Josh Fairbanks is a bread and bagel baker based in Portland, Oregon. The complexity and timelessness of his slow-fermented sourdough loaves and honey boiled bagels have contributed to his reputation for creating products of exceptional quality and heart. Here, he speaks with me about his time at San Francisco’s Tartine bakery, his visions for the future, and the perennial relevance of bread.
A gallery of all of the photos we shot together can be found here.
Quinna Hadley (QH): Who are you and what do you do?
Josh Fairbanks (JF): My name is Josh Fairbanks and I’m a baker and a pizza-maker.
QH: There was a time in your life when you studied music, and you also went to school for English literature. How did you end up baking bread?
JF: To be honest, I worked in the food industry throughout college to pay for my education, and the degree I ended up with was an English degree with an emphasis in creative writing. But I didn’t get a degree in anything that would really get you a job - it just gave me an experience. It gave me all the soft skills and no hard skills. When I was approaching graduation, I feel like there was this bomb-going-off moment where it was like, okay, the fuse is going, I’m about to graduate, I’m about to graduate! And then right when I expected a big bang, it just didn’t go off. I graduated in the winter instead of the spring. And so I finished my last classes and I knew that I was going to pass, but there was still this chunk of time between that and getting the diploma. After I finally graduated, I ended up staying in the apartment I had been renting off campus even though I didn’t have a job lined up. What I realized at that point was that honestly, graduating doesn’t mean anything unless you do something about it. I hadn’t inherently done anything yet.
And so I found myself with two options: I could either substitute teach or work at a sandwich shop. I took the job at the sandwich shop. I figured I could teach at any time, and the sandwich shop donated one to a local nonprofit charity for each one they sold. I thought that was cool. I felt more drawn to that kind of work at that kind of company than I did towards anything else at that time. And at that point, I had already worked in the food industry for seven or eight years. I had worked in it all throughout college, even in high school, and so I just ended up staying. There have been little points where I’ve had to stop and ask myself, okay, is this still what I want to do? And I’ll have a moment where I get super excited about the possibility of another career. But then I just realized how much I enjoy working in something tactile and tangible. There have been a lot of things that I’ve been passionate about that I didn’t feel like I had an aptitude for, and I’ve just been the person that’s excited about their job, excited about the possibility of something, but then is really awful at it. This might be the first and only thing that I’m passionate about and actually somewhat decent at.
QH: What did you want to be when you were a child?
JF: I was interested in music fairly early on. Both of my parents were in multi-level marketing, and I remember thinking that it seemed like a whole lot of talk. So I think that early on one of my goals or dreams around work was to do something that didn’t take an explanation of value - something that you didn’t have to question at the end of the day, something where you didn’t have to ask yourself whether or not it mattered. When I listened to John Coltrane, I felt like what he did mattered. I could listen to one of his songs and feel something I didn’t feel before I listened to it. So I started to study music and I did that for a long time - I really gave it a shot. It didn’t end up working out but I’m not mad about that, because I’ve found something now that I’m truly happy with. I feel like my child self would be proud of the work I’m doing. Because really, what is simpler or more inherently valuable than baking a loaf of bread?
QH: Before moving up to Portland, you worked at Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. Can you talk a bit about your experience at the bakery and how you got there?
JF: I used to be an incredibly sleep-deprived, overworked manager of a pizzeria, and one day the owner asked me to take a vacation. The first thing I could think of was San Francisco. I figured I could see the ocean and I could also try some food I’d never had before. Just by being in the food industry I knew about Tartine, and another bakery in town told me that I had to check it out. I knew a little bit about the dogma and everything that surrounded it, like how you had to go at a specific time, that the bread wasn’t out until five o’clock in the evening, that there was always a line - but I didn’t know a whole lot other than that.
I remember feeling giddy and ecstatic before I even got the product. When I got to the front of the line, I could see through the speed rack behind the cashier where the baker was baking, and they pulled a loaf out of the oven. And instead of putting it onto the cooling rack, they put it directly into the bag and handed it straight to me. I remember that specifically, and thinking how special that was.
I drove out to the coast and sat down at a picnic table. There I was, sitting at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, at a really difficult place in my life, and all I had was this loaf of bread. I ripped it open and it smelled like everything good I’ve ever had - and not just food. It was magic. Here were these people who were getting ground-up wheat wet and letting it sit, and then getting it hot, and it became one of the most incredible things I’d ever eaten. And it was just flour, water, and salt.
Reflecting on it now, I was definitely prefaced to think about that loaf in a different way than I would a normal loaf of bread. You know, if you go to the supermarket, you’re not going to take a pre-packaged, pre-sliced, store-bought loaf of bread out to the coast and rip it up with your bare hands. But that’s what I did, and I felt that I had experienced something amazing. I left San Francisco thinking, how could I replicate this? And beyond wanting to recreate the bread itself, it left me wishing that I could create a similar experience for others. With my work now, that means setting up my baking schedule so that I bake right before people come to pick up; It means having people get their bread in a three hour window. It’s practical, but it’s also a way to let me know that their loaf is at least still somewhat warm in their bag when they get it - because I know that if they get a warm loaf of bread, they’re much less likely to let it sit in the bag for a couple of days before digging into it.
Ultimately, I ended up going back to San Francisco and getting a job at Tartine. I hadn’t baked professionally before that, so I feel really grateful for Veronica Cates and Jennifer Latham for taking a chance on me. When I was there, I asked a lot of questions – something like, what’s the difference between extensibility and elasticity? And they would be like, ‘well what do you think? Do you think it’s this or that?’ And the whole point was to make you really question what you were doing. They obviously knew the practical answer, but it wasn’t about that. It wasn’t about how we can make today’s bread better, it was about creating a team of bread bakers who were curiosity-driven and questioned things - it was about making tomorrow’s bread better, and the day’s after that. We’d have some question about why the dough was the way it was on a particular day, and so we’d do an experiment. We’d blue tape everything, and label things 1-A, 2-B, 3-C. We did side by side, blind comparisons where what you wanted, or what you might have predicted, didn’t end up mattering. We just wanted to make the best bread we could make and learn as much as we could along the way.
I’ve taken that ethos into both the bread and the bagels that I make now. Just a few months ago, one of the flour mills I use burned down. Since I use some of their flour in my bagels, I had to start over and learn again from the ground up, coming up with a new flour blend for my dough. And it wasn’t that I needed a flour that was just like the other one in terms of specs, it was that I needed a flour that did all of the tactile and flavor things that that first flour did. So I took seven or eight bags and did an experiment with a hundred percent of each type of flour, side by side and marked with blue tape, and then I ate them without knowing which one was which until I turned it over. I wanted to figure out, at each stage of the process, what those flours really did. A lot of my approach to baking today is based on what I learned during my time at Tartine.
QH: I know you have some personal and professional goals, but what would you say are your biggest ones? Where do you see yourself in five years, ten years?
JF: I want to find a sustainable way to do what I do. Right now I’ve found a good balance of baking in conjunction with working another job at a pizzeria, where I get healthcare, benefits, and all of that. I think it would be great to find a way to do this full time, where I can provide those same things for myself and others: where I could give other people the opportunity to have an experience like I’ve had. I know a lot of folks in the industry who have never had the opportunities that I have now, and to be able to offer that to them would be really rewarding.
I definitely have certain reservations when it comes to the idea of opening up a full space of my own and then just having, you know, a decade of liability on it. There’s a real lack of peace of mind in that, even if you’re confident enough in the product you’re making. And for me, I’m not sure that it would be worth it. I don’t know if there would be anything in that vision that’s satisfying enough to warrant the drawbacks. I don’t feel the pull of needing to have my own space, where maybe others would really want people to come and get coffee at their coffee shop or bread at their bakery. I don’t feel the same need. I feel like there’s a fairly common sentiment that the only way to have a legitimate business is to have an address, but I think that there’s real freedom in doing things the way that I’m doing them now.
QH: Finally, what does success mean to you? Personal, professional, or a combination of the two?
JF: One of the Beatles told an anecdote at some point that I think of often. They said that when they were in grade school, they were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, and they responded by saying that they wanted to be happy. The adult said that they hadn’t understood the question, to which the young Beatle countered by saying, ‘you don’t understand life’. And it’s such a Holden Caulfield way of responding to this, but I’ve seen the ways this industry can swallow you up whole. And at the end of the day, I just want to make something that I’m proud of. I want to positively impact the people around me, whether they’re coworkers or employees. Success is being fulfilled and fulfilling those around you.
Josh Fairbanks, Instagram: @joshfairbanksbread, @honeybagelpdx; www.fairbanksbread.com.
