Brian Smith Lincolnton | What a Payroll Spreadsheet and a Sourdough Notebook Have in Common

Brian Smith Lincolnton cutting bread

Brian Smith of Lincolnton, North Carolina keeps two notebooks. One is at his desk at work, where he handles payroll and benefits administration for the Lincoln County school system. The other is in his kitchen, where he has logged more than two hundred sourdough batches over the past five years.

He did not plan for these two things to resemble each other. They do anyway.

The Same Skill, Different Context

Payroll administration is pattern recognition under pressure. Smith is responsible for making sure bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and classroom teachers get paid correctly. Leave needs to be coded right. Benefits need to line up. Small errors have consequences for people who are counting on the number being right.

Sourdough baking is pattern recognition under different pressure. The ambient temperature changed. The starter was fed at a different time than usual. The bulk ferment ran longer than the last batch. What does that mean for this loaf?

In both cases, the answer depends on knowing what the variables were and what happened when they changed before. In both cases, the record is what tells you.

What Can Go Wrong Without Records

Smith has worked in payroll long enough to know what happens when records are incomplete. Adjustments that should take five minutes take three days. Patterns that would have been visible in the data get missed because the data was not there to see.

The same thing happens in the kitchen. The loaf that collapsed last April would have been preventable if he had noticed that the kitchen was three degrees warmer than the week before. The notebook now has a column for ambient temperature. That column exists because of April.

Neither notebook is optional. Both are the mechanism by which he learns from what did not go the way it was supposed to.

The Satisfaction of Getting It Right

There is a specific satisfaction in work where accuracy is the whole point. Smith has described his job at the school district in terms of the people who depend on it being done correctly. A bus driver whose paycheck is wrong has a real problem. A cafeteria worker whose leave is miscoded has a real problem. The job is to make sure those problems do not happen.

The bread version of this is smaller in consequence but identical in structure. If the hydration was off, the crumb will be wrong. If the bulk ferment went too long, the structure will not hold. If the score was too shallow, the loaf will not spring.

In both cases, Brian Smith of Lincolnton is accountable to the output. And the output is how you know whether you did it right.

What the Pandemic Revealed

Smith started baking sourdough in March 2020, when the schools went remote and the central office emptied out and he was working from a card table in the spare bedroom. He needed something to do with his hands that had a result he could see when he was done.

He did not know, at the time, that he was doing what he had been trained to do his entire career. Record the variables. Track the outputs. Adjust when the results do not match what they should be.

The pandemic produced a baker. The baker had the methodology before the bread did.

He has kept the sourdough notebook on the kitchen counter next to the scale for five years. He has kept payroll records for more than twenty years.

Both notebooks are full of corrections and adjustments. Both notebooks are how the work gets better. Both are, in that sense, the same notebook in different rooms.

He does not think much about whether any of this makes him a particularly good person. He has bread. He knows people who can use it. That is the whole calculation.

The bread is useful now in the way it was useful to his grandmother when she made biscuits every morning without being asked. It was what you did if you knew how.

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