Chow Down: The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread

The Greatest Thing Since SLICED BREAD

BY HEATHER HAMILTON-POST

Like everyone else with an oven and a hoarded bag of flour, I’ve been spending time baking bread. Because we’re (just barely) millennials, we’ve been eating avocado toast everyday for breakfast for the last few months, spending a small fortune on whatever loaves of sourdough we could find on grocery store shelves. But when my Instagram carbo loaded with so many delicious bread rounds that I could practically smell it, I decided to give it a go.

Sourdough bread is not, at least initially, a plug and play bread. It requires a starter, which is a potentially very old jar of not quite bread that lives in your refrigerator, demanding to be fed every couple of days. You can buy one online for a lot of money if you want, but I, like most, decided to make my own. The process involves some version of combining flour, water, and yeast and essentially waiting it out. Never did my starter follow the progression I read about far and wide across the internet, but, when I eventually used it in a loaf of bread, it did indeed make bread.

Some sourdough starters sell for a lot of money or provide a bragging point for your neighborhood bakery because they are old. While we aren’t necessarily kind to old people, we’re enamored with old bread, and old sourdough starters are undeniably better, having had years to develop the distinctive sourdough taste of your dreams. My sourdough starter is new, and not that sourdoughy yet, but I haven’t met a loaf of fresh bread I didn’t like and this experiment has been no exception.

To make sourdough bread, you combine sourdough starter with flour, water, honey, and salt, no yeast needed, if you’ve done the starter right. It has to rest for a long time, and eventually ends up in a preheated ceramic dutch oven. In my case, a square pan I use for brownies and a sweet aluminum foil lid. I am SURE this breaks a lot of rules about breadmaking, but I’m here to tell you that my bread was extremely delicious and breadlike in appearance, so I’m fine with it.

Having a sourdough starter is like having a pet. It requires daily or weekly feeds (depending on who you ask). It can get hungry. It smells good or bad, depending on how you’re treating it. You have to remove part of it when you feed it (flour, not something cool like a Snickers), and throw it away, but that feels wasteful to me. I used the “discard” to make sourdough soft pretzels, which were also delicious. Presenting my family with warm bread at any time of day is an impressive move, even if it sets up dangerous expectations.

The sourdough starter at Zeppoles Bakery is “at least 26 years old” they tell me, which makes it as much of an institution as the bakery itself. And sure, a jar of bread soup is a weird thing to pass on to my children, but I’ll never have to explain why this particular pet went to live on a farm or replace it with an identical-looking one in the dead of night, so I’m 100% in. Soft pretzels made with the throw away starter Having a sourdough starter is like having a pet. It requires daily or weekly feeds (depending on who you ask). It can get hungry. It smells good or bad, depending on how you’re treating it.

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