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A Year of Re-Skilling

Weekend DIY: Create Life

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I was jonesing for a kitchen project this weekend so finally tried something on my bucket list: making a sourdough starter from scratch.

My first-ever loaf of homemade bread. (Made with a breadmaker, of course.)

Sourdough bread is my absolute favourite, with its chewy moistness and subtle sour aroma. I usually feed my addiction by investing in $5 loaves from some of the Cowichan Valley’s many amazing bakers, but (like heroin) that quickly becomes an expensive habit. So every few years I decide I’m going to bake our own bread. In 2008 that meant adopting Brock’s parents’ breadmaker. I used yeast from a jar and we endured a few of my fresh-and-organic-but-not-as-good-as-store-bread loaves. Once we started going to farmer’s markets regularly we discovered artisan bread, which is usually made with starters and not dried yeast, and we were no longer able to settle for anything less.

in 2011, our Renaissance Women group shortlisted bread-making as a skill we wanted to learn, and some of our members taught us their secrets. These breads involved a yeast starter that had fermented overnight (“poolish”), and a sourdough starter that Tessa had maintained for years after being gifted it by her baking mentor in France. I kept my starter, Sabrina, alive for months, but eventually my daily commuting to work in Victoria made it too difficult to service her needs: living starters need to be fed flour and water at least once a week. Sabrina died a grey, stinky death.

This weekend I atoned for her murder by creating life where before there was none, simply by following the instructions in my much-beloved Joy of Cooking:

  1. Stir together 1/2 cup flour and 1/4 cup barely lukewarm water in a non-metal bowl.
  2. Knead or stir it for 3-5 minutes until it is smooth and elastic.
  3. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap, then poke 5 holes in the plastic with the tip of a sharp knife.
  4. Let stand away at room temperature away from drafts for 12-15 hours.

After 12 hours the dough looked the same, which is normal. So I stirred in another 1/2 cup flour and 1/4 cup water.

According to Joy of Cooking, my dough should have needed another feeding at 12 hours before resting for 24 hours, but I neglected my starter-in-progress while working and sleeping: about 18 hours later I woke to find my dough bubbling. Yay!!

My homemade starter begins to bubble!

Bubbles mean that my flour + water dough collected enough wild yeast from the air in our tiny house that the yeasts were able to reproduce. As the starter continues to ferment, bacteria will also reproduce and make my starter “sour” (which is what I want, so I can make sourdough).

I took a picture in celebration, then fed my new pet another 1/2 cup flour and 1/4 cup water and covered it with plastic wrap (without holes this time). After one more feeding, my starter should smell slightly sour. It will hopefully have developed enough leavening strength for me to use it to make bread. I will keep my starter in a jar in the fridge, then take her out once a week to feed her and make a few loaves of bread or pizza dough.

Making the bread, of course, is a whole other challenge. I don’t want my starter to die again, but that requires using my starter to make bread at least once a week. Also, my hands are still gibbled from having uber-bad tendinitis this summer, and it is very difficult for me to knead bread properly. Luckily, it’s winter and Brock will be inside more — and he has the hand-strength to knead dough. So maybe our pet starter will prosper until the spring.

But say she does die, or the Apocalypse comes and we can no longer buy dried yeast at Thrifty’s. I now know I can make my own starter using just flour and water. I can make dough bubble, just like my great-grandparents could, before our society decided that individuals didn’t need to be bothered with that knowledge.

Reclaiming that knowledge this weekend tastes as good as the most expensive artisan sourdough bread, oven-warm and buttered.

Bread from a Cowichan Valley artisan baker, with roasted Makaria Farm garlic cloves (aka Heaven).
A Year of Re-Skilling

Sabrina the Sourdough Starter

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When I left home Sunday evening for our first ever Renaissance Women workshop, I thought bread making was a mystical art beyond my ability. My few attempts years ago resulted in brick-like loaves and carpal-tunnel-inflamed hands from kneading.

Print card made by Renaissance Woman Tessa.

Four hours later I had a sourdough starter named Sabrina in a jar in my fridge: 100g of aromatic beige goop that smells a bit like kombucha (fermenting, oxygenated, yeasty). She smells like good bread. By the time I returned home and put her in the fridge, the glass jar was already steamy with her exhalations. Sabrina’s ancestry can be traced back through Tessa to a baker in France named Vincent, who 20 years prior had been given his starter by another baker. Sabrina is likely older than I am.

“It’s like Facebook.”
– Maeve, on how sourdough starter spreads around the world through sharing.

We learned the basics of three different breads at our February workshop, using a sourdough starter, a gluten-free recipe (the batter-like dough looked like mocha icing), and “poolish,” a yeast-flour-water mixture that ferments overnight.

Our workshop teachers included two Renaissance Women (Tessa and Tanya) and Jenn Dixon of The Bonny Baker. Both Tanya and Jenn have apprenticed with True Grain Bread in Cowichan Bay, our local miller and organic bakery, and the bakery had donated a 20kg bag of “sifted wheat” (aka flour with minimal processing) milled from hard red spring wheat grown by Tom Henry in Metchosin.

Fermented vs. Sanitized

Sourdough starter is a continuation of my new love affair with fermented foods. Just like Holly during my first sauerkraut workshop, Tessa shocked us all by saying that it’s okay to keep your starter in a less-than-clean container. In fact, fermented creatures (e.g. sourdough starters, kombucha SCOBYs) kinda like homes with bacteria in them. The worst thing you can do is expose your starter to residue from bleach or anti-bacterial soap, because it can die.

Our current society is based on pasteurization. We bleach our hospitals, irradiate our food and wash our hands with anti-bacterial soap. The unfortunate side effect of constant, heavy-duty sanitization is that our immune systems become wimpy: we’re not used to fighting off the germs in our world. And now, with superbugs evolving to resist our sanitization efforts, we’re even less able to fend off these monster germs when they attack us.

There is another way of dealing with germs: build up our immune systems. Eat carrots from the garden, even though there’s some soil on them. Use vinegar and baking soda to clean your house instead of bleach. Don’t buy anti-bacterial soap: use a milder soap instead. And to strengthen our internal biological environments, we can eat fermented foods like sauerkraut, kombucha and sourdough bread.

Kneading Tips

My first batch of homemade sourdough bread, before baking.

The whole workshop was a life-changing experience, since I can now MAKE BREAD. But the biggest revelation for me was learning how to knead properly. I’ve worked at a computer since 2004, with years of computer school work before that: my wrists often burn with the foreshadowing of carpal tunnel syndrome. As a result, the few times I’ve attempted to knead dough it’s been an agonizing experience.

Jenn and her co-instructors taught us to knead with the base of the palm, not our fingers or the top of the palm. For some reason I never learned this. Once I knew how to knead properly, I was able to work the dough for much longer than in earlier attempts, with no pain in my wrists.

That said, the first batch of dough I made after the workshop wasn’t kneaded enough (it rose horizontally instead of vertically), so I’ll work it for longer the next time. Apparently it’s not possible to over-knead dough: it will take everything you have to give.

Super-tasty sourdough buns and pseudo-baquettes!