Baking sourdough bread has become a cliche of non-essential privilege in the social isolation era.
And Im a sucker for low-effort kitchen projects.
Ive long had an interest in food science, and I have written aboutfermentation,glutenandmolecular gastronomy.
Ill occasionally experiment with pickling or weird chemicals in my own kitchen.
I mixed some ancient raisins I found in the cupboard with two tablespoons of water and stirred.
The water did not get cloudy as it was supposed to, but I forged onward.
Why did I choose raisins?
Theres yeast in wheat, so you might mix it with water and a week later youll get something.
But Im not a patient man, Agarwala told me.
He said that this system had grown him a usable starter in 24 to 48 hours.
It took me several weeks.
But well get back to that.
Its true that yeasts are everywheretheyre actually a vast group of single-celled organisms in the fungus kingdom.
I took this to mean that I was doing something wrong.
You must continue maintaining the proper environment to get the microorganisms to do what you want.
Its unclear what happened to my starter.
Regardless, I was not giving up easily.
While rinsing some brown rice before cooking it, I noticed that the runoff was cloudy.
Huh, I thought, I should just pour some of this into the bubble-less starter.
Within two days, my starter had regenerated.
It was finally time to bake the bread.
During all of this, I tried my best to make the process asunscientificas possible.
Then I embarked on the baking process, which itself spanned three days.
I let the creature sit in its now permanent microwave home overnight.
The ice generates steam to produce a really moist oven environment.
Folks, it wasnt perfect, but it tasted damn good.
Perhaps my cuts werent deep enough, or there was some other issue with heating.
Things go wrong throughout, and you just keep going.
