The Days of Sourdough

You know what I’m talking about. You, too, have recognized and marveled at the sudden and ubiquitous presence of those rounded, textured, floured domes on every social media platform you happen to visit in your quarantined stupor. You have thought, “More of these? And more?” at every 9th photo in your mindless and numbed Instagram scrolling. You have heard the cries for help, does anyone have a starter they’d be willing to share? You’ve seen the grocery shelves void of flour.

I’ve seen more posts about sourdough bread in the past few weeks–these days of quarantine–than I’ve ever seen in a lifetime. People are obsessed with baking in general in this lonely and disordered time, but it’s sourdough in particular on the front cover of Quarantine Magazine, sudden and erumpent like flowers after a wildfire.

Listen, I don’t bake. But I am loving the obsession. I love every photo.

It’s got something to do with those thick, granular crusts, scored on the surface in pleasing patterns, hearty round loaves full of texture, dusty with flour. Photos shot from overhead, fresh loaves left to rest and cool on baking racks. They are a resurrection of the color brown, paint swatch gradients of umber, ocher, sepia–they are making brown great again. They are made in batches of two or three, because loaves is so much better than loaf.

It’s the sensuality of it. You want to trace your fingers over the loaves like a lover, trace the ridges, bumps, and crusted valleys. You want to sneak off with the heel. You want to run a thick knife down the center, watch those crisp flakes chip and gather like sawdust, to feel and hear the crust crackle under the gentle guidance of the blade.

Perhaps you forsake serration altogether, you choose to rip a chunk of the steaming spongey wheaty matter by hand, rip it up Jesus style, share some with your quarantined and love-starved family, housemates, friends, share the rest with your own greedy mouth, let the soft textured insides practically melt on your tongue while molars faithfully grind and crunch the crust, you are as happy as a cow and her cud.

God, what is better than fresh, warm bread?

p.c. Ali Savage, b.c. (bread credit) also Ali Savage

Quarantine is a pagan chaos, and baking brings spiritual order. It’s the liturgy of it, the music and motions and recitations laid out before you. You follow along faithfully. Our lives are derailed these days, the scripts thrown out. We’re thankful for something to do: a recipe, an ingredient list, steps, instructions. Something that occupies several hours. Stuck inside at home, weary of news and immobilized by screens, there is relief in baking’s innate physicality: the measuring, mixing, kneading. The embodied waiting. It’s the good kind of waiting, the kind that ends with russet treasure. Waiting for bread is a welcome displacement of quarantine’s stale vision of featureless time.

Bread is one of our most basic building blocks. Bread has been around a while. We’re lonely for connection, communion, and life, and we’re living in a time that threatens it all. Bread is a conduit back. It’s practically automatic, we can barely help ourselves. In our isolated spheres, our hands faithfully resume their hieratic duties in the making and breaking of bread. They resume their ordained role in the priesthood of all believers. It’s cause for an unexplained joy, this automatic impulse to life and communion.

—–

But it’s sourdough, in particular, making the rounds these days. The difference between sourdough and regular dough is the sour, and the sour is bacteria: Lactobacillus. Sourdough bread is made with a “starter,” a fermented dough of bread and water, alive with wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria. It’s a bubbling sour mess, teeming with microbial life. You have to feed it a small diet of more flour and water, nurture it at the right temperature, let it grow. When you set out to make a few loaves, you always leave some starter aside to recultivate for the next batch and successive batches in the weeks, years, even decades to come.

Before the days of commercially cultivated consumer yeast, most leavened bread would have been “sourdough.” Yeast and bacteria are alive and everywhere: in your flour, in the environment, on your hands, just waiting for the right growing conditions. Before you could buy your yeast in a jar or foil packet, you had to catch it wild. Later, scientists found ways to identify and cultivate specific yeasts for bread baking and mass produce them. Commercial yeasts have the advantage of faster and more predictable leavening. You don’t have to wait around for hours for your dough to rise (or to wonder if it’ll even rise at all). The commercial versions of yeast certainly have their advantages.

Additionally, sourdough starters are notoriously tricky to get started on your own. They are simple in principle: flour, water, let ‘em sit. But there are numerous complications that can arise: contamination from your container, bad flour, poor temperature regulation, chemically treated tap water; and there are just as many solutions, practical and dubious alike: pre-clean the container with baking soda, employ a thermometer, try bottled or filtered water, and what was that about using grapes?

For these reasons, successful starters are more commonly acquired by being passed down in families or shared among friends. They’ll last years, if you care for them, and the flavor of your bread improves and deepens with the maturity of your starter. Some starters are known to be decades old. Some claim centuries.

Sourdough is inherently communal in these ways. We’re drawn to the challenge of making it, eager to engage its temperamentality, and ready to plug ourselves inside a rich tradition of bread-baking. There is a humble thrill in the rediscovery of humanity’s longstanding relationship with the starter’s bubbling microbes. We’re stuck inside, we’re lonely, bored. We want this reconnection.

Sourdough is the nostalgic call to communion with a simpler and fuller past. Remember the days of floured hands and early mornings? Remember the dough waiting there on the wood block? Remember the early rays of morning, the quiet industry of the baker’s humble labor, the alchemy of flour, water, salt, and heat? Remember our symbiosis with the wild yeasts and microbes of yesteryear?

Remember the hospitality of bread? Remember how bread is a sanctuary? An encounter with the Divine? A promise for healing in the midst of brokenness and death?

Remember all the things we never knew to know until now?

Hello, Instagram followers. Remember sourdough?

p.c. Ali Savage

—–

There’s a mystery here in our relationship with this aromatic dough. There’s a subtle irony at play which plunges us into another kind of tradition: the tradition of spiritual paradox. The paradox is this: in order to pass the time while we hide ourselves away from the viral threats of a microorganism at work, we’ve chosen to obsess over an activity in which the essential uniqueness and draw is precisely the result of…

…microorganisms at work.

—–

Like me, you feel the fear, the slight anxious hum beneath you, your elevated awareness. You feel the nagging sense that you ought to be doing something and doing it sooner rather than later, if only you knew what that something was. You wrestle your own selfish impulses, fight the need to build a bomb shelter out of toilet paper, Purell, bulk dried goods, Netflix shows, and trips to the liquor store.

Because, too, you see the cracks in the pavement where kindness and love are beginning to push through like flowered weeds. Strangers helping each other. Advocates for the poor emerging from nowhere. Businesses on the brink of extinction extending themselves for their neighbor. You yourself have at least written a few encouraging notes to your friends, have had strange and love-filled phone calls, are holding more closely to what’s precious than you were before. You are more conscious of what’s cherished and vulnerable.

The days of quarantine are lonely and frightening, touched with absurd humor, kissed with a still and unknown sadness. And yet, too, the aimless days are charged with a deep and unspeakable presence. There’s electricity in the air, it’s there with the flour and dust, backlit by sunlight through the kitchen window, both thrilling and fearsome. It’s something fermenting in the profundity of quiet grief, an urgent rapping on the door of your heart. There’s a stranger at the door.

—–

The baking and breaking of bread is an act of encounter, and this is precisely what hospitality is. The tension of hospitality is revealed in the word’s own etymology. Our word hospitality traces way, way back, all the way back to the Proto-Indo European* word ghos-ti, a word that simultaneously meant both guest and host. The word belonged to a people who are believed to have been largely nomadic. They’d wander the land, occasionally encountering other nomadic tribes, and in this context, the roles of guest and host were more fluid–hence the one word for both meanings. The word trickled through years and tongues into its Latin form, hospes, carrying the same dual meaning of guest and host, and eventually found its way into all kinds of today’s words: hospital, hospice, host, hostel, hotel. Even ghost is a derivative of the same source word, a ghost being a kind of house guest, or a kind of host.

But interestingly, the Proto-Indo European word ghost-ti is also the predecessor of our words hostile and hostage. For the guest was also a stranger, an unknown person who held the possibility of harming or taking advantage of you.

Hostility and hospitality, then, are diametric words, siblings of the same parent held in the tension of opposites. The presence of the unknown guest-host has a simultaneous meaning. It is at once the threat of harm and the source of healing and rest.

—–

Our language for what is happening to us and in us is not enough, but it’s doing its best. It’s working inside us like a ghost. Our words are bushwhacking to the silent core.

The feeling is something about possibility, the chance for a love you didn’t even know how to hope for before you were confined to home. You are there now, home with your countertops, your Zoom calls, your iPhone, your bags of flour. You are a little numb some of the time or maybe more, this is part of the dough. In the threat of sickness, in the presence of a world in panic, you feel something stirring within you, ready to burst like a song, to nudge the soil gently aside like a spring tulip. It is something waiting for your hands, your speech, your hospitality. Something is knocking.

It’s the paradox of solitude, of viruses and sourdough–this realization of a deep and profound communion.

A stranger is at the door. It is ghos-ti, they are holding fresh-baked sourdough. You don’t know quite what they have come for, but you can hope. They are you, the world, the sacred ghost.

Do you dare open the door? ♦

 

 

---

*Proto-Indo European is a reconstructed language belonging to an ancient Eurasian people group, and is the parent language for all the languages in the Indo-European family. This includes the Hellenic languages (the languages of Europe, of which English is a descendant), and Indo-Iranian languages (Sanskrit, Iranian, Slavic, and more).

 

References

• Partridge, Eric. Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. New York, NY: Greenwhich House, 1983.
• Stroud, Kevin, host. “Episode 7: More Indo-European Words.” History of English Podcast (podcast), August 8, 2012. Accessed April 10, 2020, https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2012/08/08/episode-7-more-indo-european-words-2/
• Weeks, Eric, and Patricia Gadsby. “The Biology of . . . Sourdough.” Discover Magazine. Discover Magazine, August 31, 2003. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-biology-of-sourdough.