To a trained observer, Samuel Fromartz looks fully at ease as he shapes the pain de campagne loaves while waiting for a final baguette to brown in his home oven on Capitol Hill. But at one point, the veteran journalist pipes up to say he's feeling out of sorts. This is not how he's used to baking bread.
It's a sunny afternoon in August, and Fromartz, 56, is juggling multiple breadmaking duties while assuming the roles of educator and interviewee for a pair of journalists. He's milling flour, hand-mixing dough, shaping baguettes, slashing proofed dough, baking loaves, answering questions, explaining complicated processes and even cleaning up after himself in his small subterranean kitchen. He is, in short, operating outside his comfort zone.
More than once, Fromartz mentions, after finishing some task, that this is when he would typically run upstairs and start answering e-mail or making phone calls related to his position as co-founder and editor in chief of the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit group that produces the kind of deep investigative reporting that many newspapers can't afford anymore. Later, he acknowledges to me that he was "a little flummoxed" by having to simultaneously bake bread and field questions.
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