The Extreme Loaf, Revisited

It’s August again, and I keep circling back to the summer I ended up elbow-deep in dough inside a shipping container in San Sebastián. Here’s the story.

It starts with Dan Lepard. I’d known Dan from his blog for years before I met him in person. That first face to face took place an ocean from my New York shores.  We had connected through the Bethesda Bakers, a loose online community that traded starters and stories the way other people trade investment tips.

At the time, I was head chef at a private men’s club in Manhattan that closed for August. Most summers I’d use those weeks traveling through Europe. That summer I connected with Dan while visiting San Sebastián where he was then baking. And it was there where I would find myself on a hot summer day in hot dough in a hot shipping container.

Let’s back up. The shipping container was one of five that comprised his baking operation Dan was running. Called “The Loaf,” it consisted of five shipping containers near the San Sebastian train station. The shipping containers were open on one side, allowing the public to watch the whole baking process happen.

Dan was running The Loaf with Iban Yarza as well as two apprentice bakers — Egoitz, who everyone called Fagus, and David. Anyway, within minutes of entering The Loaf, Dan had me baking with his team. It was a wonderful time.

I still remember the taste of the first loaf that came out of hs oven. It was under-salted — genuinely, noticeably — something I’ve written about before on this blog, and somehow that made the afternoon more memorable, not less. It felt like seeing a thing before it was finished, which turned out to be true of The Loaf itself. It had only opened that summer.

The Loaf was a pop-up in the truest sense: five prefabricated containers, cheap enough to serve as a pilot for what San Sebastián was calling “techno-emotional spaces” ahead of its turn as European Capital of Culture in 2016. Xabier de la Maza, Nacho Bueno, and Andoni Munduate put it together under an outfit called La Salsera, bringing in Dan Lepard and Iban Yarza — the Basque baker who’d translated Lepard’s book into Spanish — to run the baking and teach courses.

Between them the container turned out five or six hundred loaves a day, plus whatever pastries showed up depending on who felt like making what. One of Dan’s signature breads there was something the regulars started calling the Extreme.

Nobody I’ve found ever nailed down exactly why it got that name. My best guess is that it has less to do with heat than with restraint — barely any starter worked into a lot of flour, so the dough has no choice but to sit and take its time instead of getting rushed along. That’s a strange thing to call “extreme” until you remember what it’s actually up against: an August that wants everything to happen too fast.

Which is the part I keep coming back to this time of year. There’s something almost stubborn about a loaf that refuses to be rushed, especially in a kitchen this warm, when everything else in the summer wants to hurry. This one just sits there being patient at you, all day, until it’s ready — and somehow that’s the part that feels true to the memory, more than any of the specifics do.

That’s the loaf I’ve been reworking this week — not a copy, since nobody ever wrote the original down in a form anyone could copy exactly, but a version built on that same patience.

The flour Dan used that summer is not something I could easily replicate. Regardless, I blended my own approximation. While it was never going to behave quite the same, it landed me close to something for which I yeared — a bread from Iban Yarza’s Pan Casero. It was a bread that had hints of rye, just enough to round out the flavor. Same instinct, even if the flours themselves aren’t twins.

Before I started baking, I went online to see whether The Loaf was still there, half hoping some day I’d get another August off and get to go visit that wonderful train station bakery. But I couldn’t find anything on it. So I reached out to Ainaralo Lopez, who had worked there way back then. She confirmed that The Loaf has closed. Which is too bad for the world. It was a great little bakery. 

So this loaf is an elegy. Not for a recipe — it never really left, it just kept getting reinvented by whoever tried to remember it — but for a container full of people who let a stranger who liked Dan’s blog get his hands dirty one August afternoon, and handed him a loaf that was missing something, same as the place itself is missing now. I can’t walk back in anymore. So I bake my way back instead, salt and all.