The Generosity of Bakers

A few months back, a Vancouver Island baker reached out after reading my blog post about Cranberry Pecan Bread (June 5, 2025), which featured a purple-tinged crumb, dried cranberries and toasted, chopped pecans.

“Now, try CAP Bread!” he said. “Cranberry, apple, pecan! It was my best seller!”

The baker was Kees Docter, the former head baker and owner of the Utopia Bakery Cafe in Chemainus, B.C., Vancouver Island.

Kees was no slouch: a baker from a family with multi-generations of bakers in Elburg, a small town in the Netherlands. I took it as a compliment that he wrote to tell me about his “best-selling” loaf at the Utopia Bakery.

I replied that it would be easy to add apples to my Cranberry-Pecan loaf, especially since I’d been told that we’d be having a “bumper crop” of apples on Pender Island this year. I’d love to try it, I said, and so honour his legacy with the addition apples, an ingredient that is so plentiful on Pender Island this time of year.

Generosity

“PRACHTIG!!” he wrote back. The word translates from Dutch as “Gorgeous!” according to Google Translate. He followed through several weeks later by sending me his recipe to ensure I had what I needed. His generosity and enthusiasm touched me. After years in baking, he was still proud of his bread and delighted to share his formula with another baker.

It was typed on an Excel spreadsheet showing the quantities and percentages of each ingredient, a format called “Baker’s Math.” It allows bakers to scale the recipe, to make more or less bread as required and still produce loaves that look, smell, and taste the same no matter how many loaves they bake.

The Utopia Bakery closed several months ago and Kees is enjoying his retirement.

I’ve never met Kees and have only communicated with him via email, but there is something I know about most bakers: they are generous to a fault.

Sharing trade secrets

Some might think a time-honoured recipe like his CAP bread would be akin to a “trade secret.” But in baker circles, it is nothing of the sort. A formula is something to share, no less than sharing a loaf of bread. It’s something you’ve made, refined, and are proud of … so you share it with another baker.

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I’m sure there are many bakers who are ogres to work with, many who act aloof and appear to be uncaring. Some may even be mean and miserly, but I’m convinced that what underlies all bakers is a generosity of spirit, humility and warmth. Those qualities may be hard to see at first, but inevitably, their kindness and humanity shine through.

Monastic Behaviour

In a recent New York Times article, food writer Lisa Donovan wrote this:

“There is a quietness, and a kindness, to [bakers’ lives] that veers into almost monastic behavior,” she wrote. “Perhaps it is simply the ancientness of being a fire maker — tending a hearth that really brings something out in a person. I’ve been working in restaurants since I was 15, and one thing I keep learning over and over is that some of the smartest, deepest and most earnest people in our world are bakers.

“It raises other questions,” she continues. “What does baking require of us? It requires patience, thoughtfulness, an eye to your surroundings, otherwise known as simply paying attention and responding accordingly. Maybe most important, it calls to light a common refusal to let the world shift your perspective, to hold true to a thing you believe to be true in all the small movements and steps and to return to them again and again.”

• From “A Brioche That Will Make a Believer Out of You” by Lisa Donovan New York Times, October 9, 2024

Being a fire maker

This is not to say that only those who exemplify these qualities are professional bakers and bona fide artisans! They include home bakers and untrained practitioners. I’ve written blog posts about a handful of people I consider my “teachers,” such as Penny, my landlady in the 1970s, or my favourite bread blogger, Francis Olive, or the inspiring author of The Tassajara Bread Book, Edward Espe Brown, who was a Monk, not a baker, working in the kitchen of a Zen Monastery, but he conveyed what baking requires of us, what it teaches.

Whatever these people taught me about making bread, they also conveyed — in their own ways — the “ancientness of being a fire maker,” the tending of loaves on a hearth, and their astonishing transformation from grain farm, to mill, to bakery, mixing and baking.

It’s enough to humble anyone!

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