A note on Sourdough
The whole country seems to have decided to learn how to make bread, and I couldn’t be happier. The joy that baking bread has brought me is something strangely deep and fulfilling, and I hope that everyone can find that joy in their loaves too. “Baking bread brings deep joy?” Yeah, I feel weird writing that down, too. But frankly, it’s very true. The yeast colony feels like my child. But a non-consequential, low commitment child…if I can’t handle it one day, just put it in the fridge until I’m ready for it. Ideal parenting if you ask me. But the days that I take the starter out of the fridge and pour my love and attention into it, I’m rewarded with watching an entire life process take place. It starts by waking it up to the room temperature, having faith that it will come alive again. Feed it sustenance and watch it slowly come alive, then boom with activity. If you wait longer, you observe it get tired, eat all of its resources, and go to sleep. When you use that starter to make a loaf of bread, the journey takes a turn. Give it more food. Then work your love into the dough. Feel it transform. Give the yeast direction and watch it expand. The art baking bread is about understanding your yeast, and what it needs. Different flours and different hydrations will need different kneading, different shaping, just different handling. There are so many methods, and so many variables to manipulate, it is a never ending learning process. And at the end of the day, when you take your fresh loaf out of the oven, you are rewarded with something that you can literally live off of. I recently listened to a podcast episode about bread (Gastroegyptology by Ologies, highly recommend this episode and all others) and this expert said that “baking bread is not a recipe, it’s a skill.” Perhaps that’s why it can seem so intimidating? More than just following a recipe, it’s a process of understanding. I’ve enjoyed baking for a long time. It started when I was younger, and my mom didn’t bake much nor by any type of sugar from the store, but obviously as a hyper child I really wanted sweets. I started with chocolate cookies, and I remember making a huge chocolate cake, and spending all day watching Disney Channel and making a lemon meringue pie. It was always fun, but it was always motivated by a sugar addiction—just a relentless desire to stuff my mouth with the most decadent dessert my mind could imagine. Baking bread is something different. When you gift someone a homemade baked dessert, they are unbelievably grateful. But when you gift someone a homemade loaf of bread…it just feels more real. Like somewhere inside they know that that chocolate cake is going to give them a sugar rush and then a sugar crash and then make them feel sick after they eat half of the cake in one night….or is that just what I do? But that loaf, that loaf will nourish them all day, no crashes associated. Maybe I’m just projecting, or maybe I’m onto something. Whatever the receiver feels, I know that I feel great about gifting bread. Maybe it’s just the gift that I would want to receive, but I know that I have spent HOURS on that single loaf of bread. One loaf is a true piece of my life and my love.
Not to mention the history of breaking bread, with its many religious and historical connotations. Point is, bread has been around for thousands of years. One of the reasons is that properly fermented bread (ie sourdough) provides enough nutrients to sustain you indefinitely. Unlike other moderns breads that use dry yeast, the fermentation process (proving, leavening, just when you let it sit and do its thing) breaks down the fibrous grains into molecules that are much more easily digested by our human bodies. That is why we think of European bread as being better, its often fermented, and why many people who have issues with sliced bread do not have issues with fresh bread. Sourdough as a process simply refers to the traditional making of bread using a yeast culture, rather than dry yeast. It is also associated with a specific flavor, which is just a result of fermentation.
To conclude my love letter to bread, I guess I just wanted to iterate how magical and intrinsic the act of making and eating bread is. I hope that through this blog I can help inspire and teach a few people how to tap into the wonderful world of fermented gluten. But mostly I think I just have a weird obsession with sourdough and like talking about it, so feel free to reach out to me with any questions or ideas!