For me, bread has become the Linux of cooking, complicated and fiddly, but ultimately rewarding.
I am generally a fan of making things and doing repairs for myself.
Over the yearsIve learned to love cooking too.
Slowly but methodically Ive gotten over fear and laziness to enjoy my time in the kitchen.
Breads easy, I thought, so I decided to give it a try.
Sourdough bread uses an active yeast culture starter you make for yourself and a couple of days of effort.
It took me eight attempts before I had an edible loaf of sourdough bread.
Regardless, the different skills Ive utilized making a simple loaf of sourdough is surprising.
Theres a lot happening here.
Even after you have a base understanding of how it all works, theres still plenty of troubleshooting ahead.
Its a dull, complex, slow process that in turn is calming, challenging, and insightful.
A starter is a means to cultivate wild yeast so you could bake with it.
Yeast is a live, single-cell organism that causes the bread to rise.
To make use of this yeast, you better create an environment that the yeast wants to live in.
Wild yeast is pretty much everywhere, but its notably present in flour.
The next day, add more flour and more water.
People refer to this as feeding your starter.
Repeat this for a few days, and the yeast starts bubbling.
Of course, if it was that easy, I wouldnt have screwed up three times.
Practice Makes (Kinda) Perfect
My first attempt at a sourdough starter didnt end well.
On the third attempt, I finally got it right.
The science of sourdough starters is far more interesting than just a lab experiment on your kitchen counter.
People keep their sourdough starters alive for decades, passing them down to family members.
How all this works together is enough of a mystery that research into the topic resulted in theSourdough Project.
It takes the time to actually explain what terms mean and how everything works.
Most sourdough recipes have atleast10 steps but upwards of 30 depending on how theyre written.
As for actual readability,The Kitchns excellently writtenrecipe is 25 steps.
How does this all look when you plot it out on a to-do list?
Some recipes use starter and leaven interchangeably, which is confusing.
This is theautolysestage, where the flour absorbs the water.
This stage helps the gluten form and enzymes break down the starches into sugars.
Once thats done, you fold or knead the dough every 30 minutes for about two and half hours.
This process varies from recipe to recipe.
Finally, after what seems like 600 hours, you bake the damn bread.
The basic, literal process of scheduling this out takes extreme project management skills.
Thankfully, a few points in the recipe allow you to put the whole thing on pause.
Then, my brain turns to troubleshooting and I attempt to understand the problem.
Unlike most things, this is a problem I can fix by myself.
Problem solving is something Ive always associated with work and therefore acauseof stress, not a reliever of it.
The next batch was the same, even though I kept an eye on them when they were rising.
Finally, that produced a loaf of bread I could actually eat.
Even when things go right, other little things dont work out.
Fixingthatwill lead to a slew of other problems and this process will repeat forever until the end of time.
In a lot of ways, this reminds me of just about every Raspberry Pi project Ive done.
This zen state is relaxing.
Its that moment where work becomes this all-encompassing feeling where nothing else matters but the success of this project.
Until you screw up the next loaf.
I have a lot of work left in front of me before my breads great.
There is lots of troubleshooting to do, some science to tinker with, and waiting around to do.
Illustration by Sam Woolley.
Photo byFrancis Storr,Jim Champion.
