Starter, dough, half-baked, done

A cloudy, dreary day offers a wonderful opportunity to distract myself from gloom and doom by messing with the resurrected sourdough starter and mixing some dough for baking bread tomorrow. Some time back I read something about naming one’s starter, sort of like it's a pet. I’m seriously considering naming mine Lazarus, considering the number of times it’s been brought back from the (near) dead.

home-made starter looking happy

Photo by J. Harrington

The Daughter Person has challenged me to craft gnome bread for this Christmas season. I’m currently contemplating the pros and cons of acquiring an oval dutch oven or an oval baking cloche or simply replacing a baking stone that got broken some months back. The cloche I really like is out of the question because it weighs 22 pounds and that’s gross overkill for my needs and abilities. Anyhow, the challenge now has me engaged, which is much better for me than sitting, sulking, and stewing over the state of the world. Instead, I’m reading and learning from Sourdough by Science. I much  prefer to have at least a slight understanding of why I should do certain things a certain way and that’s a good part of what I’m gaining. Also, it turns out that although I’ve been doing many of the basic steps in the correct sequence and using correct procedures, I’m now learning what those steps are actually called. That’s progress!

As I think back to when I first began baking bread, I kept trying things until I found a pattern that worked and produced bread that I liked the taste of. Then I became hesitant to stray too far from that pattern, which eventually left me in a somewhat boring rut. I’m going to work hard at avoiding a repetition of that pattern and, it seems, a good way to do so it to get a better handle on the basics so I can learn from whatever mistakes I make, rather than being limited to saying “I have no idea what went wrong!” I bet such an approach could improve our lives, if only we could identify what the basics of a happy life are.

Inside

By Linda Hogan

How something is made flesh

no one can say. The buffalo soup

becomes a woman

who sings every day to her horses

or summons another to her private body

saying come, touch, this is how

it begins, the path of a newly born

who, salvaged from other lives and worlds,

will grow to become a woman, a man,

with a heart that never rests,

and the gathered berries,

the wild grapes

enter the body,

human wine

which can love,

where nothing created is wasted;

the swallowed grain

takes you through the dreams

of another night,

the deer meat becomes hands

strong enough to work.

 

But I love most

the white-haired creature

eating green leaves;

the sun shines there

swallowed, showing in her face

taking in all the light,

 

and in the end

when the shadow from the ground

enters the body and remains,

in the end, you might say,

This is myself

still unknown, still a mystery.

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