me and weighing my life choices and my heart against the feather of Ma’at—Ralph Blum ’50 stopped me in front of Bartlet/the Penis Statue. After a nice conversation, he had me draw my rune—isa, the symbol of ice. ‘Do nothing,’ he said. I pray the Harrison’s I ate shortly after, with Kenechi Igbokwe, Alex Moris, Kojo DeGraft-Hanson, JeanMarie Gossard, and Clarissa Deng, thawed the apparent ice block in my soul as it clogged the arteries of my heart.” Not everyone needed to thaw out after departing the dorms Sunday morning, however. Clare Kasemset ate amazing bread at Bertucci’s for the first time since graduation, joined by her husband, Allen Cheung, and classmates Stephanie Chan, Yaa Serwah Frimpong, and Martha Vega-Gonzales—bread that Matt Brennan can confirm is delicious, having split a silano pizza with Sarah Donelan and Laylah Mohammed and run into Jane Waterfall and Margaret Kelly ’06 at the Main Street establishment that very day. “Played on the swings outside Rockwell with Patrick Jiang, Stephanie, Martha, Yaa, and Emily Bargar; discovered the world clocks at the library, including one for the Capitol, Panem; shared poetry with a bunch of other alums at the Andover Bread Loaf writing class,” Clare wrote in an e-mail, sounding more civilized than the vast majority of sources consulted for this story. To wit, Christian Vareika, despite having managed to complete his second year of law school, win election as executive articles editor of the Boston College Law Review, and serve as summer associate at Ropes & Gray, could offer no more than a hazy recollection of “ringing in the sunrise on WQN” with Matt Brennan, Alex Lebow, Katie Hunckler, Steve Sherrill, Cassie Tognoni, Harry Goldstein, Kyle Kucharski, and Sam Kennedy. But it was not only the likes of Kyle and Mac King who may have crossed the line. (ICYMI, they performed a surprisingly romantic, PAPS-angering pas de deux to Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” in the Quad for a predawn audience that included Matt, Christian, Harry, JeanMarie, Cassie, Katie, Geoff Miller, Laura Eddy, Steven Rolecek, Dave Wilkinson, and Whitney Wilkinson ’04.) In an e-mail, Hilary Fischer-Groban, who recently moved to NYC to manage operations for ABC Carpet & Home after graduating from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, called out Head of School John Palfrey. “The highlight of my reunion was listening to
www.andover.edu/intouch Alex Bois ’05 Finding the flavor in the flour
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s head baker for the High Street on Market restaurant in Philadelphia, Alex Bois ’05 boasts a career that is on the rise. He won national recognition this spring when he was nominated for the prestigious James Beard 2015 Rising Star Chef of the Year award. In 2014, Bon Appetit magazine called his bread and bagels “some of the best in the country.” Bois, 28, is currently helping to open a branch of High Street on Market in Manhattan. Believe it or not, he baked his first loaf just four years ago. Bois grew up in the Boston area, entering PA as a junior. He wrestled, studied Japanese, and, he says, “frequently found my way to the Sanctuary for peace of mind and a sense of communion with the natural world, which for me is a basic requirement of living.” His interests lay in biology and languages, and in his senior year he undertook a handful of independent projects, one related to fermentation. Before going to UMass Amherst, where he majored in biochemistry and Spanish, he took a gap year to volunteer at the Holbrook Lab for plant biology at Harvard. Along the way, Bois did a bit of cooking. In college, he worked a restaurant grill for a summer. During his junior and senior years at UMass, he spent some time cooking and cleaning in youth hostels in Argentina and Spain in exchange for room and board. But it was beer that led Bois to bread. He brewed his own for three years and had hoped to pursue it as a career—until an illness left him unable to drink alcohol. Bread baking, though, seemed to offer a similar confluence of science and cooking, and it tied in with Bois’s early interest in biology and fermentation. “Brewer’s yeast and baker’s yeast have the same origin. The microorganisms in sourdough ferment the same grains as in beer,” says Bois, who’s keenly attuned to the complex chemistry behind both products. He started out working for New York baker Jim Lahey, of no-knead bread fame (Lahey’s recipe had caused a sensation when it ran in the New York Times in 2006). Seven months later, in February 2013, Bois moved to Philadelphia and found work at the newly opened High Street. Bois’s devotion to his craft focuses on both ingredients and process. “I try to make bread as fermented as possible in order to draw out the flavor in flour,” he says. To this end, he is constantly experimenting; his favorite breads are dark crusty ryes. Much of the flour he uses comes from grains grown in the fertile soil of local farms and then ground at a mill just 20 miles away. Bois elaborates on the human ecosystem it takes to build a better bread: “Basically, it’s the beautiful quality of the raw materials that motivates us to give [bread] the appropriate respect. This is something that represents the collective care of a lot of dedicated people.” Poised to introduce Manhattanites to buckwheat cherry bread and squid-ink bialys, Bois says, “I would like to pass on the passion.” Spoken like a rising star in the world of artisanal bread.
—Debra Samuels
A vegetable-ash levain, one of Bois’s creations for High Street on Market
Andover | Fall 2015
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