Local Baker Creates 17-Point Crumb Evaluation Rubric Including 'Emotional Openness of Holes,' Scores Own Bread 3/17

In 1203, a Flemish monk named Adso of Ghent documented what scholars now believe to be the first written crumb taxonomy, cataloguing loaves by their interior distribution of air as either "heavenly" (open, spiritual) or "earthly" (dense, penitential). Adso scored his own monastery's bread last in every category. We have learned nothing. This brings us to Dale Fenchurch, 44, of Boise, Idaho, who last Tuesday published a 17-point crumb evaluation rubric to the r/Sourdough community under the title "A Framework for Honest Assessment," and then, two hours later, posted his own loaf's score: 3 out of 17. "I stand by the rubric," Fenchurch told The Baker's Bulletin. "The rubric is correct." The document — 2,400 words, with footnotes — opens promisingly. Points 1 through 4 track standard crumb diagnostics: overall hole distribution, crust-to-crumb ratio, shatter quotient (how the crust behaves under thumbnail pressure), and what Fenchurch calls "loft honesty," defined as "the relationship between oven spring claimed and oven spring achieved." These are real things bakers measure. The framework held. Point 5 is where the rubric turns. "Emotional openness of holes" awards a point if the crumb's air pockets appear "receptive to light, as though the bread wants to be understood." Point 6 awards a point for "structural grief" — evidence, in the dense lower third of a loaf, of a crumb that "processed the proofing process rather than merely enduring it." Point 9 asks evaluators to consider whether the bread exhibits "a relationship with its own crust that suggests mutual respect rather than cohabitation." Fenchurch's loaf earned points on metrics 6 and 14. Metric 14 is "willingness to be cut," which he defines, in the footnotes, as "a crumb that does not resist the blade out of existential attachment to its own form." His bread did not resist. It got a point. The remaining fifteen it did not receive. "The hole distribution was uneven in a way I can only describe as avoidant," Fenchurch wrote in his scoring notes, which he also posted. "The upper quadrant shows openness but the lower third has collapsed inward. This bread is not ready to be seen." The post has 847 upvotes. Fourteen bakers have already adopted the rubric. Three reported scoring their own loaves in the low single digits and described the experience as "clarifying." One user, handle u/tartine_of_theseus, scored a 1 — point 14, willingness to be cut — and posted only: "I needed this." I asked Fenchurch whether his rubric might be asking more of bread than bread can reasonably give. He was quiet for a moment. Then he mentioned that he'd been working with an emmer wheat blend for the past six months — and here I must be honest with you, I had to set the phone down. Emmer. Triticum dicoccum. The grain that built the ancient world, that fed Egyptian granaries and Roman garrison towns, that I once held in my palm at a stone mill in Umbria and very nearly wept over, right there in front of a stranger. That Dale Fenchurch is using emmer as an experimental variable in a rubric with a category called "ancestral grain humility" is either a desecration or a form of devotion so complete it has circled back around and become something else entirely. "I think the emmer might be why the lower crumb is dense," he said. "Version two will have a point for that. Grains that carry more geological memory may require a different scoring weight." Version two currently has 23 points. Fenchurch has not baked since Tuesday.