OUR DAILY BREAD
A basic pleasure became essential during lockdown.
➸ how many trendy sourdough starters have been nurtured and brought to toasty fruition by your humble critic since the dark covid curtain descended last winter? Not a single one, I’m a little embarrassed to admit. I’ve experimented with pizza doughs (a dash of dark beer works wonders), avidly Instagrammed apple pies being made from scratch (as followers of @plattypants know, our in-house baker favors an intricate lattice crust), and when not stuffing home-baked goods down my craw, I’ve made trips out into the world for bags of bagels, dense loaves of Pullman, and pointy Jerusalem-style baguettes, which I like to slice, freeze and then pop in the toaster whenever I’m looking for a little comfort on a cold gray morning or in the middle of the night.
A working bakery is a wonderful thing in the best of times, but in the worst of times—as our city fathers, in one of their sporadic fits of good sense, have recognized—it’s essential to body and to soul. There are the obvious sensory pleasures of bakeries: the heat of the ovens; the familiar, toasty smells; the reassuring sight of the golden loaves or bagels or pastries laid out in their baskets and baking trays. As at a church or museum, regular visits are encouraged, and so is generous tipping. You don’t have to stay long to receive your benediction, but after a while, the act of pilgrimage takes on a comforting rhythm of its own.
If you’re looking for a loaf of Pullman, I recommend the She Wolf Bakery stand at the Union Square Greenmarket, and for fresh bagels, you can’t do better than Bagel Bob’s on University Place, where, as every devout regular knows, you can tell what’s fresh from the oven by the clouds of steam on the display-case windows. For croissants and pastries, I suggest the original Bien Cuit outlet on Smith Street, where the area manager, Christina Oh, told me, on a recent rainy afternoon, that the bakers had been coming in to fire the ovens every morning starting at 3 a.m. for seven months straight. The only day they took off was Election Day, which we both agreed, as I hoisted my bag of croissants out the door, was the most essential day of all.