I would do it just for the smell.” That’s Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and co-creator of the Netflix series “Cooked,” and he’s talking about bread. Walking into Cat Cox’s bakery Country Bird at 1644 E. 3rd St. in Tulsa, it’s hard not to be reminded of Pollan’s comment because the aromas evoke a wave of positive sense memories related to baking, especially bread.

From a technical standpoint, this is the Maillard reaction — the reason why bread smells so lovely and toasty. Truthfully, all bakers are some degree of scientists, even though because many learn to bake alongside a family member or via trial and error in their own kitchen, they don’t have the process demystified until they go to culinary school or read an explanation of the process of baking.

Cox, a Tulsa native, came to baking first as a hobby and then as a profession. But not until after she left the art world, where she had created textile and fiber art, especially papers, and earned her degree at the Kansas City Art Institute. She was looking to open a studio in Marfa, Texas, after leaving a studio job in New York City. While that didn’t work out, the food service job she’d taken to pay the bills did usher her into a new-to-her world.

“I’d always loved baking as a hobby, but the process of production work resonated with me,” she says. “I love learning new things, and if I don’t feel like I’m growing, I lose interest and move on. Working with products like stone-milled flours and bread is very humbling because there is always something new to learn, something to keep me engaged.”

Rather than science being the inspiration, for Cox it was art, and then science, and then (like many who bake bread) mythology. Bread has been with us for roughly 6,000 years, and for a brief moment in the mid-20th century, we lost our collective minds and took something that worked beautifully — converting three simple ingredients into a life-sustaining product — and mechanized the baking of bread, stripping it of nutrients and its most important component, fermentation.

In that latter respect, Cox follows after her food mentors Sarah Owens and Richard Bourdon, two bakers who have been evangelists for fermentation and sourdough breads. Bourdon is the primary inspiration behind one episode — “Air” — of Pollan’s documentary series on Netflix. All agree that fermentation is key to doing bread properly, which is to say, in a way that it doesn’t negatively affect our health in ways that modern bread making has.

But that’s science again. The mythology of bread is what inspires us: bread of life, bread basket, staff of life, eucharist, the Body of Christ, harvest, beginning and end and, for Cox, dust. Dust?

“I was working harvest at John’s Farm in Fairview, Oklahoma, riding a combine,” Cox says. “It was mesmerizing; ‘amber waves’ is really a thing. John (Gosney) called it ‘making dust,’ and that phrase stuck with me. The harvest kicks up so much dust, and when we grind grain, we make dust. It’s a cyclical thing; the end is the beginning, and new life comes from the death of something else in this beautiful process.”

Without the aroma and experience of freshly baked bread at a family table, convenience and “modernization” robbed us of something primal and essential, something comforting and grounding. Cox is trying to restore our faith in bread, not as a commodity, but as something unifying and nourishing.

Country Bird wars against another reality that Pollan addresses: homogenization into a least common denominator of edible. All things begin to taste more and more like the one thing, a meta-bread, if you will, but the meta-bread is related to Cox’s bread like a shadow is to our physical form. Country Bird features a dizzying number of options, making it impossible to leave with one thing, and everything tastes distinctly not like everything else. So many wonderful aromas are filling your head that exploration becomes the only sane option, so of course we’re buying 12 things that should last us a few days, but that we’ll mostly eat by day’s end, and then wait with growing impatience for next Saturday.

It’s true: Cox is only open on Saturdays, with an occasional Thursday thrown in like an unexpected bonus at work. Making bread is a three-day process at Country Bird that begins with mixing on Tuesday and baking on Saturday at 3 a.m. Of course she’s only open on Saturdays. “People ask me why I’m not open more days, but with this process, there is no way to do it right if we’re open all the time,” she says.

To facilitate a program that includes dozens of breads, pastries, cookies and phenomenal egg salad, Cox relies on the skill of two full-time bakers, Abby Burton (egg salad genius) and Courtney Scwhamb (sandwich genius).

“We’re not trying to create something new,” Cox says. “We’re taking traditional pastry techniques and asking, ‘How can we make that unique to Oklahoma?’”

The short answer to her question is by working with local producers. James Beard Award nominated chef Lisa Becklund (Living Kitchen, Farm Bar, Il Seme) said she’s never worked with someone who is so committed to building relationships with local producers and thinking so hard about ingredients and flavors. “I’ve seen her drive to the middle of nowhere to talk to farmers, to build relationships, and she’s so intentional about every ingredient,” Becklund says. “She inspired me to think more about flavors and textures.”

Cox is quick to praise Becklund, too. “She taught me ‘what grows together goes together,’” Cox says. “And that has definitely affected my three-pronged approach: ingredients from the actual producers, pairing ingredients properly and contrasting textures.” The end results are breads and pastries made with focused intentionality, love for the process, concern for sustainability and human thriving and a voracious curiosity that leads her to keep creating, experimenting and offering us brilliant and delicious baked magic. •