Baking Sourdough In The Time Of Corona

As I write to you, my oven is pre-heating for two loaves I’ll be baking shortly, there is dough proofing for an afternoon bake and pizza dough resting for my dinner.  It’s a rare “lazy” Sunday and I’m passing my time indulging my love of baking hoping to drop these beautiful Sourdough boules on the doorsteps of friends and neighbors later this afternoon. 

My love of Sourdough didn’t start here in the time of quarantine and sheltering in place, no, my journey into bread baking started 16 years ago, fresh out of college and feeling the most lost I’ve ever felt.  When I graduated college, at 21, I found myself working full time at the grocery store I had worked at while I was in college but was now officially full-time and in management.  I was no where in my major, but it helped me payback the massive student loan debt that would be following me for a while, and seemed like a decent job for someone who was feeling clueless about her long term career goals.   There was a heavy mess of post college angst sitting like a brick on my chest.  Wasn’t I supposed to be living my passion? Wasn’t I supposed to know what was next for me and be going after a fresh career in my major with gusto?  Wasn’t I supposed to be saving the world? 

Autolyse

Doing none of those things, and anxiety ridden, working with the general public, (and hopefully I don’t need to tell you how we the general public are typically as a whole very rude, thoughtless, and unkind to cashiers and those who work in service jobs), lost only begins to describe how I felt. Lost and chronically unhappy.  To sooth my malaise, I took up yoga, but there’s only so much yoga that one can do.  I discovered that one of our universities UNCG, offered various non-credit classes for the community.  I scanned the packet and I decided I’d take a bread making class that was held at a local bakery in our downtown. At the time the bakery was called Simple Kneads, tucked in a picturesque alley off of Elm St.  I believe the owner’s name was Jim, and he had the task of teaching us what we needed to know about the art of making Sourdough Bread. 

With dreams of creating rustic sourdough boules and baguettes like the one’s I’d seen and eaten a fair share of in Paris, I was an earnest student.  I was learning new words, like proofing and autolyse.  I began to channel my frustrations and post college angst into the baking process.  If I couldn’t control the course of my life, just maybe, I could control the process of baking and turn out some beautiful and delicious loaves of bread. 

What any new baker learns is that tending sourdough must be a love affair, because of the level of devotion it requires.  Caring for a sourdough starter requires as much attention as a pet, regular feedings at 12-hour intervals (depending on how often you’re baking) and a good bit of care, especially in the beginning.  Jim our passionate teacher told us stories of bakeries in France whose starters were over 200 years old.  Can you imagine the responsibility of keeping a starter alive that has seen two centuries? 

Second Rise

In baking much like in life you can’t rush the process.  You can’t force your sourdough to rise before it’s ready.  And you’re probably not going to produce a beautiful artisan sourdough boule on your first try, or 12th for that matter.  This is as much art as it is science, it takes practice, paying attention and more practice to get it right.  While you’re learning and working the process it can be all consuming.  This new obsession fed me, it kept my belly fed and the bellies of friends as I dropped off loaf after loaf on their doorsteps unable to personally consume all that I was baking.  Somewhere along the line I dropped the practice of baking bread, not because I didn’t enjoy it but because life got in the way, jobs and houses changed, a relationship ended a new relationship began.  Life got messy and bread baking required too much attention, it required too much love and I was not yet ready to maintain a long-term sourdough relationship

Shelter in place has helped me uncover old loves and new loves, but it seems that all of the practices I’ve taken up have ancient roots, and this renewed devotion to my sourdough is making me think about my ancestors. Whenever I’ve made a loaf of bread I remember stories about my paternal great grandmother Marie (DeSimpelaere) Wielfaert.  A great grandmother originally from Belgium, I never got to meet because she passed before I was born, who didn’t speak English but could read it and understand it.  Marie spoke Flemish and dutch, not English, but I’ve been told she was a phenomenal baker who made not only bread but Belgian crème puffs, cakes and cookies too.  Wielfaert family legend is that my grandmother wanted her mother-in-law’s bread recipe but it would only come out in fits of Dutch and Flemish and she didn’t measure things out in cups or weight, it was a handful of this or a handful of that.  Can you imagine baking bread simply measured by handfuls and eyeing ingredient amounts based on years and years of baking the same things every week? Maybe someday I’ll be as skilled as my great grandmother Marie. I think about her, this ancestor I’ve never met who’s name is my middle name, and these stories of her baking play over and over like a movie reel in my head.  I wonder about  who she was, what her dreams were and what her life was like.   I have a few of her well worn and stained feedbag aprons a casual almost off handed gift last year from my grandmother a few months after my dad passed.   I sometimes wear her apron while I bake and hope her skills in the kitchen are etched in my DNA.

As someone who likes things to be clean, to fit in a certain box, as someone who wants to get it right and control the outcome I found bread to be an all-consuming challenge. It’s messy and very difficult to maintain a clean kitchen when you’re baking as much as I have. That chafes at me like an itchy scarf, but baking sourdough has become too grand a teacher with new lessons every day and I’ll have to tolerate the messy kitchen, and sometimes failures if I want the lessons.

I walked into my house today after dropping off a few loaves fresh out of the oven and the whole house smelled like warm bread. It smelled like love, and realized I’ve taken my love and devotion and baked it into the loaves, and deliver them to the people I care about and hope that they can feel the love when they eat it. If you’ve got any inkling that you might enjoy giving yourself over to this practice I’d like to encourage you to give it a try, I guarantee even a little baking will teach you something about yourself and leave you with something to nourish not only your belly, but also your soul.

(A special thank you to Sadie of @Buttercup_Branch_Bakery on Instagram for giving me a bit of her starter to rekindle my sourdough love. Her tutorials and encouragement have meant the world!)