SOURED

The first quote in my new Saturday morning journal is something from Amelia Earhart and because Michael left multiple pages between the quotes, I have spent multiple Saturdays on the same story. The story that came forth was one of a woman trying to make a loaf of bread from a sourdough starter she had also created. So, it’s an autobiographical tale. I had left off the previous Saturday with the woman, Amber, eyeing her sourdough starter with suspicion. When I picked up the thread from there, I wrote about coming from a family that didn’t bake loaves of bread. This is true. We baked cakes, cookies and pies. Cornbread and biscuits. Rolls for Thanksgiving dinner. Never loaves of bread. I was raised in the west by people raised in the south. The leavening agent of choice was baking powder or backing soda and yeast sold in tiny square packets. Sourdough was something someone made in the north, on a coast.

I am not genetically predisposed for baking a loaf of sourdough bread.

Yet…I keep trying, tossing my failed attempts into the garbage each week.

As I tossed the latest failed attempt, Michael told me for the thousandth time about how he used to make really good bread. He worked at Subway and Planet Sub in his late teens, early twenties. So he knows how to make corporate bread for the masses. Then he asked if I just wanted him to make me a loaf bread, obviously oblivious and clueless about my motivations for my own attempts at making a loaf of bread. The truth is, I could also make a really good loaf of bread using the very same method Michael would probably use. I too have done this thousands of times. What I have not done, is create a loaf of sourdough bread with a crispy outside and a light, airy inside. I have not produced anything I want to slather with butter and jam or smashed avocado. Not ever. Not with the old starter and for sure not with this new one.

But it doesn’t keep me from trying.

Michael keeps asking me what he can do to help with the things I’ve been worrying about. “What would be easier for you?” is his go-to question. The answer I never give him, the truth, is that what would be easier is not have to answer the question at all. Just step in and take some action. He still hasn’t learned that while I am a very independent woman, it sure is nice to have someone else just step in and do something without having to be asked or told. You see it needs to be done, so you do it. But in all fairness, there is nothing I can do to fix or change or make things easier for myself either. I just have to accept the process and give in to the knowledge that there is nothing I can do.

All this time, while making my sourdough bread, I have meticulously weighed flour and water. I have had complete control over the ingredients, yet no control over the outcome of mixing those things together. And that’s the lesson. Each batch of bread is a reminder that there are only parts of a situation that you have control over. The moment I place the dough into the oven, I loose all control over what kind of loaf of bread it’s going to turn out to be. I just have to wait and see. If it fails, it fails and I just try again maybe with a different recipe or doing more to adjust the temperature of the house to accommodate a better rise. The important part is that I try again. And again. And again. And again. With each attempt, leaning into the unknown, knowing that I made an effort. I carefully weighed and measured.

All that’s left is the wait and see part.

A LISA SIMPSON STORY

Bread making

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Sunday morning I woke up wedged between a dog and a cat. From my view point, I could see through a crack in the blinds that it was still overcast and dreary outside. We had an odd unseasonably cool Fourth of July weekend with lots of rain. Any way, I'm laying there trying to decide which animal to shove over first, knowing that disturbing the cat will incite Josephine to chew on the cat, when I think "I should bake a loaf of bread!" I know. Just wait until I reach about seventy four when the gaps in my brain are even bigger. I managed to shimmy out of bed without disturbing the animals, slid into a house dress and made my way to the kitchen.

I first made sure that I had all of the ingredients before heading over to the cookbook stack to retrieve my bread recipe. My bread recipe is written on an old scrap of paper that is worn and brown around the edges. It is the recipe I have always used to make bread ever since I started making bread and I made A LOT of bread. I'm going to tell you why I made loads of bread. It's a full confession of my absolute nerdery. Are you ready? Back in my early teens, I was a member of the Food and Fiber Group. It was a 4-H program designed to promote and educate people about Oklahoma agriculture. I think there was like six of us or something and we each had a table. Someone told the story of cotton. There was a table on pecans. Jessica Worstell had a table on dairy because her grandparents owned the local dairy. I don't remember all of the tables, but my table was all about wheat. I grew wheat. I milled wheat. I turned wheat into flour and I made whole wheat bread to hand out as samples. It worked really well when Jessica would make butter with my mom's little butter churn. Then we'd have bread and butter. We all wore matching denim dresses with green bandanas. Our tablecloths matched our dresses. 

Yes. I recognize that this was full on dorkery. Say what you want. I learned the value of getting a loaf of bread to the table and a little bit of scholarship money. In those days, I pimped myself out for scholarship money. So yeah, I'd wear that awful denim dress and do my whole song and dance about wheat a million times if I had to. I also became very adept at bread making, but for some reason, mostly because I got lazy, I stopped making bread. It just seemed like it was an unnecessary task, which is why I was a little surprised I woke up wanting to do it. In retrospect, I should have made an apple pie, because of America, but no. I wanted bread with flaxseeds and sunflower seeds. I am pretty sure that I had tucked that scrap of paper containing my tried and true bread recipe into one of the cookbooks in my collection. At least I was pretty sure. Turns out I may have stuck that recipe into a three ring binder that contained recipes torn from magazines; the very three ring binder that I threw away during one of my cleaning fits. 

That's right people. I've lost or thrown away the National Treasure of a bread recipe. I even called Mom to see if she had a copy and she said "nope!" There's no copy! I guess it's not really that big of a deal, because a bread recipe is a bread recipe. They all contain flour, yeast and maybe honey. Except that this was the bread recipe that I learned on. This was the recipe that I knew. When I was being taught to kneed dough, I was told to think of the dough as a punching bag. My Mom had just been fired from her job. Her supervisor, who was a real jerk, came up with some cockamamie reason to fire my mom. I used to imagine that dough was Mom's supervisor. Later that dough would become other mean hateful people that would skirt on the edges of my life, but the point is that I could take out all my frustrations on this lump of flour, yeast and water. Then I could bake it and turn it into something delicious. 

I ended up using some random bread recipe that I found online that seemed pretty close to the one I used to use. I'm out of practice. The bread turned out good, but dense and not as fluffy as it should be. It still makes great toast though and maybe this will become a regular Sunday thing. Baking bread could go on the list with CBS Sunday Morning, laundry and waiting until late afternoon to brush my teeth. Maybe I had some frustrations that needed to be turned into something delicious and that's why I got all obsessed about baking bread. Maybe it is just a good idea to practice releasing frustrations every week by pounding a lump of dough with my fists.