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The old baker in Tulsa who showed me how to check my dough with my elbow
I was 24 and working at a small shop on Cherry Street in Tulsa, and this older guy named Ray had been baking for like 40 years. He watched me stick a thermometer in my proofing dough for the third time in one shift and just shook his head. He told me to press my elbow into the dough instead, that my hands were too warm and I would never feel it right that way. Now I do it without thinking, but I still wonder how many other little tricks like that got lost because nobody passed them down. Did your first boss or mentor teach you something that sounds weird but works every time?
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the_ben3d ago
The elbow thing makes sense because your fingers are always gonna be a few degrees warmer than the dough, so you're basically measuring yourself instead of the bread. What gets me is that Ray probably learned that from someone else who learned it from someone else, and none of it was ever written down anywhere. Baker's math and dough feel live in the body, not in books, so when a guy like that retires it just vanishes. I bet there are entire ways of doing things that died out in small shops all over the country and nobody even noticed. Feels like the real loss isnt the trick itself but the chain of people it got passed through.
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