Робин Слоун - Sourdough

Belasco gave me a frank look. “A market in the Bay Area needs, at minimum, three things. It needs fancy coffee, weird honey, and sourdough bread. Naz has been here from the start and he roasts his beans with lasers. Gracie gets me my honey. You might be my baker. But like I said, this is a place for new tools.” She smiled. “I want robot bread.”

“I don’t. Have. A robot.”

She looked at me innocently. “Get one.”

“Why can’t I just bake bread normally?”

“Go to Colma if you want to do that. I need you to do something different here. The new ideas, they’re not always … Have you seen cricket flour? It looks like flour. Once you explain it, people get interested, but as we approach our opening, I am mindful of the need for a bit more pizzazz. You, baker, could provide this pizzazz.”

I had never before been invited to provide the pizzazz.

“Get a robot and this spot is yours. You’ll have the exclusive sourdough franchise. The market runs previews Wednesday mornings. Look, you’re right by the door! You’ll sell out. Get a robot.”

* * *

MY DISGRUNTLEMENT DISSOLVED on contact with the problem, the way it had hundreds of times at Crowley and General Dexterity. Maybe that was my great weakness: if a task was even mildly challenging, any sense of injustice drained away and I simply worked quietly until I was done.

I guess I learned that in school.

The elephantine bread oven’s manufacturer was etched on the thin lip of metal above the baking bays; it was a FAUSTOFEN, from MUNICH. I looked it up on Global Gluten—the depot had very fast wireless internet, network name: CRUCIFEROUS—and discovered that the oven was considered a boring but reliable workhorse of industrial bakeries.

A Faustofen definitely did not provide pizzazz.

It took me a bit of poking around to find an open pantry stocked with staples, including flour and salt, the latter Diamond Crystal, which made me feel for a moment like I was somewhat in the loop. I mixed the flour with water and fed the Clement Street starter, watched it bubble and fizz. It was late, nearly midnight, but I was wide-awake, buoyed by curiosity. We would see about pizzazz. I mixed some dough and set it to rest.

I stood and faced the Faustofen. The controls were all in German, but how difficult could they be? Very difficult, it turned out. It took me ten minutes to deduce the combination that commanded ignition. When I did, the deep whoomph of the burners inside sent me leaping backward.

As I turned the dough, I paid special attention to what my joints were doing. I imagined myself a General Dexterity robot arm. I made low, rumbling robot-arm noises.

A smell wafted over from farther up the concourse, fishy and marine. I heard the clink of glass. I watched a sheet of steam rise in the distance. I saw a woman in a short lab coat, stunningly beautiful, dark-skinned with darker slashes under her eyes, wandering slowly up the yellow-tape road carrying a bright blue mug, her lips moving slightly, twitching at moments into a smile. Then, suddenly, she spun in place and sprinted back to wherever she’d been working.

I knew that feeling.

While I waited for the dough to rise, I wandered back to the lemon grove and the coffee bar. The barista, Naz, alternated his attention between a rig upon which a laser tracked slowly across a scattered bed of coffee beans—their roasty smell rising—and a laptop that showed a long playlist.

“Any requests?” he asked.

It was only then that I became aware of the depot’s soundtrack: currently an ambient swell so deep it could have been the far-off foghorns that guarded the Golden Gate.

Was it the far-off foghorns?

“She calls herself Microclimate,” Naz explained. “She samples the foghorns up close, then she plays with the sound, turns it into drums, voices, everything.”

So Naz chose the Marrow Fair’s music.

“The acoustics in here,” he began, and then words failed him, and he just shook his head in awe.

I sat with my cappuccino in the folding chair alongside the ping-pong table. The acoustics of the concourse carried not only Naz’s playlist but also scraps of sound from other workstations. I heard low beeps, sharp scrapes, muttered conferences, and the occasional laugh. The depot was wreathed in gentle effort. It percolated.

My dough had risen, so I formed a loaf. Technically, I should have let it sit, but I was impatient. I slung it into the Faustofen’s top baking bay and commanded the stoic monolith to bake.

The Faustofen had, in addition to its temperature dial, a humidity control, and I’d never controlled an oven’s humidity before. I made my best guess and resolved to check Global Gluten later. Then, through cloudy glass, I watched the solitary loaf bake. It felt transgressive; a process previously private, protected by walls three bricks thick, now starkly visible.

Naz must have switched albums, because the foghorn faded to nothing and was replaced by electronic drums—slow taps blurred by the width and breadth of the concourse into massive echoing thuds. I imagined the loading cranes at the Port of Oakland lifting their legs to plod across the airfield above.

Inside the Faustofen, the loaf inflated.

The crust darkened. Cracks formed.

A face emerged, wearing just the faintest smile.

I looked around. I liked this spot, right next to the door. I liked the folding chair. I liked the ping-pong table. I liked the pink light and the cool soundtrack and the wandering geniuses.

It couldn’t be that difficult to acquire a robot arm.

SO, YOU ASKED ABOUT THE STARTER.

The Mazg have many stories explaining how it came to us, and they all contradict each other. Every family maintains their own starter, always in a ceramic crock like the one I gave you. Sometimes the crocks are very old. That one was pretty new. I bought it in Daly City.

Here in Edinburgh, in the little Mazg neighborhood, when I go walking in the morning, through all the second-story windows I can hear the starters singing.

REFURB

I TOLD PETER I wanted to borrow a robot arm so I could teach it to bake bread.

“I don’t eat bread,” he reminded me.

That was well established.

“I didn’t think the arms could do kitchen stuff,” Peter said.

“They can’t. Not yet. I can figure it out.”

He pressed his lips together and I saw the muscles of his jaw working. This was Peter’s being-a-manager face. It meant he was figuring out how to help you. “There’s never enough arms, and Task allocates them. But if you really think you can do it … Huh. That would be a big deal, right? It would be. We could pitch it to Andrei.”

For all his reality-bending intensity, our CEO was accessible and approachable. He ate his lunch in the cafeteria with the rest of us, sitting with a different group every day. You could tell where he was without looking because Andrei’s table always laughed a little too loud.

Peter and I went to lunch early. We migrated between the stations of the cafeteria slowly, smoothie to salad to waffle maker, circling vulture-like, waiting for Andrei to appear. Peter looked very suspicious circling with just a single green Tetra Pak.

When Andrei appeared, Peter hooted an alert, and I tracked the CEO out the tail of my eye. It took him a long time to fill his tray—every step interrupted by a greeting, an admonition, a whispered report. I had never watched him this closely. Passing through the cafeteria, he left a wake of keyed-up expressions—smiles and grimaces. He was a walking amphetamine. Peter and I loitered together at the paella station. My pulse accelerated.

Finally, Andrei selected a seat at a half-empty table.

“Go, go, go!” Peter commanded. We sprinted across the cafeteria, Peter angling neatly between the Dextrous, me smashing into them, to bring our butts—his sliding, mine crashing—into the table’s last available chairs. Two cold-eyed wraiths had been vectoring for the same spots. I glared at them and sounded a warning hiss.