam on the cover that spoke to me. And I took it home and I just started baking these simple, 100% whole wheat breads. And people would say, oh, your house smells so good. And then a neighbor would tell another neighbor, and then some neighbors told the college professors, and I was starting to be called the bread guy, and people would invite me over to their dinner parties or whatever just to share this simple loaf of whole wheat bread. And it just, not only was it something that I loved, it was something that I was learning

to love, but it was something that, wait a second, I'm making friends, I'm meeting people that are interesting, I'm sharing like a simple joy and a simple excitement. And it captivated me then and it still captivates me today. Pete Let me ask you about the Tassahara Bread Book. It was written by a Zen monk. What was it about the book and about his approach which is rooted in Zen philosophy that was really interesting to you? Pete I mean, you know, I didn't know about anything about Zen philosophy at the time. I was just looking at a bread book that appealed to me, but within those pages he would talk about being connected to the process, you know, holding the flower in your hand, smelling

each step along the way, you know, really immersing yourself in the process. And now we talk about mindfulness and being in the moment, but he didn't use those words. He talked about the emotional connection to making bread and really, really touching the dough and feeling it as if it's life itself. And that really spoke to me. I mean, I was 18 and trying to find my way in life, and it just spoke to an emotional quality that is very much alive to this day for me. He also talked about how, and these are, I mean, you read about this in the book, working to bake bread can renew our spirit with this work. We renew the world, our friends, our

neighbors. I mean, that can sound, you're just talking about bread, but at the same time, it's what you said right at the very beginning, that you become the bread guy, that something is created when you are baking your own loaf of bread that people want to be part of. I mean, I'm still fascinated by what happened during the pandemic because of all of the foods, of all of the things that people could have kind of attached themselves to for comfort, it was bread. I mean, it was such a phenomenon. And, you know, the social media posts were extraordinary. And I know some bread bakers, they have a million or two million followers, and they are reaching out to the world in their commitment

to making good bread at home. It's quite fascinating. What did you make of that? That of all the things that people turned to, it was bread baking during that really isolating time? John Sussman To me, I always think of bread baking like farming, like music. You know, you walk in a room and there's beautiful music, you feel different. You pull a carrot from a garden, you feel different. But bread baking has that... I don't know, it's so primal, it's so real. There's nothing that you can't understand. You have some water, you have some flour. And then when the mythology went away about sourdough, wait a second, sourdough is just flour and water that you feed a few times over a few days and all of a sudden

it's this bubbly mass and that is going to make your bread. And the byproduct is this wonderful flavor of, you know, technically we're creating lactic and acetic acids. I mean, there's a lot of science to it, but there's a lot of mythology and there's a lot of just practicality. I mean, when I first learned to bake in France in the early 80s, the bakers who taught me, they couldn't tell you about the type of lactobacilli or the exact qualities of the flour. They smelled the sourdough,

they felt the dough in their hands, they touched the flour, and it was that experience that they refined over time that turned them into good bakers. And I think that during the pandemic, each of us in our own little worlds could experience this connection and the satisfaction and the sharing from nothing, flour and water.

Were you a natural at this? What were the early loaves that you baked like when they came out of the oven? Oh, no, they were paperweavers. I remember back when I was in college, we actually had typewriters and we would have our term papers piled up. I can remember putting a loaf of bread on my one of my term papers so it wouldn't blow away. How did you learn? I mean you talked about going to Europe. What was it that you learned when you were traveling through Europe? You know, I consider myself a master of going to the back door of a bakery and knocking on the door. And in the early days, I spoke just in a French to talk my way into a bakery.

And then I would ask them, could I stay a shift? And then they turned into three nights. And back then, before there was a lot of modern retarding proofing equipment, we'd start working at midnight and work until late in the morning. So we would have time to talk, and we would have know, really look at the oven and look at the dough. I mean, I'm actually quite happy the internet was not around when I was learning bread baking because I got to experience it, you know, firsthand, like from real artisans, from real craftsmen and women. And it was a wonderful part of my life.

What did you learn about flour and about the importance of what we put into the dough? Well, there's kind of like two worlds in milling. You've got commercial milling and what I'm calling non-commodity milling. And non-commodity milling would be a small flour mill, often stone ground, that has direct relationships with the farmers who are supplying this mill. And this flour is often less, most often it's less refined. In France, they have a type of flour called Type 85, where they just sift off a little bit of the bran,

just to make it a little bit lighter. Just explain what that means when you say it's less refined. So if you take a wheat berry and you crush it in a stone, okay, 100% of that flour would be whole wheat flour, but whole wheat flour tends to be a little heavy. So what they do is they just have some sifters and they'll just maybe sift off, let's say, five or ten percent of the brand just to make the flower a little bit lighter. But it's not white flower. It's kind of like a sandy color with flecks of bran in it, a very, very different quality than commercially ground white flower that we'll see in a supermarket. But luckily,

certainly in the States, and I know this is true in Canada as well, there's a lot of small mills popping up. In fact, one of my favorite mills in France just opened a mill near Quebec, and so they're milling this French-style flour in Montreal and Quebec now. Pete And you notice that in the taste of the bread? Pete Oh, totally. Oh, I can tell instantly in the taste, I can tell in the color, I can tell in the way the loaf rises, I can tell in the caramelization of the loaf because you haven't sifted out a lot of the germ, which has got the fatty part of the wheat kernel in it. It's got more of the bran. You develop different flavor profiles with this more whole grain flour.

How does it taste differently? I mean, describe what that taste would be, the difference. I would say that there's a earthy, especially when you're making sourdough bread, there's an earthy quality, but it's pungent at the same time, but not overpowering. It's this very, it's like, it's a strong and soft smell at the same time, but it develops a strong and soft smell at the same time, but it develops a really... I like to make sourdough breads that are not too acid, and so it's got this sweet and sour quality at the same time.

Hi there, listeners. Steve Patterson here, host of The Debaters. It's a CBC comedy podcast where my fellow comedians debate hard-hitting topics like butter versus margin or our long weekends Overrated and I try to moderate them though. Not as moderately as most moderators do anyway Our live audience picks the winner using the highest technology we have available human applause So if you're not afraid of a few painful puns, then we'll be like two peas in a podcast You can hear the debaters on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. People think of baking as being a science in many ways. I mean you use a scale because it's more precise than measuring things out by hand, for example.

But in the book you talk about the soft skills of baking. That might sound like a contradiction to some people. Can you explain that? Well, you know, I know bakers who are by the book only. They're so worried about the skill that they lose their contact with the process. And I like to have a balance between the two. Like last night, I was actually making some bread. And the moment you put the water and flour together, there's a process called autolyse, where before you add your sourdough, you just hydrate the flour and you let it sit for an hour. And I had a friend over and I said, these are the qualities that you look at. And we picked the dough up and we saw how the dough draped over my fingers. We saw how it stretched in my hand. We smelled it.

Okay, now I had scaled the flour. I had scaled the water. I was being very careful about the process, but I was equally in touch with how it felt in my hand because no two batches of flour are exactly the same. So I might say, well, wait a second, this feels firmer than last time. It feels a little tight, I'm gonna add a little bit more water to the dough.

Now, if you're only going by the book, you're not gonna even ask that question. You know, you're gonna say, well, I did it the right way. Where I'm always encouraging bakers to feel, to smell, to hold the dough in your hands, to not rush the process, and more importantly, enjoy the process. Be in touch with it so that you feel it as you're going each step of the way.

I mean, that literally speaks to what you're doing. You have your hands in the dough, and yet because of maybe the times we live in or what have you, we are trying to rush through things. But you're telling people, while your hands are there, actually, I mean, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier with the Tassayara book, like be in the moment while you're baking that bread. Right. And also, you know, maybe today's bread is going to be better than yesterday's, maybe it's going to be worse, but enjoy the process and like when, wait a second, this bread is different than last time. Why, what did I do differently?

Oh, I let the sourdough go two hours longer. Oh, it was a little bit warmer. Oh, yesterday I left it in the cooler for 24 hours and today I only did 18. You know, like you can kind of go through the process and kind of like review it in a way that's like each bake is a learning skill. That's why you say that each loaf doesn't need to be a 10 out of 10, that seven or eight out of 10 is fine?

Yeah, absolutely. I no longer try to make perfect loaves. I try to have the process be an experience. And if the bread is a 10, I'm happy. If the bread is an 8, I'm happy. Of course, you know, if it's not, if I really mess something up, that's a little disappointing, but that doesn't happen too much these days. It's hard in the Instagram era because everybody wants to take a picture of their bread when it's perfect and posted. Yeah, I'm guilty of that too. Good to know. One of the other things that you talk about and people who bake know this is that when

you bring it out, when you bring the loaf out of the oven, you need to stop and you have to listen. What are you listening for? Well, when the bread is cooling, you get this kind of crackling and especially if you bake the bread a little bit dark, not too dark, but you get some real caramelization. You get this fissure from the loaf cooling. I remember the very first time this happened to me. I was at a bakery in Paris, and the baker said, listen to me, listen to the music of the bread, and he puts the baguette next to my ear, and he's smiling from ear to ear, like, because I had never done that before. And he was so excited

that I was experiencing that process for the very first time. That's crackling away as it cools down. Exactly. Exactly. Do you name your sourdough starter? I ask because people... This is what you saw during the pandemic as well. Yeah. People become very attached to their sourdough starter. Sometimes they name them for reasons that are too long. Mine's called Carmine. But do you feel attached to your sourdough starter, sometimes they name them for reasons that are too long, mine's called

Carmine. But do you feel attached to your sourdough starter? Oh, totally. We just got back to Maine where I live now and we were gone for about three and a half weeks. And so, I come home and I check my sourdough right away and I literally only keep up like maybe like 40 grams in the refrigerator and I check it. And so it's been three weeks and then I fed it yesterday morning getting ready to mix the dough last night. And it just comes alive so quickly. That in itself is like this magical process. People say, well, can I kill my sourdough? Well, I mean, I think it's possible. Maybe if you neglect it for three or four months. But I've had sourdoughs for two months sitting in the fridge and you feed it again and

off it goes. But it is a thing, right? People do become attached to the starter. Oh, yeah. Well, I'm definitely attached to it. I'm very, very careful. If we have a lot of guests or in the summer, if my family comes and they're in the refrigerator moving things around and I open the fridge and my sourdough is not in its normal place, I'm like, oh my God, you know, did someone take it? Did they throw it away? Like, it's a moment of panic because I am attached to my 50 grams of sourdough I keep in my fridge. So, we were talking earlier, you said you're fine sometimes with the eight out of ten loaf. Pete Yep. Pete You also, after you retired, had a chance to live through this dream that you'd had, and it's not, you're not looking for an eight out of ten or a nine out of ten, you're looking for ten out of ten. And competing in Le Grand Prix de la Baguette, what is that?

Pete Well, in Paris, every year since 1993, they have this competition. And every bakery in Paris is entitled to bring two baguettes. And you have to get there between 10 and 11 a.m. You bring two baguettes and they weigh them, they check the length, and then they lay all these baguettes out on a table. Maybe, the table must be 40 feet long. And so you have this sea of baguettes. And it's something that I had always been fascinated about. And so I called a friend of mine who has a bakery in Paris, and I said,

well, why don't we enter? And would you think if I baked the bread? So I, along with his baker, we baked these two baguettes and they were exactly the right weight and exactly the right length. And we took the baguettes there, and it's like this magical moment where you've got bakers showing up on bicycles and bakers showing up on motorcycles and cars and bakers of every size and shape and age showing up, and they drop the two baguettes off, and then all the bakers are like lined up along the Seine, breaking baguettes and talking and waiting for the judges to decide.

And so they have... It sounds very French, very much like Paris. Oh my God. It was just the... It was so much fun. And they have three teams of judges, and they each start out with like 40 baguettes and they bring it down to 20 and they bring it down to 10, and then each table picks one, and then the judges at the end all pick one winner, and that winner gets to at the end all pick one winner, and that winner gets to deliver bread every day to the Lycée Palace in Paris for a year, and they win, I think, 500 euros. But it's not so much about

who wins, in my mind, it's about the joy of all these bakers coming together. And it was really, it was really one of the most wonderful moments of my life being part of that competition. How did it go for you in terms of the competition? We don't know because only one person wins. But because they knew I was writing about it for the book, they let me stand in the room when the judges were going through the competition. And so after about an hour and a half in it was so intoxicating, the smell, that I had to leave for a minute.

Pete Slauson Do you worry, and I ask you this because you're involved in this wheat improvement center, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico. Do you worry about the impact of a changing climate on what is essential to your life's work, which is the wheat that leads to the flour, which leads to the bread. Yeah. I mean, it's a big issue. Last year in France, the harvest was very high quality, but half the quantity. The center in Mexico is doing all of this amazing research trying to create cross-breeding varieties of wheat. There's a photo in the book where they're trying to have the foliage on the wheat,

they have the leaves be bigger, which keeps the soil cooler, and also varieties of wheat that have a root structure that goes deeper so that they need less water. So there's tremendous research going on, really trying to look at what can we do to combat climate change. Just for example, here in Maine, most of the farmers that are growing wheat are now planting spring wheat rather than winter wheat. Just because-

There's not much of a winter anymore. Yeah, it is scary, but it's also hopeful that you have this amazing scientific community across the world working to address this problem. And an audience that is there, I mean, there's a whole fight against ultra processed food, but also this real movement of people to try to figure out how to slow their lives down, whether it's changing your technology or what have you. It feels, and it's beyond the pandemic, that people want to eat real food and people want to figure out, I get that it takes more time than just pulling a loaf of bread off the store shelf, but they want to figure out

how to create some of that food as well. Yeah. And I mean, there's a real movement, I've seen this in Canada, where I wouldn't call them homesteading, but I would say there are people starting family farms again, looking for niche products that they can grow or process on the farm. There's this micro bakery movement where people are starting micro bakeries in their garages and doing subscription services. But it's interesting. You can look in people making spirits and people doing all types of foods at home, Kraft cheeses. I mean, it's a scary time, but it's also an exciting time for Kraft Foods. What would you say to somebody who's like, I don't have the time for this, I don't have the skill for this, I'm going to make the, what did you say, the paperweight that I'm gonna put on my term

papers rather than something that people would wanna eat? What would you say to them? Well, the first thing I would say is that the whole world was making sourdough bread up until about 1900. So, modern yeast-raised bread is relatively new. So if people did that from the beginning of time through the turn of the century, it can't be that hard. I mean, before people had machines and all types of gadgets to help us, people were making sourdough bread forever. So that's the first thing. It's not hard.

It's a basic skill. The second thing, it's a lot more weight than work. Okay, you could say, oh, my sourdough bread took 36 hours from start to finish, you know. Well, how much time did you actually spend working? If you feed your sourdough before you go to work in the morning, and then the afternoon you knead your dough a little bit and you shape it before you go to bed. It's sitting in your refrigerator and the next morning before you go to work, you pop it in the oven for 45 minutes. It's 24 hours of time and 24 minutes of work. And so it's not complicated. It's a simple process. It's something anyone can do. You know, people are almost intimidated by yeast and sourdough.

If you could just take that out of your mind, it's an easy process. People have done this since the beginning of time. I can do it too. And it's kind of like a magic act, flour, water, and salt. Exactly. Exactly. It's a real pleasure to talk to you. The book, as it should, made me hungry and made me want to get my hands back into the bowl and mix up a loaf of bread. Daniel, thank you very much. It is my pleasure. Thank you for this. Daniel Leeder's new book is called A Slow Rise, Favorite Recipes from Four Decades of Baking

with Heart. I spoke with him in December.