Gelyka Dumaraos There is something brave about being a beginner, once again.
You forget that, sometimes, when you’ve been doing what you do for years. Writing becomes so much a part of how I move through the world that I can almost forget the feeling of sitting in front of something unfamiliar — like creating something from scratch with my hands. Last Saturday, I remembered.
I signed up for a Baking 101 class in San Mateo, Rizal. A few minutes from home, so close I almost talked myself out of going because it felt too convenient to be worthwhile. The fee was 1,300 pesos — a small amount (that, at first thought, could be a scam) to spend on something that might become nothing, or might quietly become something I carry forward. I chose to go nonetheless.
I’ve been baking since the pandemic, the way most of us did. Banana bread that saved us from losing our minds. Then cheesecakes, brownies, cookies — weekend experiments that made the days feel less still. Banana bread is always a hit, which I recently made during Mother’s Day. My sister, Mama Emy, my husband, and my nieces and nephew all loved it. And they requested more. But baking at home, alone, following a recipe on your phone, is a different kind of learning. Even when you buy a nice oven and bought supplies from Shopee. You don’t always know what you’re doing wrong. You just know when it doesn’t taste right.
This felt like taking it seriously for the first time in years, and that’s fine. I wanted to give myself this opportunity, which I haven’t done recently.
The class ran the whole day, which I hadn’t quite prepared for mentally. By lunchtime, my arms ached from kneading. My sweat was all over, and we were so busy I forgot to even drink the brewed coffee I bought with me.
We learned to make soft breads — pandesal, pandesiosa, cheese rolls, dinner rolls. The base ingredients are all the same. But they differ in the dough-rise time, baking time, and required toppings and fillings.
We learned the whole process, from measuring ingredients to the final pull from the oven. Our trainer mentioned, almost in passing, that the humid weather was actually ideal for these breads — something about how the moisture helps the dough. I filed that away. The city heat I usually complain about, suddenly useful for our neighborhood panaderyas.
I also learned nuggets of information I wouldn’t be able to learn from YouTube simply because I am too lazy to finish the whole video or read the recipe and notes from the description box. The yeast should be stored in the fridge to last longer. There are different kinds of bread flour for soft breads and the hard ones. Measurements should ideally be in grams to get the exact amount. And many others I jotted down on my tiny notepad. I felt uneasy sitting and listening to someone talk. It humbled me.
Kneading, I learned, requires a kind of patience I had to consciously practice. You work the dough until the consistency changes beneath your hands — until it becomes something different from what it was. It takes longer than you think. A heavy-duty mixer helps, and we tried that too, but there’s something about doing it by hand that makes you feel it: the resistance, then the give.
What I didn’t expect was the people.
The class drew mostly locals from San Mateo, with a few who had made the drive from Quezon City. We introduced ourselves in pieces, between kneading sessions and flour-dusted breaks.
A young man who admitted he’d been signed up by his mom, but stayed because their family had a small business. A call center agent. A teacher. A former OFW now looking toward something different, something she could call her own. A housewife who spoke quietly but practically about wanting another income stream. A widow who said, simply, that she wanted to try something new — the kind of sentence that holds more than it lets on. A grandmother who wanted to bake for her grandchildren.
I thought about how we all end up in the same room sometimes, for different reasons that aren’t so different after all. Everyone there was trying to begin something. Or return to something. Or survive something, quietly, through flour and warm bread.
My reasons felt small next to theirs, and also the same: I wanted to try something new. Learn something I didn’t know. Find some inspiration in a Saturday that could have just as easily passed without meaning.
I came home tired and smelling faintly of baked bread and I was happy. We were able to bring home a few breads and my family loved them.
I’m already thinking about trying the recipes at home — the soft pull of the pandesal, the cheese rolls my family would eat still warm. Baking, I’m finding, is one of those things that teaches you something beyond technique. It asks you to be present. To pay attention to texture and temperature and time. To stay with the process even when you’re not sure it’s working.
Maybe that’s what I was really there to learn.
