On bread: I am, and always have been, a bread slut

It is morning in November. The sun is rising, bringing into the front rooms of the house a grey, diffuse kind of light. I’ve been awake for awhile already—my husband Mike got up in the deep dark of the early morning to go to work and I’ve pulled on warm clothes and slippers before padding downstairs to the still-dusky kitchen. The coffee maker is clicking quietly to keep itself warm, and beside it is a ceramic mixing bowl covered by a linen tea towel. Underneath the tea towel, alchemy is happening.

I have always been fascinated by the process of making bread. Baking was not common in my house, so what I knew of bread making came from aunts and uncles who I watched add flour and yeast and water and salt to automatic bread makers that would then fill the kitchen with that yeasty, magical, almost ancestrally familiar smell. It somehow didn’t strike me until university that I too could make bread at home, and without a machine at that—after all, humans had been doing it for millennia.

And so, I started occasionally turning out loaves. Usually these were no-knead recipes and they were always made with store-bought yeast. I don’t remember if sourdough had yet entered my consciousness—this was a decade before the pandemic would bring it to the cultural forefront. It was also three years before I’d meet Mike, who was then a professional chef and who would give me a complete set of bread making equipment and a recipe book for our first Christmas together. 

I remember, though, being impatient with the process of bread making. I didn’t want to wait for the bread to rise. I wanted the immediate satisfaction of a perfectly-cooked, chewy, warm, tangy loaf. I was always vaguely disappointed with my efforts.

Eventually I learned about sourdough and the process of making really good bread. I learned (probably through Mike) that the patience is what leads to the “perfect” loaf of bread—a virtue I still lacked. We had a starter in our first apartment, taken from a larger starter at Mike’s restaurant, that we used a few times and then neglected and eventually threw out. When we moved to our small town, Mike was given a portion of a 50-year-old starter from a local baker, which promptly ended up totally forgotten on top of a cupboard while life—our wedding, the ongoing pandemic, my illness, job changes—exploded around us.

So there it stayed, starving and fermenting into hooch, for two years.

Last summer I decided to see if it could be revived. I drained off the hooch that had formed, scraped off anything discoloured, moved the surviving starter to a new jar, and started regularly feeding it. It took a couple weeks, but the alchemy happened: soon, bubbles started to form after feeding. I opened it one day to discover that it smelled strongly of apples. A few days after that, I went into the kitchen to discover that it had doubled its size after its morning feeding. Mildred, the name I gave it because you have to name your starter, was ready.

After everything I’d been through, I found that the long and slow process of bread making brought me some kind of steadiness. Though I am by no means a fancy baker and strongly believe in making it as easy as possible (I mostly follow this process with modifications depending on the season and my unique kitchen), going from sourdough starter to finished loaf is still a twenty-four-hour process. And lately, I’ve been doing it a lot.

It started while I was on holiday from work, when we decided to make some extra loaves to freeze so we’d never be without good bread. That meant that for a straight week, my days were divided into one-hour intervals: feed Mildred, take the banneton with yesterday’s proofing loaf out of the fridge, wait an hour. Transfer the proofed loaf to the dutch oven, stick it in the oven, move yesterday’s autolyse to the banneton, wait an hour. Pull the piping hot, crackling, golden brown finished loaf out of the oven, start a new autolyse if Mildred is ready, wait an hour. Stretch and fold the autolyse, wait an hour. Stretch and fold the autolyse, wait an hour. Stretch and fold the autolyse, wait an hour. Stretch and fold the autolyse, cover it up with the linen tea towel, go to bed. 

The proofed dough in the banneton and in the dutch oven, scored (ignore that I need a sharper lame) and ready for baking.

This process, which intimidated and annoyed me when I was younger, now gives a nice rhythm to my days. Maybe what was missing when I was younger was the understanding of how flexible and forgiving it can be: my neglected starter getting revived is one thing, but I can also mess with the process in countless ways and I’ll still end up with a serviceable loaf of bread at the end of it. It works with you, with your schedule, and with your environment. Starter takes on unique flavours from the wild yeast that it captures from its own home, so each kitchen gives a slightly different tang to the bread. It’s homemade. It’s yours, at its most fundamental definition. 

I like that kind of magic, the kind so tied to hearth and home. The kind that connects us back through centuries. The smell of it baking, so familiar to us, would be so familiar to our ancestors too. It’s grounding in the same way that I find gardening grounding—leaning on processes and methods that were true back then and are true today. Good soil grows stronger plants, flour and water will ferment and rise, and some things are unchanging.

Until next time.