Bread!*

I have been making a bit of bread in the last few weeks, but all the no-kneads and quick breads were just to get my hand in.

Yesterday was the big test.

I made sourdough bread from a starter I developed myself - no shop bought yeast around here, no sir.

I'm really pleased with how it came out, but the whole process was frankly a bit fiddly. First you have to develop a starter, which basically involves mixing flour and water and letting it ferment under controlled conditions. You have to tend to it carefully over the course of a week or so, refreshing the mix so it ferments and doesn't rot, which is actually quite fun in a way. After a day or two you start to see the little bubbles popping up on top of the mix, and that's when you know that Chemistry is happening. I found this particularly pleasing, having been told in high school that I was hopeless at science by more than one frustrated teacher. Now look who's making yeast! Didn't need a Bunsen burner for that, did I Mr Graves?!

Now, bear with me because I am no food photographer, but this is what it looks like after a couple of days;

Not that exciting so far. Just brown sludge. Anyone can make that, I hear you say. Well. After a week or so it starts to get really frothy, and it smells amazing. Not good, necessarily - don't forget that this is basically soggy flour on the verge of rotting - but complex and appley and like something that's doing something that I still feel is almost magical. The day that I woke up and opened the container and saw all the bubbles I cackled manically and shrieked 'IT'S ALIIIIIVE!'

After all that coddling comes the actual bread making. You take a bit of your hand-reared yeast and make a sponge (which is the word we professional bakers use to describe the first stage of making the dough), leave it overnight, then mix in the rest of the flour the next day. And then, after a bit of kneading (and a tiny bit of weeping with the effort of beating two kilos of obstreperous bread dough into submission), a few hours of proving and some anxious hovering around the oven, you get....

In all honesty, this is probably a bit more effort than I would be prepared to go to on a regular basis (It takes the better part of a week to go from 'hmmm, maybe I'll make some bread', to 'OMG THIS BREAD IS AMAZING'), but you can freeze the starter and just use it when you need it instead of continuing to feed it forever and ever - my bread book talks about professional bakers who have kept starters bubbling away for thirty years, and I do love the idea that I could still be cooking with the descendants of this loaf for my grandchildren.

But for all the effort, it was totally worth doing, for two reasons. For one, it tastes amazing. It is dense and chewy, in a good way, and the flavour is more complex than any of the quick breads I've made could ever be. But more than that, the process as a whole is utterly absorbing and so rewarding in a way that I never would have expected it would be. This is more or less the same way that people have been making bread since before the pyramid were built, and there is something quite awe inspiring about that; thousands of years and unimaginable technological advances later we're still making and eating bread made using more or less the same technique.

*I was thinking about doing a pun in the title, but then I realised that not every post kneads a pun. I mean, really, I doughn't think anyone enjoys them as much as I think they do. And I'm still serious about trying to earn a crust as a writer, and if a potential employer sees this blog, well, any way you slice it, they aren't going to be impressed. I need to mature as a writer - I can't just loaf around any more, relying on puns to fill out my posts, like some hack without a crumb of self-respect.