Poor Emamaline was getting pushed further and further back on the top shelf of our fridge … until …
Every time I opened the door to my fridge, Emmaline seemed to stare back at me. I knew what she wanted to say: “Do something. Help me.” I’d known it was a bad idea to accept her, because the last time I’d been given sourdough starter by a friend, he/she had also sat abandoned in my fridge, for weeks. But I rarely ever refuse gifts of food — even if this wasn’t quite edible — and this one had a very good pedigree. Emmaline, as I was told this starter was called, hailed from San Francisco and was 150 years old. My mother-in-law had bequeathed me with it. I’d thought to myself, this time will be different.
But it seemed like the starter was doomed. For almost two weeks, the white goo sat there in a mason jar on the top shelf of my fridge undisturbed. A layer of gray watery liquid formed on top of the gummy substance. I occasionally reached for things sitting next to it — my Thai red curry paste, my Chinese chili sauce — and it got pushed further and further back on that top shelf.
I’d looked online at the recipes and the starter just seemed too intimidating: having to feed it regularly, doing something with the discard, and then actually using it. All the recipes for sourdough bread seemed to be a dozen paragraphs long and required three days of loving attention. I tried to give some away to a professional chef friend. “No, thanks,” he said. “I don’t want the responsibility right now.” So the starter sat. It was rapidly falling into that category of items in my fridge I know I should throw away but don’t because I’d be reminded of the tragedy and the wastefulness of not having consumed it.
Then sourdough came up in one of my online cooking classes. A guest introduced herself as an expert sourdough bread baker. I confessed to her that the starter had sat neglected for two weeks. Should I just toss it out? I asked. “No, actually,” she said. “You can still bring it back to life.” But she added that I should get to it rather quickly.
The idea of resuscitating something in the midst of a pandemic sounded alluring. Yet I let another 72 hours slip by. Finally, I took it out the fridge and fed it for the first time. I mixed 1 cup of flour with 1 cup of water. I poured out some of the starter. I mixed in the flour slurry. I let it sit on my counter until it got bubbly and foamy then stuck it back in the fridge. Then I tackled the discard. I’d found a recipe for sourdough discard crepes, but I wanted more crepes that the recipe called for and in my doubling of the recipe I had somehow fumbled the proportions. I discarded my discard and just made my kids normal crepes.
But I got into the habit of feeding the sourdough every week — there was indeed satisfaction in reviving it; I wasn’t an essential worker during this pandemic but every week, I did save my starter. Every Wednesday or so, I took the mason jar out, discarded a cup of it, and added in my 1 part flour 1 part water slurry. I even successfully made sourdough crepes. Those crepes became a ritual — on a weekday! My husband thought I was nuts. “What are you doing, again, crepes on Wednesday?” But it happened to be the perfect solution to one of our ongoing conflicts over breakfast. Every weekend, we made pancakes, but he liked them huge and puffy while I liked mine thinner and chewier. He got his fat pancakes on the weekends and I got crepes on a weekday; our kids enjoyed both.
In the last week or so, I began to feel it was silly just to feed and discard and not actually make bread. This last week also coincided with a funk — all the politics of late and the surging COVID-19 numbers have been getting me down. I thought back to one of the last periods of my life when I baked a lot of bread, and recalled a whole wheat bread I’d grown fond of baking when I lived in Cuba. I remembered how that bread had offered so much comfort the morning after Donald Trump won the election in 2016. The reassurance that bread gives us is evidenced in the shortages of flour and yeast that have taken hold since the pandemic began.
So this past Wednesday, I took the starter out of the fridge and was determined to pony up and make real sourdough bread. I’d found a sensible recipe on King Arthur’s website. From start to finish, this recipe was supposed to only take me 12 hours, most of it inactive time.
But then I took out the jar of starter from the very back of my refrigerator and realized that it was frozen. Augh. And I had already promised my kids the discard crepes! I knocked out a batch of normal crepes. Then I decided to take another look at the starter, remembering that yeasts and other bacterias did just as well, or even better, in the freezer. Like a lake at the beginning of winter, only the top of the starter was frozen. I chipped away at the icy layer with a big spoon and stirred up the whole thing for a good five minutes, until it reached a milky uniform color. I discarded some and fed it.
The recipe called for “fed” starter but that left me confused. Should I use it immediately after feeding it, or wait until the next day, as other recipes had said to do? The information on starter and sourdough that I found on the internet was voluminous and inconsistent; it’s as if Putin is waging a disinformation campaign against U.S. politics and sourdough simultaneously. Finally, I came across a website that seemed to make some sense - it advised me to use the starter when it got to the peak of its bubbly stage, somewhere between 4-12 hours. For the next few hours, I checked for bubbles, which seemed to be forming more steadily.
In the afternoon, I was distracted by another baking project: cookies. Earlier that day, I’d promised my son I’d bake with him. So while my six-year-old mixed snickerdoodle dough, I finally began to knead my sourdough. It wasn’t more difficult than dough for noodles or pizza. After the dough came together, I let it rest while we ate dinner.
After finishing dinner and doing the dishes, I went back to the sourdough — it had grown tremendously like a billowy cloud. As I touched the dough, it deflated like a balloon, just as the recipe said it would. I shaped it into two long baguettes and let that sit while I went to check my email and work for an hour. Right before putting my kids down, I went back into the kitchen, removed the dishtowel I’d placed over the dough, to reveal two baguettes that seemed to have doubled in width, just as they were supposed to. I flicked some water on them, dusted them with flour, and slid them into the pre-heated oven.
After reading a few chapters of The Twits to my children and turning off the lights in their room, I went back downstairs to inhale a heavenly scent that had taken over the entire house. In 30 minutes, the bread had risen and turned golden brown. After I let the bread cool (over my wok), I sliced off an end, lathered it with butter and sunk my teeth into it.
It was definitely the best bread I’d ever baked, and possibly one of the best I’d ever eaten. My husband was already in bed and said he’d wait until morning, but I managed to summon my mother into the kitchen. After she’d bit into the bread, she agreed wholeheartedly. Yes, it was an unusual time to be eating bread — ten thirty at night — but it still was definitely one of the best breads she’d tried.
My final product … cooling atop my wok!