After a little encouragement from Michael, who had just listened to a podcast about sourdough (the podcast is, oddly enough, called "Sliced Bread"), I began a starter last week.
Sourdough takes a lot of time and a lot of patience. There is also the fear of failure, brought about partially from looking at too many photos of beautiful-looking sourdough breads on the reddit sub called "breadit." I am amazed at the way mysterious wild yeasts develop when you add water to flour. And when you let the mixture sit in a warm place, and feed it with flour and water for a few days, those wild yeasts form whole colonies of living organisms. Whole worlds.
While washing out a bowl the other day I started to wonder if all of life from the big bang onward is simply a bit of sourdough starter in a giant mason jar that we could call the "universe." And if that is the case, what happens to the bits of dough after they are washed away? And what about the mass destruction that happens when you subject those living beings to extreme heat and then consume what is left behind?
At first the sourdough taste overwhelmed me, but then I started to like it. My starter is living in the refrigerator now, and I will use it again. Working with sourdough has been an emotional roller-coaster for me, but now I feel balanced and kind of proud for having some kind of success my first time around. I took pictures:
The top example in each photo is the sourdough, and the bottom is bread made with commercial yeast. Both loaves are made with the same flour: about 2/3 dark rye flour and about 1/3 stone-ground european-style bread flour that is whole wheat but looks off-white. I baked them the same way in the same bread pans, but they look and taste so very different from one another.
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