Sourdough's Satisfaction

Ok. I'm a foodie.

Oh, not the kinds who says the dish has to be luxurious.

I love a bit of foie gras. Seared. And I love steamed broccoli in my favorite lemon pepper sauce (just mayo - Hellman's of course - blended smooth with lots of fresh squeezed lemon juice and dashed with lots of lemon pepper and fresh pepper seasoning) just as well.

I love a bit of wild salmon, sizzled skin side down. And just as much the pedestrian blue fish, from my New Jersey shore roote. Just broiled. Don't mess with it.

I love the most exotic food adventures. Lasserre in Paris' where the homard breton calls and the pretentious place rolls back the ceiling to let the stars shine in and the stale air waft away. Or in a North Philly dive for Papa Rellenas (just mashed potato balls stuffed with ground beef and fried in a cornmeal coating.

But there is at least one food place in my heart that isn't about food. It's about an internal adventure. Every time.

Baking fresh sourdough bread at home. It's not about baking. Or about bread.

It's about a compass that shows me where I am in relation to my center. The needle is the inclination to bake the bread.

It all goes back in some weird way to growing up in the 50's. Mom's relationship to vegetables. Frozen. In little square boxes. Going into that little square Pyrex pot. Cut into little square carrots and beans. (They never did figure out how to square the lima beans). Everything was supposed be like that. Never varying. Square cut, perfect every time. Always the same.

I subscribed. That was fine. Right up until my candles and sandals days in college. Learning to love variety, surprise, even to embrace disappointment. Discovering that vegetables came fresh and in very odd shapes. That they required lots of knowledge to cook right. And discovering that above all, I knew NOTHING of bread that didn't come in a round tube with a metal ends and a promise that if I knocked it just right on a table edge, I could grab and bake the perfect little rolls.

Somewhere after college, I discovered I liked my bread, and my life, and my adventures, at least a little bit messy. This was the time to experiment. And square at the center of that experiment was the quest for the wild yeast.

Sourdough bread.

Flour and water that traps what the air has to offer. Stuff that you knead and manipulate til it's to your liking - but never within your control. Tart in a special way, but sweet too. Crunchy or bland, rising well or defying the expectation of fluff. But always tasty and satisfying. Bread that took hours to make (though only minutes at a time through the process). But most of all, bread that connected me to generations, to my grandmother's baking, to the legends of my rituals (oh that bread that couldn't rise and so became matzoh).

For years, in my newlywed days, as a young mother, as a new resident of Iowa learning to garden in the black gold soil, I'd bake all our bread. Bake bread while the baby napped. Bake bread for the pot luck suppers. Bake bread, when I was a weaver, while the dyepot heated or in breaks from warping the loom. Before the magnitude of demand of career drove so much of that off. Before the career was centered away from the tactile and in the computer. Before we entered the time warp that demands nanoseconds instead of minutes of attention. Before I invented my own motherly organizing principles that let life be regular enough, easy enough to organize. Even got my own square Pyrex pot. Routine enough to be comfortable.

Yet, periodically, through the years, I decide to bake. And it has nothing to do with bread.

I know what I'm really doing. I'm reaching out to touch that self, that time, that centeredness of a long time ago. To bake part of it back into myself. To take out the sourdough starter from the far far back of the fridge.

And for me it always affirms something really important one more time.

All the experts will tell you that if you don't feed that sourdough starter, if you just ignore it way way in the back of the fridge, it will die. But that is no more true for the sourdough starter than it is for the dormant parts of us. For me, the weaver, the young mother, the soul who loved to be alone and quiet.

When I reach back there in the shelf and take out that old container, there's the starter, pale and dull. I visit with it. Pour off the used up "hooch" on top. Sweet talk it a little. Feed it all the right stuff. A little flour here, a bit of sugar there, stir it into a big glass bowl. Warm it and examine it quite carefully in the bright light.

It always obliges and starts to bubble away.

A whole new start.