Personal essays
Sourdough is life
Flour and Water
The Danny Rojas character in Ted Lasso bursts on the scene with an enthusiasm for the game of football that many of his teammates have forgotten.
He joyfully repeats his mantra to all who will listen with the biggest smile on his face: “Football is life.”
It’s one of the things we do as humans. Knowingly or not, we look for and find metaphors for the world around us in everything we encounter like we’re a college freshman getting high in their dorm room discussing the meaning of life.
I’ve had nothing stronger than coffee this week, and yet I’m seeing life lessons in the sourdough starter I’ve decided to grow.
Back in August when I knew I’d be traveling for much of the fall, I decided to let both my wheat and my rye sourdough starters die.
I could have freeze dried them and reconstituted them - but the time it takes me to regrow them from scratch is about the same time that it takes me to build a new starter.
Jeffrey, my favorite teacher, loves that he’s kept his starter alive for decades. There’s a continuity that he loves.
The mathematician in me can calculate there are no cells from his original starter that are present in the current starter.
Then again, there are no cells in me that are the same as were present in me when Jeffrey began his starter. My individual cells have died and been replaced and yet somehow the thing that is “me” is still here.
So I recognize Jeffrey’s point of view but I don’t have the same attachment to my starter culture - at least not yet.
Sourdough is life.
From scratch
Last week I milled 100 grams of rye flour and mixed it with 100 grams of tap water and I set it in a warm place and I left it alone.
A day later it had a pleasant but different smell to it.
I poured out all but 50 grams of the mixture and stirred in equal weights of rye flour and water and left it for another day.
I could see little bubbles.
There are other recipes I know where you start with a little honey or some squeezed grape juice or something - but this was just flour and water.
I knew that using organic rye berries that I milled myself would help - but really there is yeast in the air that this mixture is capturing.
The world around me is helping me and the result is greater than the ingredients I’ve added.
Nothing seemed to make people madder than when politicians like Elizabeth Warren said, “you didn’t build that.”
But she meant that even with all the work you did yourself, you are still depending on work that others did. There are roads, and the internet, and a banking system, and …
And to many of us, these things are as invisible as the air around my thriving starting culture.
It’s David Foster Wallace’s fish noticing the water they are swimming in.
It’s seeing that sourdough is life.
The wolves
On day three I split the starter into two different jars. I continued to feed one with 40 grams of rye flour and started feeding the other with 40 grams of fresh milled wheat.
I increased the feedings to twice a day, though each feeding I discarded all but 40 grams of each starter. I also used 40g of water in the rye starter and 50g of water in the wheat.
Two days later the rye had a sweet intense smell and the wheat was definitely no longer the rye starter it had begun its life as. It was a wheat starter and beginning to take on characteristics of its own.
As we began to come out of the pandemic last year, I drove to Vermont to take a class on the science of sourdough.
People think of sourdough as, well, sour. But it doesn’t have to be.
As you grow the starter you are balancing the yeast you are cultivating with the various types of acids you’re encouraging. The acids are a balance of the acetic and lactic acids and the baker has control over these.
You can control the characteristics of the bread by varying the flour you use, the hydration of the starter, the temperature you keep it at, and the frequency with which you feed it.
It’s like the meme we hear too often about the two wolves inside of each of us fighting to get out.
Depending on the teller, the wolves have different descriptions but generally one is a content and happy wolf and the other is the angry, fearful, mean wolf.
“Which one wins?” the child in the story asks.
“Ah,” says the wise hero of the tale, “the one you feed.”
I think there’s a missed point in this lesson.
It sounds like a one time decision.
But each day we look at our starter and we make adjustments. By feeding it more often we can turn a sour starter to be almost sweet and by putting it in the refrigerator we can make it more sour. We can feed it with wheat instead of rye and change it completely. We can split it and feed some of it with rye and change it back.
But sometimes we can’t judge the starter that we’re keeping.
We need to listen to an expert baker or a microbiologist who can diagnose what needs to be adjusted.
Instead of worrying about the two wolves inside, think of the sourdough culture we all travel through life with.
How often will you feed it? What will you feed it? Will you keep it warm?
Sourdough is life.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 193. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe