I’m at the Columbia City Bakery, which has only been open for a couple of months but is already rightly considered one of the best in town. They’d been selling at the farmers market before that. The bakery itself is a bright space on Columbia City’s main drag, across from Geraldine’s Counter, which has one of Seattle’s best burgers.

I intended to stop in for a little free wi-fi and a cookie, and I’m availing myself of both those amenities, but I couldn’t leave without a loaf of bread. Today it’s the crusty *pain de campagne*. They’re making baguettes in the back, flouring up the couches just like I used to do before Iris, when I spent some time baking bread. We recently made an order from [King Arthur](http://www.bakerscatalogue.com/), which sells the best parchment paper you can buy, and I threw in a bag of their high-gluten flour. Iris and I will make bagels and pizza with it.

When I first walked into the Columbia City Bakery, I took a look at the bread display and knew immediately that they made great bread. This is not because I’m a bread expert. It’s because there’s something unique about bread: good bread always looks good, and bad bread always looks bad.

It’s easy to burn some grill marks into a so-so steak and make it look prime, but somehow bread doesn’t work that way. Unlike any other food I can think of, you can size up a loaf of bread the same way you size up a mate: a good loaf just looks special, and it’s not due to one particular feature that can be taken in isolation. Being able to see good gluten formation in the slash is important, as is color (darker is better, up to a point), but those qualities alone don’t tell the whole story.

Probably there’s an exception to the rule somewhere, a loaf that looks like Poilâne and tastes like poop, but I don’t want to hear about it.