The View from the Bottom
So, what’re we looking at here?
‘5 Game of Thrones References You’ve Missed in these NASA Images’ ? A satellite image of Mars’ poles or the icy peak of Olympus Mons? Easy enough to imagine a little green man, North Face bag at the ready, staring up at the solar system’s largest volcano, contemplating the journey to come.
With an impossible task ahead and no idea how to tackle it, I can’t help but empathise with our little green friend. You can plot your routes, research the gear, brag to your friends, but in the end, only one thing’ll get you from the foot, to the peak; the first step.
No Perfect Pilot be This
Before chef, or baker, I was a physicist. Granted a poor, undergraduate one, but a physicist nonetheless and as such, there’s one thing I’ve learned to do well, and that’s fail. I’ve not had to make a million, or experience a medical emergency, all I’ve had to do is drag myself into Manchester University’s Physics building. Every morning, as I weaved my bike through the morning commuters on Oxford Road, I’d be bracing myself for the day to come, a day full of faulty experiments, programming errors, impossible mathematics and useless results.
Just to give you a taste of life at the time, here’s a picture of my final year project:
This, remember, was the project that earned me my Master’s. We were attempting to find revolutionary new methods of cooling urban structures…with hot lamps, bricks and bits of insulation foam. For those of you who haven’t taken a stopwatch to a warm wall yet, I’ll save you the energy; 4 hours is how long it takes for a brick to drop 10°C (with another 2 to heat it). All in all, each uncertain experiment cost us 6 hours of life, and that’s before we even saw any results.
But despite all this failure, I’m still here, and no worse for it. On the contrary, it may actually have benefited me. The conclusion to the brick cooling project involved me and my lab partner presenting a ‘revolutionary’ idea to our supervisor; that cities should could be cooled and powered by converting wasted urban heat into usable electricity.
Amazing.
However, we were then forced to reveal the results which suggested that the technology we’d use is so inefficient that it would take roughly 32,510 years before the technology would start paying for its self. For this, we were awarded a first class degree and the best received presentation we’d ever made as students.
Bringing the Lab Into the Kitchen
The lesson here, in the words of our favourite Mythbuster, is that;
“Failure is always an option” – Adam Savage
There isn’t, and never will be, true perfection. It’s subjective, it’s very nature meaning that what’s perfect to me could be repugnant to you. “Haters gonna hate” as our misguided youth would say but in this case they’re right! A quick Google would return many pages of ‘perfection’ for whichever field I desired, in seconds, but none of them will have a story I can relate to, and so aren’t perfect. If everything’s flawless, what’s left for me to care about?
With this site, my aim is not to become ‘Facebook Famous’, to go viral and live out the social influencer dream. This site’s an investment. An investment in myself. An archive documenting my projects and ideas as they appear, with emphasis on the culinary. Somewhere I can record my research and share my discoveries for all curious cooks and bakers out there.
The problem is, I have to start somewhere, which brings us back to the foot of the mountain.
The First Heavy Step
If you’re still intrigued about the opening image, I’ll give you a hint as to it’s true nature.
It’s not the whole picture.
The image you saw at the start is in fact part of a much larger image, an image of cullinary failure on my part, and perhaps some perceptual failure on yours. If we zoom out, allowing the ‘Martian landscape’ to fall away, along with my self worth, we can finally see the image’s true nature.
An utter disaster. A tragedy in black. Just a slighly burnt, wonky loaf.
That’s all it is, a loaf bread, and terrible one at that. Quite a poor opening subject for a culinary website. But we have to start somewhere, we must face up to our failures, and they can’t get more apparent than this.
As far as looks go, this loaf can quite comfortably be compared to the flow from a horse’s back side. It’s edges are burnt, it’s sides have deformed and there are whole sections of loaf that have simply caved in.
But it does have character!
This image tells a story, a story of how 2kg of dough on a 12 inch pizza paddle tends not to slide as gracefully into the oven as one would imagine. It conveys a history, a sense of respect for the 24 bakers of Bièvre, each responsible for loading his/her wood burning oven with 625 of these behemoths a day. Most importantly it represents a step, the first step towards a far off summit, and that story does excite me.
So just remember, embrace failure. The difference between an experiment and an embarassement is just how many see it.
Extras
If you’ve had a good read, I’d love it if you shared this article, with your help, hopefully I can turning this experiment into a full on public embarrassment! Or, even better, you can read more here, about failures and how I was sacked as a baker for Dylan’s one year into my baking career.
