On Baking, Burnout, and Why We Teach

Reflections on returning to our old bakery in Walnut, North Carolina, for a couple workshops this fall.

My first morning back in Walnut, I thought I had misread the weather forecast. I awoke with the first morning light, ready to hike at the nearby Laurel River, the place I miss most, and it was gray all around. I arose and checked again: it was supposed to be a sunny day. I went outside. Silver gray everywhere, all around, as if the clouds were being slowly pressed into this small mountain valley by a gentle hand above. These weren’t clouds but fog: the ubiquitous fog that settles into nearly every Walnut morning this time of year. Three years away had been enough time to forget. 

I left here at the end of 2020, putting my bakery and baking school on hiatus in the process. It was partially by circumstance and partially by choosing. The house, with its attached bakery and brick ovens, was being sold by my landlord to new owners who planned to move in upon purchase. My landlord was scaling up her flour mill and the new owners were leaving behind Philly, a city they had cooked in for years, with plans to open up a small project of their own. It was just a small glimpse into the shuffling of priorities and careers and values in the food industry that year, and it meant I had to pack my stuff and go. 

But I was also burnt out from running a small rural bakery and baking school, and had been seeking new opportunities but wasn’t sure where to start. Consistently late nights firing the brick ovens and early mornings waking up to bake; the gas mileage I accumulated driving all around the region to deliver bread and pick up flour; repeatedly having to shuffle around the setup of the bakery to accumulate workshops, then farmers markets, then pizza nights; and most of all grappling with the fact that my body was rejecting gluten, getting increasingly inflamed when I mixed and shaped dough, and sluggish and lethargic when I consumed my own baked goods. It was an identity crisis as much as it was physical burnout, and I needed a break. 

Bakers who have spent time here for workshops or events or visits–and the fame of this space has drawn in countless–will tell you there is an undeniable magic to this space. How the smoke pluming out of the outdoor oven merges with the morning fog. How the apple tree offers the most tender, fragrant blossoms in the spring and fruits abundantly with stunning, austere Arkansas Black Apples in the fall. Frogs croaking as dusk falls, the evening light casting shadows over the mountains in the background. And the stars! Those glorious and abundant stars. 

I and the other bakers that have lived on the property will also tell you the space is a headache. Yard work galore, a very old bakery space with ovens that require hours or days of firing to retain heat, water leaks running down the driveway and scurrying mice and a dash of mold and an ever encroaching Appalachian jungle on all sides. It’s a recipe for burnout and isolation and sleepless nights. 

More often than not I found myself staring up at the stars, my hands covered in drying dough and my clothes perfumed with smoke and my mind keenly aware that I should have been in bed hours ago. I could stress all I wanted to, or bake the perfect bread, or misfire the oven, and regardless those stars would still be shining overhead, a defiant cacophony. 

The Walnut bakery is the manifestation of the baker’s–the creative’s?--dilemma in time and place. Time and place: those words being sourced here from the original NOMA cookbook because they have come to be what I and so many others are after with our food projects. Rooting our interpretations of those two things with our food and our care and our busy hands, telling, as best we are able to, a story. It’s remarkable, the lengths will go, the amount we’ll strain, to tell a story.

Since I’ve left Walnut, I’ve been traveling around the world, exploring the stories told through food and foodways in various places, at various times. I’m incredibly lucky to have had such opportunities, and my privilege to be able to do so does not go unnoticed. One near constant everywhere I go: bakers are tired. Tired and questioning their workload and wondering what’s next. 

The beauty of the pandemic from a baking and small business perspective, at least for those lucky enough to be in a position to take advantage of the opportunities, is it opened up new avenues for running a food project. With restaurants closed, pre-orders and markets and operations run out of one’s own home boomed. It has democratized baking more so than ever and allowed countless new voices to enter the baking conversation. It’s gotten people on board with whole grain and milling and sourdough, since many started baking more at home and researching these things. Now, as we enter a world that has in some ways moved past the pandemic, many of those small business owners are wondering what to do now that things are returning to normal. 

Many I know have been approached with offers to move into a space and run a full-time bakery. Most have little interest in this and want to keep their project small, but can be often faced with the dilemma of staying small and having to do all the work by yourself, or scaling up but having to slowly give up the part they love, the actual day-to-day baking, to manage others and do paperwork and interface with the public.

 Others I know who were already running established bakeries have closed them or limited their hours, realizing they don’t want to or need to be running their bodies into the ground with an early wake up every day. Plenty are having trouble finding enough staff who want to commit to such inhibiting hours.

Work-life balance does not come naturally with restaurants or bakeries operating under capitalism. The predicament often seems to be: sell your soul to make a profit and have some free time, or work tirelessly to keep doing what you love. I’ve seen a few examples of bakers striking the middle path, so to speak, in my travels: a couple in Glasgow who open their bakery only on Saturday and Sunday, him doing the bread and her doing the pastry; a few pop-ups across the West Coast that only open once a week, sometimes once a month, and sell out every time; small projects across the States that do so well at the Farmers’ Market they don’t need to open up a full time bakery. But these are the exceptions to the norm, only able to thrive because they’ve hit upon the perfect circumstances. Their product is just that good, and their kind of baking can’t be found otherwise in the city, causing lines to form around the block when these projects sell their baked goods. And even for those wildly talented bakers, things can get repetitive and exhausting. 

Jeffrey Hammelman, in his foundational Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes, writes of a baker’s role almost as a duty. Unlike artistry and other forms of cooking, he says, baking is a craft that requires repetition, patience, and devotion to the craft. It is a particularly Old World sentiment, utterly anti-millenial, and at odds with our current climate of food trends. I was drawn to that alluring romance in Hammelman’s version of baking: tireless attempts at the same loaf, the repeated early mornings, a light dusting of flour settling into your coffee mug at 5am while you mix your second dough of the day with calloused hands. And, when I stepped away from baking as a full time profession years ago, I thought about this quote a lot. This was not me. This was not where I felt most myself. 

Yet, teaching back in Walnut reminded me why I do this: the fire in student’s eyes as we pulled our loaves and galettes and cardamom buns out of the oven; the glimmer of creativity as we decorated cakes; the excitement palpable in their countless questions on fermentation. Students came from far and wide to work with their hands and see the brick ovens in use and talk about freshly-milled grain. My co-teacher and I offered lessons on mixing doughs, shaping pies, and decorating cakes; in return, we were offered a glimpse of that adamant, pure love of baking we too often lose sight of amidst the daily grind.

Which is to say: we teach to remind ourselves why we loved baking to begin with. It is a  chance to take a step back from the baker’s bench and see baking and flour and our tired joints anew. Rolling out brioche dough in front of the group, I’m amazed at the capability of my hands and how tender the dough is. I made this. I can do this. 

Some students attended our classes because they were thinking about quitting their current jobs to start their own baking project. The fearful part of me wanted to warn them against this; the more mature part of me knew not to. They’d figure out what they wanted and needed for themselves, and maybe develop even more creative and healthy ways to exist as a baker while avoiding burnout. This is, again, life under capitalism, where there is no simple solution and no easy path. Balance, community, self-care (big words!); many newer bakers, especially bakers of color and female bakers I know, have done a far better job than I did of rooting their own work in these ideas and making their careers far more sustainable in the process.

The fog did clear up, you should know. Around 8:30 A.M., just like it used to. I was three miles down the Laurel River path when it did so, giving way to crisp blue skies and a view of the Laurel rushing into the bigger French Broad at the trail’s end. I let myself pause for a few minutes to take in the view, to recenter myself in time and place. Tree branches rustled in the soft breeze and squirrels foraged for their winter supplies. The river was low this year, but the water of the French Broad flowed by softly, nearly soundlessly, as it always does.

Then, I turned around and my walk turned into a brisk jog. The dormant sourdough needed feeding and the cold brick ovens needed a light firing to wake them up. There was baking to get back to.