Longreads

08.11.09 | 11:23 AM ET Photo by David Farley As soon as I closed the door of the cab and told the driver where I wanted to go, an uninvited visitor leaned in my window. “Opium? Weed?…

An amateur baker apprentices with a Paris boulanger and learns the secret of artisan bread:

"Over the centuries, how many bakers have walked Paris’s dark avenues at night, heading to the fournils—baking rooms—to provide the city’s daily bread? In the 18th and 19th centuries, les geindres (the groaners) began before midnight, each laboring over hundreds of pounds of dough that they kneaded by hand and baked in basement wood-fired ovens. The poorest slept by the hearth, inhaling flour and often suffering from tuberculosis. Yet many did their jobs superbly, faithful to the demanding task of coaxing bread out of levain, or sourdough—a process that took days. As I walked toward the bakery that morning, I felt as if I were following in the footsteps of ghosts."

Tony Perrottet on the remotest reaches of Australia:

The first time I visited the Outback, I had hitchhiked the three-thousand-odd miles from Sydney along dusty roads first blazed by mad Victorian explorers and Afghan camel traders. This was more than twenty years ago, in my Jack Kerouac phase: I was carrying a fifteen-dollar tent from Woolworth's but invariably slept outside beneath the stars after a satisfying meal of instant Chinese noodles boiled on the open fire and the odd Vegemite sandwich, toasted for variety.

Australia has changed a lot since those days—and so, frankly, have I. Living in New York, I found my old enthusiasm for noodles and Vegemite somehow—inexplicably—waning. But I still had periodic cravings to get out into the wildest corners of the Outback, in the hope that space and freedom still lurked there.