The Secret Ingredient: Hands

That place you're inhabiting as an artist...also belongs to the gardener, the baker, anybody working with their hands.

Taisho, or Sarah, is a member of the Zen Mountain Monastery where I practice, and was appointed “Chief Disciple” (like a role model) for our last period of intensive training, which is kind of a big deal. It’s hard to communicate through text what her presence is like in person — the way her voice sings certain words and communicates the smile that often lights up her face. During my last retreat I was assigned to the kitchen, making big salads in the back room and silently working alongside Taisho while she baked. There’s a kind of delight around her that warms you up, especially since the monastery can sometimes feel like a solemn place.

Taisho is trans, which is why she refers to the “guy camp” she used to inhabit, and has talked about her experience of transitioning as a way to see both sides of the world and an impetus to break down the barriers between them. I thought it was especially interesting to hear her perspective on making bread versus desserts, where there is still a gendered division in the professional world.

When someone’s a really good storyteller, I sometimes let them get away with talking not strictly about an ingredient. But we decided that Taisho’s ingredient is hands, because the tactile learning that comes from shaping dough was first way of connecting to the mindful quiet of baking, and because what baking means to her today has everything to do with giving and serving what she’s made.

I drafted this before the fires, but it feels a bit like a love letter to California 🧡

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So my mentor in painting, the first question he asked us in graduate school was how many of us owned anything that was handmade. Someone would say, my belt is handmade, or an Afghan I have on my bed, but very few people had anything. And one of his points is that you don’t have to go that far back in history to where everything was handmade. Your bed sheets were handmade. Every piece of clothing you wore was handmade, there was nothing that didn't come through the labor of hands. He was trying to communicate that painting was this little preserve of that sense of touching, but baking also had that for me, it had that sense of touch, of connection.

Baking was the job I loved most, but I fell into it by accident. Santa Cruz is a tourist town with lots of restaurants, so if you’re a college-age person that’s your job. I was a dishwasher, prep cook, line cook, dinner cook, then I got a job at a place called Emily’s Bakery, which made artisanal bread. We were the only bakery in Santa Cruz doing our own sourdough. We had a starter with a pedigree, originating from the Yukon Gold Rush in Alaska, like a 100 year-old-thing. So that came with its own sense of awe.

It was the first time in all my years of working at restaurants that I felt skilled. It was a skill that was handed down, and a type of handing down where it's literally hands on top of your hands to show you how to do the kneading — like if you’re doing a boule, how to get that rounding and feel the tension of the skin as it wraps around that dough. It was keeping track of how the bread felt. You had some sense of “let it proof for one hour” or whatever, but ultimately it was your hands and your sense of its puffiness, its airiness, and the understanding that it was a living thing.

My hours were 4 am to 12 noon, and you were there for a long time yourself. You’d get there at 4, turn on the ovens, get the starter out from the walk-in, get things prepped to start to make the bread. And you saw the world wake up. We had coffee and day-olds available, and first there’d be the truckers who were trying to get down the coast early in the morning, and then you’d get the early morning farmers and then the commuters. It was like this invisible part of the world waking up. I saw every sunrise. I’d take a break around 5:30 and go outside with a cup of coffee and I could hear the seals barking from the harbor. It was magical for me, but it also put me out-of-step with the rest of my 20-year-old friends. You need to go to sleep very, very early. So I cultivated what I already had as a painter, this sense of being alone in silence. And I would only learn about this later, when I was practicing Zen, but if you're fully there and you're sensitive to it, there's no words in your head, you're just there.

You know, we make painting and being an artist into this elevated, rarefied thing where you commune with the Muses and extract some heavenly connection and bring it forth into form. But that place you're inhabiting as an artist — which is this place of quiet and this place of fully being present — also belongs to the gardener, the baker, anybody working with their hands. It's just that we live in a society that grants special status to some things rather than others. I think anybody involved in these types of things can talk about what that space feels like. What does it feel like to lose yourself and be fully present?

Kate: So you learned how to make bread after college, but then that didn’t become your whole career. How did baking come back into your life?

So many many many years later when I came to the monastery, they knew I had this background in bread baking so they assumed I’d know how to bake other things. But I had never in my life made a pie crust. At Emily’s and the other places I worked, bread baking was a male thing and the making of desserts was women’s work. And at the time, since I was in the guy camp, there was this sense that, like, we do the physical work that’s ancient, like we’re connected to the invention of fire. [She laughs] It’s comic but it was there. So when I had this job at the monastery, it was like the universe saying, Oh, you thought that was easy and you thought it had no skill. Well, let's let you have a go at it. It isn't so easy, especially at scale, because for a Sunday dessert you’re at 120 people. So I struggled. There were a lot of things that didn't work, and I’d have to figure out how to do it again on schedule — which in the monastery meant waking up extremely early or using your breaks — and that was humbling.

In most baking, there’s some distance between you and the person you’re baking for. But at the monastery, you have a very direct connection to the people eating your dessert. We had a lot of people coming with dietary restrictions and preferences, so all of a sudden you're baking for people are gluten-free, vegan, “butter okay but not eggs,” “eggs okay but not butter,” lactose-intolerant, keto, nut allergies, just a lot of differences. So when I came into that, not being sensitive to it, I originally found it somewhat of a burden.

There was a moment when I was being jocular talking to someone about how hard it was. And a person came to me who is vegan and said, “Just so you know, I can’t really join in on your sense of humor because it makes me feel like my needs are a burden.” And that stuck. It affected me, because I don’t want anybody to feel like they’re a burden. I think especially because I’m trans, and I transitioned at a time back in the 90s when we were very marginalized, I was sensitive to that idea of being a burden, of not being seen, not having my needs seen, of being the exception. It went deep. I started to make sure that if anyone was coming in, like someone who was gluten-free and vegan and no-nuts, I’d make a half-batch [of the dessert] just around that person. And you start to see that these people would seek you out — they were stunned and they would be so thankful and talk about how they could never find anything to eat. You start to realize that what this is communicating is, I see you, I care about you, there's a place for you at the table. It really communicates love.

K: I feel like these two eras of your baking — the bread-making in Santa Cruz and the dessert-making at the monastery — are sort of opposite in that one was so inwardly-focused and the other was outward. But at the same time, those are really the two parts of making food that are most important, at least for me.

It’s true. My Zen practice connected those two things. When I was in the commercial world, it was all about being lost in myself — though not my chatty self — and being still, being with this thing. And when you’re doing zazen [sitting meditation] it’s all about you being alone in the presence of your own mind and opening up to that and quieting it. But then you’re supposed to bring that into relation. And the way that happens is that you're able to set yourself aside, because you've learned how to quiet that chatter and be with what's in front of you, and now you can offer that to another human being to say, I can listen. I can be here and just listen to you.

And that has this corollary with making food. When I’m baking, I’m in that space where I’m just present, I’m just with the food. But then you bring it into contact with the world.

What I’m Cooking