Erik Fabian talks with Samuel Fromartz about his 2014 memoir, In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey, and how his baking has evolved in the 12 years since.
Sam Fromartz is a journalist who has spent four decades covering food, farming, and the environment. He started at Reuters in the mid-1980s, wrote for Fortune, Inc., the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and in 2011 co-founded the Food & Environment Reporting Network, the nonprofit newsroom he led as editor-in-chief until 2023. He is the author of two books: Organic, Inc. in 2006, and In Search of the Perfect Loaf in 2014, which won the IACP award for literary food writing. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he bakes all his family's bread.
In Search of the Perfect Loaf began in 2009 with a magazine assignment to work in a French boulangerie. That trip set Sam on a years-long pursuit: first of a better homemade baguette (one that eventually won a "Best Baguette of D.C." contest against professional bakeries), then of bread itself. He baked sourdough in California, rye in Berlin, and country loaves in the South of France, and talked with millers, farmers, wheat breeders, and fermentation scientists along the way.
We talk about tips for baking with freshly milled flour, why bakers are so fascinated by the baguette, how his baking has changed since writing the book, and what his perfect loaf is today.
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