Loafing Around With Musician Aaron Raitiere

It started with an Instagram post of David Crosby, Jason Isbell, and David Cobb sent to me on my phone. “I’ve got a home cook for you,” texted photographer Brooke Stevens. “His name is Aaron Raitiere and he’s a writer for Thirty Tigers (the label of Jason Isbell, Tyler Childers, Sturgill Simpson, and many others). He recently won a Grammy for ‘A Star is Born’ with Lady Gaga.” Aaron said if he has a chance at the cover, he'll “bake a shit ton of bread." Which, I found out, he does quite regularly for most of Music Row. He even makes his bread on the road.

The latter part was in an email along with his bread recipe. Upon closer scrutiny of the Instagram pic, I saw that it included a baguette in Jason Isbell’s hand—the work of our home cook. Aaron Raitiere (ray-t-air) is known for handing out homemade loafs of bread to everyone at his RCA office—the writers, engineers, even the gopher who gets lunch for the bigwigs.  We met him at his midtown apartment where he was bouncing around making his bread and talking excitedly about almost everything: his dad’s place in the country, his French grandmother who lived in New York, his mom’s love of King Arthur flour, the homeless man he could see off his balcony, the music business, his garden at another apt…

Aaron popped some baguettes in the oven and proceeded to mix up a new batch of dough for us, all the while talking away. You see, baking is in Aaron’s blood and at this point his bread doesn’t take a lot of concentration. In fact, very little.

As he mixed up the dough, he got out his scale to weigh the flour, which was ironic as he said that the ratio is always 3:2. 3 cups of flour then 2 cups of water and he never obsesses over much else. (The scale, he said, is habit.) He roughly mixed up the dough in a plastic bowl then placed it in a Tupperware container to proof (or rise).

Bread isn’t the only thing that Aaron makes well. He sent me the recipes for 2 soups and when our conversation moved on to farmers markets (I mentioned I had a ton of fresh spinach in the car), he exclaimed, “oh, make it into soup with mascarpone cheese! Just wilt it down, stir in mascarpone cheese, and whirl it up with your immersion blender.”

His bread isn’t pretty or that of a professional baker and he wondered out loud why we were interested in it as Brooke photographed it and I took notes. “Because it’s real and honest and from the heart,” I told him. Which is precisely what our Home Cook column is about. It’s also good. Aaron shows that you don’t need to have fancy equipment or specialty pans or a million books and recipes to make good bread, just the desire and love of doing it. And to share. Of course, to share. Which Aaron happily does.