Baking Bread

I was very lucky recently to spend several days in France, my first time there in quite a while. I was in the very un-touristy part of Brittany called Finistère (translating to “Lands End”), a region filled with rolling green countryside and tiny little villages separated by vast swaths of farmers’ fields. It’s gorgeous, and the mix of coastal climate, Breton culture and language (and tough-to-understand accents), and the absence of tourists made for a wonderful if not brief immersion. My fond memories of France and the French were more than reinvigorated. And then there was the food.

I stayed in a modest house in the middle of a village similar in size to Ludlow, Vermont but more compact. The main square abutted the medieval church and the old commercial buildings housed an unremarkable collection of businesses – bank branches, a super market, a couple of bars, and an amazing number of hair salons.  Then, around the corner from where I stayed, on the main street, just down the block from the church square, is one absolutely incredible boulangerie and patisserie. The thing that makes this haven of excellent food in this slightly out-of-the-way place so incredible was how normal it is for everyone there. The boulangerie is clean, inviting and the people are very friendly, but nothing about it is designed for tourists, it is not intended to draw in a wider clientele and it is in no way gentrified. The place simply serves the needs of the local people, that being the making and serving of exceptionally delicious food (exceptional only if you're not French, I guess). And by delicious, I mean mouth-wateringly, roll-your-eyes and hold-your-belly, spend-time-before-going-fantasizing-about-the-food good. Breakfast each day consisted of pain au chocolat, naturally, and each day included one or two baguettes depending on the lunch plan.

The baguettes from this place make the breads sold here at home under the same name seem somehow to be improperly identified. Color: golden brown. Tap the outside and they sound hollow. Want to break off a piece? Just bend it slightly and the crust gives way to the lightest and most flavorful inside. So often when we eat fresh bread here at home, even if from a great bakery, the inside is just gummy enough that we have to muscle off a piece and the crust scrapes at our mouths as we chew. It’s depressing. The baguettes in my new favorite food joint on the planet massage the mouth as you chew, the sounds of the easily cracked crust serving as the perfect opening act to the joys within.

Sorry, I digress. I do have a point to make here about skiing and teaching skiers (to say nothing of cooks, bakers and consumers). A lot of people spend a lot of time analyzing what makes greatness great. The physics of a baseball pitcher’s wind-up, the ability of a great striker to see and to create ways of scoring in soccer, the movements of a great golf swing, all fall under the analyst’s microscope. In my now favorite boulangerie,what makes the bread so great? Is it the water? The ancient brick oven? The wheat and the way it is milled? The quality of the air? The incantations of the bakers? Maybe they hum long forgotten Breton folk songs to the dough as they knead it. Who knows. Who cares. And that’s the point. Whatever it is, the key thing is to appreciate just how good it is, to view the bread in the context of the experience of tasting it in the environment in which one can find it, and to keep the memory of that experience wedded to my time there in Finistère.

As instructors, doing technical analysis of skiers, and understanding and then training the specific details of technique is a major component of our jobs. It’s an essential skill set that take years of practice, and it provides an important service to our guests, the staff that we train, and to our industry and our sport. Still, sometimes, we need to be able to sit back a bit, look at the totality of what we see in someone’s skiing (even in our own skiing) and say “wow, that’s awesome”, without breaking it down into bits. More importantly and at times more difficult, once we’ve done the work with our students of breaking down the details so as to improve their skiing (and their understanding of skiing), it’s essential to bring back that most simple level of appreciation. The ultimate result of someone moving their inside ankle a certain way during the initiation phase of the turn shouldn’t be that they feel their inside ankle (although that helps). The ultimate result should be that it brings their skiing to the next level and it feels really cool! It’s our job to keep that perspective close at hand even while we focus on the details, and that is an art form found in only the best bakers and the best instructors. Hmm, suddenly I’m hungry for more.