Zen and the Art of Making Bread
Bread is nothing more than flour, water, and salt, but making real sourdough bread not only tested my patience, but sent me through weirder rabbit holes on the Internet than any other project I’ve ever done. For me, bread has become Linux cooking, complex and tedious, but ultimately rewarding.
In general, I am a fan of tinkering and repairing for myself. I would rather spend four hours learning how my bike works and repairing it than not wasting time and $ 50 getting someone else to do it for me. Over the years, I’ve also learned to love cooking . Slowly but methodically, I overcame fear and laziness and enjoyed my time in the kitchen. One day, a couple of months ago, a friend convinced me to bake sourdough bread. “Bread is easy,” I thought and decided to try it.
The first thing I learned was the difference between bread and leavened bread. Regular sandwich bread and other similar types of bread are easy enough to make using commercial yeast, and it only takes a few hours of your time. Sourdough bread uses an active leaven of yeast that you make yourself and a couple of days of effort.
It took me eight tries before I had an edible loaf of sourdough bread. I had a few false starts and spent a couple of weekends working only to make inedible balls from cooked flour that looked more like hockey pucks than bread. Last weekend I finally baked a couple of loaves of edible bread, but I still have a lot of tinkering to do before it gets any good.
However, the different skills I used to make a simple sourdough loaf surprise me. There’s a lot going on here. Like any baking project, sourdough requires close attention to detail, but it also requires an understanding of chemistry and biology to get started. Even after you get a basic understanding of how it all works, there are still many challenges ahead. It is boring, difficult, slow, and in turn calming, challenging, and discerning.
I train scientific muscles that I haven’t used since high school.
Science and baking have always gone hand in hand , but sourdough seems like a scientific experiment from the start. Before you can make bread, you need to make a snack that feels exactly like the science experiment you do in school.
“Sourdough” is a means for growing wild yeast so that you can bake with it. Yeast is a living, single-celled organism that makes bread rise. This is because when you mix flour with water, the yeast eats up the sugar in the flour and produces carbon dioxide, which creates air bubbles that help the bread rise. To use this yeast, you need to create the environment it wants to live in.
Wild yeast is found almost everywhere, but it is especially present in flour. So, the easiest way to turn it into sourdough is to mix flour and water and let it ferment for a few days.
To make a sourdough starter, simply take one part flour and one part water, mix them in a container, and let sit for a day. Add more flour and more water the next day. People call this “feeding” the leaven. Repeat this for a few days and the yeast will begin to bubble. A few more days, and it will become frothy and evaporate the sour smell that gave the sourdough its name. Of course, if it were that easy, I wouldn’t have screwed up three times.
Practice makes (sort of) perfect
My first attempt at sourdough sourdough was unsuccessful. A couple of days later, a heatwave hit Los Angeles, and for three days in a row, when the temperature exceeded 100 degrees, the leaven smelled bad. The second attempt failed because she was too cold and the general recommendation of five days of feeding was not enough. On my third try, I finally got it right. I attribute this success to taking the trouble to read about science instead of blindly following directions.
In cooking, as in so many things, it’s easy to follow directions without knowing the “why” along the way, but as with everything else, it often ends in disaster. As soon as I took the time to learn how fermentation works and how yeast affects the quality of the starter, everything started to add up. I’m an adult, but jumped with the joy of a mad scientist when I first saw the bubbles in my starter.
The science of sourdough is much more interesting than just a laboratory experiment on your kitchen counter. People keep their leavens alive for decades by passing them on to family members. At the same time, the leaven acquires all its qualities, not the least of which is taste. This is because in addition to the yeast that exists in different regions, different microbes also travel, and these small microorganisms can also greatly affect the taste and quality of bread. How it all works together is quite a mystery, so research on this topic led to the creation of the Sourdough Project . This collaboration between Tufts University, the Danish Museum of Natural History and the University of North Carolina is doing DNA testing on starter foods from around the world to see exactly what they contain, ultimately leading to clues about which microbes lead to better bread. …
You can find hundreds of sourdough recipes online, but I love this one at The Kitchn . It takes a while to actually explain what the terms mean and how things work. It is also written for real beginners and clearly indicates every step you need to take, even if it is redundant and identical to the previous steps.
Baking bread helps me develop patience and composure.
Between starting the leaven (first five days or more) and then the full day of baking required to actually make the bread, the leaven tests your patience to the extreme.
Most sourdough recipes have at least 10 steps, but there can be more than 30, depending on how they are written. When it comes to taste, I really like the recipe Tartine’s rustic bread created by the New York Times of The , which consists of 13 steps. In terms of actual readability, The Kitchn’s excellently written recipe has 25 steps. 25!
What does it all look like when you put it on your to-do list? It’s actually quite difficult, even if you summarize the steps:
- Prepare the starter from scratch (about five days) or remove the cultured starter from the refrigerator, feed the starter and bring it back to life (about one day, depending on the age of the starter).
- Make a “starter,” which means take a very small portion of the active starter and place it in a small bowl, add some more flour and water, and then leave it on the counter to re-ferment for another eight to twelve hours. In some recipes, the terms “leaven” and “leaven” are used interchangeably, which is confusing. Worse, leaven is both a noun (the yeast you add to the dough) and a verb (the process that makes the dough rise), so poorly written recipes end up hard to read.
- The next day, mix the leavened dough and let it rest for half an hour. This is the stage of autolysis when the flour absorbs water. This step helps gluten formation and enzymes to break down starch into sugar.
- Once this is done, you “fold” or knead the dough every 30 minutes for about two and a half hours. This process varies from recipe to recipe.
- After that, you divide the dough in two, shape each into small circles, and then let the dough rise for two to five hours.
- Finally, after about 600 hours, you bake the damn bread.
The basic, literal planning process for this requires extreme project management skills. You have to plan a few days ahead and then be flexible in case the starter turns out to be a little slow. Regardless of how you divide the work, you still have to spend the day on noodles around the house while the bread does its job.
Fortunately, a few items in the recipe allow you to pause everything. For example, you can always leave the dough in the refrigerator overnight, which helps when you can’t sit around all day. It all takes so long that most of the beginner’s guides give you a realistic baking schedule. For example, Smart Carrot plan schedule from Friday to Sunday helpful, while at the Fickle has a plan that is slightly reduced schedule, when you are in a shortage of time. Each recipe is slightly different, but once you set a schedule, it’s easy to adapt to other recipes.
The point is, bread is a test that will test not only your patience , but also your basic planning and self-control skills. I planned my weekend, agreed that “two to three hours” in a recipe could sometimes mean four, and this time I’m focusing on the food itself, not the directions.
Troubleshooting is a zen state
My first reaction to bad bread is to get angry and throw it away. Then my brain goes to troubleshooting and I try to figure out the problem. Unlike most things, this is a problem that I can solve myself.
We all do troubleshooting, but I don’t think I ever realized how relaxing it was until I started my first attempts at making bread. Problem solving is something I’ve always associated with work and therefore a cause of stress, not a remedy for it. However, this is exactly what it is for me, and like any electronics project, troubleshooting sourdough bread is a never-ending process.
My first two loaves of bread were undercooked, which means either I didn’t give them enough time to rise, or my snack was unwanted. The next batch was the same, although I watched them as they went up. This suggests that my starter is not fully active, so the next time I gave the starter extra time to ferment before I created the starter. Finally, the result was a loaf of bread that I could actually eat.
Even when things are going well, other little things don’t work. My first edible loaf of bread was burnt on the bottom and the texture was a little loose on the inside. To adjust this, I need to lower the oven temperature a little and try to knead the dough a little more. Correcting this will lead to many other problems, and this process will be repeated forever until the end of time. In many ways, this reminds me of almost every Raspberry Pi project I’ve done.
When you troubleshoot, you have a clear guideline, and while the answers aren’t always clear, you can at least create an attack plan. This methodical process requires your full attention, which can put you into a trance where the rest of the world simply falls away. This Zen state is relaxing. This is the moment when work turns into this all-encompassing feeling, when nothing else matters but the success of this project. As you pour out and come up with a new twist on an old recipe, reality changes briefly and you feel like you’ve grasped an important truth about the world. Until you ruin the next loaf.
Not everyone will have the same reaction, but if you have a weird analytical brain like mine, you might like this. I still have a lot of work ahead of me before my bread is great. There are many problems to solve, a little science to work with, and expectations to tackle.