I never thought I would be a breadmaker. My husband Dan actually learned to make bread properly when he worked at Great Harvest for a few months while in between jobs in his twenties. I love to whip up a good quick bread, but yeast intimidates me. Breadmaking, with the kneading and the rising and the waiting, always seemed to fussy to me.
So no one is more surprised than I that I became a habitual sourdough bread baker this year. A wonderful and generous church parishioner shared her recipe and tips earlier this winter, along with some of her starter (which is over 25 years old!). I dutifully fed the starter and began trying my hand at making sourdough loaves.
She made it look easy and foolproof, but it was not. I had my share of flops: loaves that did not rise and were as hard as bricks, gummy insides, and dough that became burned because I forgot I left it in the oven to rise and then turned on the oven. I have learned all sorts of things that a written recipe can never capture: the starter becomes most activated when I place it in the sunlight beside my kitchen window; the dough rises the exact right amount if I feed the starter and wait 4-8 hours before mixing up the dough; tell my family when the dough is rising in the oven so they don’t turn the oven on. Most importantly, though, I have learned that I cannot rush the process.
I am impatient (actually I prefer the word efficient). If there is a faster way to do something, especially something that must be done routinely, I will find it. I will turn an audiobook or podcast on while I am folding laundry, I will batch tasks, and I will meal prep. But sourdough bread cannot be rushed. If I try to shave time off the first or second rise, the bread will not become fluffy. If I try to shorten the time between feeding the starter and making the dough, the mixture will not leaven. After feeding the starter, I need to wait several days before I can feed the starter again and make a new batch of bread. Timing is everything. The bread cannot be baked on a whim.
I have found a couple of hacks through trial and error. If you set the oven on a low temperature and then shut it off, the loaves rise better. I start the dough in the evening and use the overnight hours to my advantage to ensure that there is plenty of rise time.
But for the most part, I must embrace the slowness of it all. It’s a process, one that cannot be optimized or rushed. Every time I try to take a shortcut, I end up with unusable, inedible bread. If I cannot do it right, I may as well not do it.
Sourdough is teaching me something about bumping up against limits and trusting long-held wisdom. When I have tweaked the bread—subbed out the type of oil or added a spice or herb or changed the loaf shape—the bread never tastes as good. This bread recipe has been around for dozens and dozens of years, and it has stood the test of time. I cannot improve upon it, and that is okay. Part of why it tastes as delicious as it does is the time investment and patience requried. Much of the time is not active time; it is simply waiting before moving on to the next step.
Don’t rush. This has become a mantra for me as I’m scurrying out the door in the morning and inevitably spill my water bottle and drop my bag’s contents all over the garage floor. When I try to hurry up, I make more mistakes, which just makes everything take longer. Don’t rush. Let things take as long as they must. I have the time that I need.
Local friends: If you want some starter and the sourdough recipe, let me know!
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