Sourdough!

 

                It is now a quarter past 6 AM and there, on the kitchen counter, is my first Sourdough Bread, (or what remains after gifting a loaf to Evander and his parents, morning toast for Debra and me, and a couple of slices she took with her to show off to her Chef).

In Foreground: Two Sourdough Ryes

                It is as if all my decades of bread making led, inexorably, to this point. There is a complexity and subtlety of flavors and textures I had never achieved before- flavors that develop and change as the bite of bread passes from front teeth and tongue-tip, across the expanse of mid-tongue where it mixes with the mouth’s wet, and still again as it is crushed and ground between millstone molars; a density of crust and spring of crumb beyond previous efforts. I wonder if I will ever again be satisfied with less play of hue and contrast.

Mature Starter Fed For Use In Rye Bread

                Eight days ago I boiled bowls, spoons and Mason jars to sterilize, purify, make new, and sanctify. Using them I mixed rye flour and spring water, nothing more, and captured wild yeast from the Earth’s grain and the air around it. Not quite creating life, but nearly so, I watched the product of this mash swell and aerate, then fed and nurtured it, stubbornly ignoring the Sophie’s Choice of discarding half of each day’s new colony. That overflow I used to produce a hybrid that failed - a monster, a mutation, a bastard child that marked my first utterly failed bread in years.

                ‘We learn more from our mistakes than from our successes,’ I tell my children, and remembering this, set aside the rending of garment and gnashing of teeth. From this learning opportunity came a renewed humility and faith in the teachings of R.L. Beranbaum, and a new willingness to not stray too far from the path.  The rewards came in their time. The dough started to look and feel like a cousin of doughs I’d made before, just a tad more elastic, the gluten more developed and the aroma more mature. The four fermentations came at a statelier pace. I had to meet this less compliant bread on its own terms-only minor adjustments seemed possible, or advisable.

                And finally, the tangy fragrance blended with the familiar caramel-and-earth smell I have so often known from my oven, and a new satisfaction filled me. It seems the breads I’d made before these were instant, modern, made from mixes, a ready formula for the impatient and time-deficient. I had taken my place among the long and narrowed line of true Bread Bakers whose willingness to invest a week and more in the process yielded a fuller and more substantial food. As baking bread is more truly a human enterprise than plucking fruit or dropping prey or carrion onto embers, making sourdough - that securing of living matter from the ether, sustaining and nourishing it, urging it to reproduce, then killing it off in a final frenzied microscopic orgy -  is a deeper manipulation of the environment to generate fuel for our bodies.

                The first of these breads is imperfect - slightly too deeply - crusted, under-salted by a few grams, but I can work through these minor shortcomings. The seed starter has come to room temperature and I will expand, nourish and divide it to create its offspring. Newer generations will be raised to new heights.