Listen to Your Bread

A tough town like Olean offers a guy only so many job options: sweat in the stench of oil refinery crude, like his immigrant father does, suffer boredom in a factory job, or apprentice in a trade. Icky Haut chooses the latter and works his way up, one crumb at a time, in a commercial bread bakery.

Haut loves everything about baking bread: the smell and taste of yeast, the softness of flour rubbed between fingertips, the intense heat of ovens, the anticipation of a loaf's rise, and the comfor...