Why You Should Be Baking Sourdough An essay on the transformative effects of breadmaking
by Nick Gatlin illustrations by Greer Siegel The trencher. The staff of life. The body of Christ. Bread has gone by many names in our history, often imbued with intense cultural and religious significance. Someone who earns their household income is a breadwinner. To share a meal with someone is to break bread with them. The Roman poet Juvenal, criticizing the public’s desire for distractions and indulgements, coined the phrase “bread and circuses.” The word companion comes from the Latin companis, “with bread.” Fertile farming regions, like the North American Wheat Belt in the Canadian and American west, are called breadbaskets. Across the world, bread is a symbol of power, community, and life, connecting us across vast chasms of earth and time. One can imagine Roman chefs baking a loaf with candied fruits and seeds for the Emperor and his council; peasants in medieval Germany making bread and crackers for their family; Mayan home cooks frying corn tortillas and steamed tamales. And for most of history, humankind has leavened bread with some form of sourdough starter. The first recorded uses of wild yeast as a leavening agent come from the areas of both Switzerland and Egypt around 3500 BCE, and naturally-occuring yeast was used exclusively until the advent of commercial yeast in the 1800s. Sourdough 28
OPINION
is one of the oldest forms of one of the oldest foods—bread—in human history. Baking sourdough bread, the way countless generations of our ancestors baked bread, connects us to a long and storied tradition of community, creation, and connection. That’s why, even if you’ve never baked bread in your life, you should be baking sourdough. My mother never taught me how to bake bread. She taught me how to bake banana bread—technically a cake, but I digress—and my grandmother gave me plenty of tips on how to bake cookies, but bread was never part of our family tradition. It’s a wonder, then, that when the quarantine went into effect, the first baked good I turned to was bread. Hearty, simple bread. Plain enough to complement any other food, yet flavorful and complex enough to be a fulfilling dish in itself. Bread has none of the flash nor style of other baked goods. It won’t satisfy a sweet tooth like an apple pie, and it won’t impress anyone like a layer cake or a braided babka. But despite its relative simplicity, bread is perhaps the most satisfying food of all. Baking bread is easy. Baking bread well is incredibly hard. The difference between baking something like a beautiful fruit tart and baking a consistent, solid loaf of sourdough is much like the difference between sprinting and long-distance running. I’ve been reading a lot more during quarantine. One book I’ve come across is Haruki
Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. In it, he writes (and I’m paraphrasing here) that long-distance running is something some people are naturally more suited for than others—some people have shorter strides, deeper, more measured breaths. But no one can naturally run a marathon. Something like that takes long, hard training and dedication day after day to gradually improve your time and perfect your form. Otherwise, you’ll burn out. Long-distance running uses a vastly different skill set than sprinting (again, so I’m told—I’m not much of a runner). Baking sourdough is like long-distance running. There are no shortcuts. There are no tricks, no sleight-of-hand maneuvers you can pull to make your loaf come out perfect every time. There is no foolproof method. Recipes are merely guidelines, wholly unable to adapt to your unique altitude, humidity, and temperature. To bake sourdough, you have to really learn how to bake sourdough. There’s simply no other way. You have to learn through extensive trial and error, testing dozens of loaves before you bake one that you would be proud to serve to someone else. Before you even start baking bread, you have to create your starter. “Give birth” might be a better description. You have to raise your starter from infancy to maturity, from a shapeless mass of flour and water to a slightly less-shapeless mass of frothy, bubbly, yeasty levain. You create something alive, and like all things that
