The Sourdough Wars

asking him to find something out from the Department of Motor Vehicles. He said he’d get back to me. That was just as well, as I had clients coming in all morning. By the time he called back, I had seen an accused dope dealer (my least favorite kind of client) and two alleged embezzlers. You meet some nice people in my business.
    Rob told me what I needed to know—Tony Tosi’s license number—and I took off for the Palermo Bakery, where I found Tony sitting in an office as carefully decorated as his brother’s was thrown together. All impersonal tans and blacks. Tony had on a suit to match, and for that matter so did I—my best black gabardine. If I didn’t get to I. Magnin soon, people would think I was in permanent mourning.
    “Ah, Rebecca,” said Palermo’s president. “Come for that tour?” He glanced at his Rolex. “I wish you’d called—I’ve got a two-thirty.”
    “It’s okay, Tony. I just dropped in for a minute.”
    “Don’t worry, I’ll put him off.” And before I could stop him, he picked up his telephone and gave orders.
    “Let’s start on this floor, shall we? It’s backwards in the process, but it’s more exciting because the best part’s upstairs.”
    If Tony’s office was a bit overdecorated, it was the only thing in the bakery that was. The place looked as if it hadn’t changed for fifty years, even though it was only eight or ten years old. Tony had bought up a lot of ancient machines and equipment and installed the whole operation in an old warehouse.
    We went out back first. “This is the loading dock. The trucks back up here ’round the clock to pick up merchandise.” We stepped back inside.
    “And this is our warehouse.” It was just a big room full of red plastic trays with bread on them, not arranged in neat military rows, just standing around willy-nilly. Overhead, rows and rows of wire racks used as coolers moved in a circle around the ceiling. “The coolers are for steak rolls and things that will go into poly bags. The sourdough loaves that go out to the stores and restaurants are bagged hot.”
    He took me into another room with two lazy Susans on it. Hot loaves were dropping onto the moving tables, and ladies in white uniforms were putting them in paper bags, then into cardboard boxes for loading onto the trucks.
    We went into another room, about the size of a whole city block, and walked all the way through it. At the far end, balls of dough were coming off “proofers,” conveyor belts that brought them down from the second floor, very slowly. “It takes them about fifteen, maybe eighteen minutes to get to the molders,” Tony explained. “They need the time so the dough will stretch easier. We call that one ‘the cage.’ ” He pointed to an ingenious vertical arrangement of conveyors.
    “It looks scary.”
    He shivered. “Wait’ll you see the mixer.” After being molded into loaves by the ancient machines, the bread was put on cotton cloths in racks called boxes, which in turn were rolled into “steam boxes” to “proof up,” or rise. Tony pulled back a metal door and we went into a steam box—I could see how it got its name.
    “It’s about a hundred degrees in here. Hey, Lorenzo.” A man in a white outfit entered the steam box, and Tony spoke to him in Italian. He turned to me. “I told him the loaves looked a little small. Anyway, it takes them several hours to proof up. Then we bake them.”
    He took me over to the oven, where one of the bakers was using a loaf-size board to lift the bread off its cotton cloth and put it on a “peel board,” a larger wooden one that held several loaves. The loaves were then peeled—dumped—in neat rows onto the first of thirty-six shelves on which they baked. “The bread goes from shelf to shelf,” said Tony, “changing shelves every fifty seconds. We bake them thirty-five to forty minutes at 435 degrees. Now let’s go see the good stuff.”
    There was no elevator to the second floor—only an old-fashioned narrow metal staircase. The room at the top was unbelievably light and airy, and piled here and there with bags of salt, sugar, and other ingredients. The effect was rather like a huge potting shed with a good supply of fertilizer and perlite stacked in hundred-pound bags.
    On our way to the room with the mixer, we passed a metal trough about twelve feet long and divided into thirds. One of the compartments was filled with dough. “That’s it,” said Tony. “That’s the