You needed your own design, so you knew which loaf was yours.” Nowadays, Belisle and other bakers often use the scored patterns to identify the type of loaf, but the same principle applies. “Everybody in the village would make their own bread and they would bring it to the baker who would fire the oven and bake everybody’s bread. “The history goes back to the days of communal ovens,” says James Belisle, head baker at New York City’s Lafayette café and bakery. A bread lame (pronounced “lahm”) is one of them.

Simply combining flour, water, salt, and sometimes yeast can yield glorious variations, from chewy flatbreads to complex sourdoughs.īaking bread can be surprisingly simple or staggeringly complex, but regardless of your preferred recipe, a few tools are necessities. But baking bread is even more grounding and wholesome, inexplicably warm and satisfying. Immersing yourself in the aroma of fresh-baked bread while dreaming of melting really good butter into all the bubbles and cracks is gastronomic foreplay at its best.

During difficult times, it’s easy to find joy in eating bread.

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