Today’s piece is a republication of an essay I wrote for girlsoup.blog. I’m republishing it here to whet your appetites for more to come: some essays on spring and green things (how original!), a piece on the service industry as a social welfare system and how maybe it really shouldn’t be ours, and the potential tyranny of the fully-stocked pantry.
A recipe for Sourdough from the Tassajara Bread Book:
“AT NIGHT:
5 cups whole wheat flour
1 to 1½ cups starter
4 cups lukewarm water
IN THE MORNING:
Replenish the starter.
½ cup oil
1 tablespoon salt
5 to 6 cups or more whole wheat flour”
Seems simple enough, but don’t be fooled. Sourdough, if you want it to actually look and feel and taste like sourdough, is a three-day long process. It requires a scale and a bowl, bread flour, regular flour, oil, salt and water. Plus you’ll need a proofing basket and unless you know what Brown is talking about when he requests that you “[c]ut into two pieces and form into two loaves,” then you better sit down and watch some videos about shaping your loaves without disrupting the gluten.
You might be asking yourself, all that? For two little loaves of bread? My answer is, yes, of course.
Sourdough, and love, seem less intimidating now after a year of quarantining, but I’ll be the first to say they are both quite difficult to master. They aren’t intimidating because you need gadgets, expertise, or perfect judgement, but because you need time. A lot of time. Sourdough, love, good writing, all of these pursuits take time, take care.
Caring for a sourdough starter, coaxing light, tall loaves out of it, is a process. It requires attention to detail and a paradoxically flippant attitude: I don’t mind if the loaf is flat or if my starter needs a few days or extra feedings to wake up. I don’t mind if this is all for nothing and I have to buy bread after all. It takes patience, which we’ve become uniquely bad at giving.
My partner and I got into baking sourdough early in the pandemic, when we were crashing at my childhood home in Boise, Idaho. Baking together became the only thing we did without my family involved. We started our bread adventure with the classic Tassajara Bread Book thinking we might learn something of this elusive patience – of peace in a chaotic universe. How could you not when reading a book on baking bread written by a Zen monk?
Unsurprisingly, we didn’t learn any of those things. Instead, we were ridiculed for our own impatience by flat, ugly loaves hardly fit for the birds. Our relationship faltered as I scrambled to be daughter, sister, partner, student all at once. I was caught in no-man’s land without time for myself, for my relationships or for my schoolwork. And very little patience for sourdough and its whimsy.
Flash forward nearly 8 months. We’re living together in Los Angeles, in our very own apartment, no mothers to be found. We’re baking sourdough loaves with enough consistency and confidence that we haven’t bought bread in months.
It would be nice to be able to say that moving away from my mom’s house provided all the solutions we needed, but it isn’t that easy. It wasn’t just the sourdough or my partner I needed to be patient with, but myself as well. There are days when, like my sourdough, I need to spend more time under a warm blanket, when I need to rest longer before the world folds me into different shapes. There are days when I need to give myself some time, some love.
The transition from frustration to exhilaration can only be described with one, simple adjective: slow. It took time at every step of the way. When we fed it, we waited patiently, sometimes dubiously for our starter to double. When we opened up to one another, we waited patiently, sometimes dubiously for the acceptance. When I can’t be all the people that I’m asked to be, I wait. That’s what baking is. That’s what loving is.
That’s patience.
It takes hours and hours, days and days, to convince a starter to make itself known, to persuade it to become a beautiful, airy, fermented messenger of flavor. But even if we wish it were otherwise, that’s how so many things are. It takes hours and hours, days and days, weeks and months and years to persuade a simple spark between two people to become a nuanced, supportive partnership.
If I skimp when it comes to nourishing my love or my sourdough, they both fall flat.
Take my sourdough lesson, take my relationship: they are both so securely fastened into years, months, days...that it’s almost impossible to imagine their progression at the breakneck pace of the world around us.
It's not just about accepting love, but really learning to give it.
I came to sourdough. I left, I waited, I returned, I learned. Often, I spent three days or more feeding my starter until it seemed ready to take on the task of producing a loaf of beautiful bread. Sometimes, I spent months or more feeding my relationships full of honesty and I love you’s, of quiet moments together and foldings of hands together and rising in the morning to someone next to me. It’s taken a year to learn how to make a halfway decent loaf of bread. It’s taken 4 years to become a halfway decent partner. It’s taken me my whole life to learn how to care for myself.
The world around you asks you to stop giving if you don't receive something in exchange. I’m here to ask you to give and give and give, and to accept. The gifts come in unexpected ways: sometimes it’s a second set of hands folding your sourdough starter alongside you. Sometimes it’s just a nice bubble in your dough before the final fold. Sometimes it’s much, much less than this, or much, much more, but it’s always something.
Today, I am grateful for a deep breath in, for a starter that wouldn’t double and the opportunity to keep on giving to it. For the loaves of bread that turned out alright and the many that didn’t. For the arguments and the resolutions, the trouble and the ease, and most of all, for the moments I spent learning how to give love and how to receive it.