Cormac Stevens
speaker
46 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Cormac Stevens’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
When I was six years old, I ate the perfect piece of bread.
My parents brought it home in a brown paper bag with a red stripe going down the side.
The loaf was oblong with a ridge of crust along the top, and the crust was a caramel golden brown, shiny with bubbles, and the inside was snow white.
I loved that bread, and to me, it became the epitome of what bread should be, the platonic ideal.
Bread with a capital B.
When I was 12 years old, I started baking bread.
My mother taught me how to make the sandwich loaves that she made two of every week.
And the recipe was so simple that even a child could follow it, and I did, all the way up until my mother would turn out the dough from the mixing bowl.
And with a few deft twists of her hands, she would turn it into a perfect sphere.
And I would try the same thing.
and the dough would stick to my hands and it would tear and all I would get was this big shaggy mess.
And I would look at her and I would ask her what she was doing that I wasn't doing or what I needed to do to make that work.
And all she could really say to me was that I didn't know how to do it yet and that I just had to keep doing it over and over and over again until I knew how to do it.
And so I did.
And every week until I was 18 years old, I baked bread.
When I was 19 years old, I finally got a book on bread.
Not sandwich bread, but nice bread, artisan bread, capitalized bread.
And I learned a lot from that book.
I learned that an oblong loaf is called a batard, and I learned that the ridge across the top of the loaf is called an ear, which you get by scoring it with a loam.
I learned that a shiny crust is caused by steam in the oven, and that most commercial bakeries will inject steam into the oven, and that it's almost impossible to get that level of steam in a home oven.
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