He'd been making bread for two years before it was good.
Not attempting bread — making it. Every Saturday, the same routine: flour, water, salt, yeast, the folding and the waiting and the heat. Every Saturday for two years.
The first months were bad. Dense, underbaked, sour in the wrong way. He kept notes in a small book — too much water, not enough proving, oven too cool. He made the adjustments and the bread improved slightly and then got worse again and then improved in a different way and then went sideways for a month for no reason he could identify.
He didn't stop. He wasn't sure why exactly. The bread wasn't critical. He could buy good bread. But there was something about the practice — the repetition without guarantee, the small adjustments made in hope rather than certainty — that he'd become attached to.
Two years in, he pulled a loaf from the oven and something was different. The crust had a sound to it when he knocked it. The crumb was open, the kind he'd been aiming for from the beginning. The colour was deep without being burnt.
He couldn't point to when it had turned. He hadn't had a breakthrough moment, a week when something clicked. The change had been gradual to the point of being invisible and had arrived, complete, without announcing itself.
Two years of ordinary Saturdays, and then the bread was good.
He ate a slice standing at the counter and thought: this is how it works.
You cannot see the becoming while it's happening. You only see what it made.
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