Courtesy of James Fox-Smith
Like lots of other ambitious cooks stuck at home for six weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to bake a decent loaf of sourdough bread recently. Clearly, I’m not alone. If you spend any time on social media you’ll have already noticed this. The Internet is awash with photos of unkempt, flour-covered home bakers beaming and showing off armloads of golden sourdough bread loaves. Why is it sourdough, of all things, that has captured the attention of home cooks everywhere at this historically weird time? After all, an ancient staple consisting of nothing other than flour, salt, and water, ought to be the simplest and least interesting thing to make, right? Wrong. Sourdough bread is the finickiest, most frustratingly wonderful foodstuff to get consistently right that I’ve ever attempted. But gotten right it’s also the most delicious—simultaneously crunchy and chewy; light and filling; delicate and hearty. Every good loaf is the result of a quiet alchemic miracle—a complex push-me-pull-you between warring factions of wild yeasts and lactic-acid-producing bacilli which, if General Baker leads his troops right, will inflate the sticky, lifeless blob of goo on your kitchen counter into a sturdy loaf that emerges golden-brown and gorgeous for forty minutes in the oven. When this happens it’s magical. And it’s why the online bakers look so pleased with themselves: because what they don’t post photos of are all the flat, lifeless, stodgy quagmires of failed bread that precede the sudden emergence of a successful batch for no apparent reason! I am familiar with these quagmires, and call on the amateur bakers of Facebook to either stop showing off and come clean about their success rates, or to reveal their secrets. Apparently this is not something you can learn by watching YouTube videos.
We’re doing hard, time-consuming things like gardening, woodworking, brewing beer, learning musical instruments. We’re discovering—or rediscovering—all the analogue, hands-on, deeply satisfying skills that our digital native selves forgot about during the past generation or two, when failure became the luxury that none of us could afford.
As noted last month in this column, while laying in supplies for pandemic quarantine my mother-in-law discovered not one but two vacuum-sealed, fifty-pound tubs of whole wheatberries, which she had purchased in a Y2K frenzy during the runup to the turn of the millennium, then forgotten about. So I reasoned, with one hundred pounds of wheatberries to grind and time on my hands, what better to do than set about learning to master the holy grail of bread baking? This, ultimately, provides the answer to the question, “why is everyone baking sourdough now?” Because getting it right requires lots and lots of time.
[Read James Fox-Smith's 2018 reflections on the toils of sourdough breadmaking, here: "Flour, Salt, Water, Time".]
Lots of us are learning how much longer a day can be when we aren’t even required to get dressed for work, let alone to commute, or attend parties, meetings, business functions, and kids’ sporting events. Time is suddenly available to try all kinds of projects we never believed possible. This counts particularly for projects in which success involves multiple episodes of failure along the way. We’re doing hard, time-consuming things like gardening, woodworking, brewing beer, learning musical instruments. We’re discovering—or rediscovering—all the analogue, hands-on, deeply satisfying skills that our digital native selves forgot about during the past generation or two, when failure became the luxury that none of us could afford. Baking bread belongs in this grouping—not only for the sustenance it affords both body and spirit, but also because it quickly reminds you how even the simplest-looking things can be simultaneously difficult and deeply satisfying; and how even failure is always a matter of degree. “Oh look, another pancake!” observes Mathilde tartly while inspecting my latest effort, which once again has partially deflated during the crucial counter to oven transfer. That doesn’t stop her from reaching for the breadknife and the butter dish though, because crusty and hot from the oven, the results are so delicious, I wonder whether I should just start pretending I meant for my "loaves" to turn out the shape of frisbees, and start a cottage baking business called “The Accidental Flatbread Company.” Maybe, because if there’s one thing this experience has revealed, it’s that whatever the recipe, time might just be the most precious ingredient of all.
