Because group chats are the lifeblood of our sanity these days, a number of people witnessed my bread-related failures in real time. One was a beloved of mine, who is within walking distance and offered to bring over some of their sourdough starter.
In the meantime, I had also managed to get 3 bags of flour (one from another beloved and two from my own apocalyptic adventuring) but still no yeast.
Excellent, I thought! That solves the “no yeast” problem I’ve been having! A sourdough starter, that’s an auspicious thing to have during a global pandemic! So they dropped it off outside my door, and I sanitized the outside of the jar, and we were in business.
Let me pause here and say that I was raised by an educator and a scientist, and myself have been a teacher. One of the life lessons that has been imparted in me from birth is always read all the directions before you start.
So let me preface this by saying that I absolutely should, and did, know better than to do what I ended up doing. However, hubris and stress make fools of us all, and I’m not primed to make brilliant choices while on 24/7 lockdown with an agitated teenager.
The angel who provided me with the starter had recommended that I “do the next step” around 2 or 3pm, and had texted me photos of their bread baking book with the recipe. I neglected to pay any attention to this and decided that 8pm would be a good time to start messing with the starter.
It was not a good time.
Things started out okay. The instructions said to measure out “one cup” of the starter, which wasn’t very easy to do since the starter was just a bunch of sticky goo. I didn’t know whether to smoosh it down into the measuring cup or not (like measuring brown sugar by packing it in, or measuring flour by not doing that — a distinction I learned in Family & Consumer Science class in the ninth grade) so I mostly just did my best.
You were supposed to tear the starter into pieces and put it with some flour and some salt. I measured out the flour, but completely forgot the salt (this will be relevant later). I ended up with a ball of dough that seemed plausible.
Then it said to “discard the rest” of the starter and I thought, well that’s no fun! So I decided to just throw the remainder into another bowl, and try making another dough. Since the ratios of flour and everything in the recipe assumed one cup of starter, I just kind of eyeballed the rest for this Experimental Loaf, trying to get the ratios right. This kind of visual guesstimation is not my strong suit, but I figured, if this loaf was completely inedible, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, since the starter it was made with was supposed to be trashed anyway.
I also decided that since this loaf was Experimental anyway, I would go ahead and throw in a bunch of other stuff. I added dried rosemary, rosemary-infused olive oil, and salt. It was while adding the salt that I realized I had neglected to add salt to the Actual Recipe loaf, and I started panic-googling about whether that had irreparably ruined it and what I could do to resolve the problem, but wasn’t able to get a clear answer (some places said it would be fine, just bland; others said the salt was critical for some chemical process that breadifies things) so I figured I might as well just forge ahead.
Next step was to knead the dough. Unfortunately I didn’t have any counter or table space that seemed wise to knead on, so I used a baking sheet. It was very hard to knead the bread dough on the baking sheet because the dough kept sticking to and picking up the baking sheet and slamming it around. So I’m pretty sure the bread was under-kneaded on account of me getting tired of that.
That’s when I checked on the next step, which was to wait an hour, then fold the bread. Then another hour, and another fold. And so on.
It was then that I realized I had made a very big mistake.
It looked like, if I was going to do this right, I would need to attend to the bread at 9pm, 10pm, 11pm, 12am, 12:45am, 3:30am, and 4:30am — then start baking, which took about 50 minutes and would be repeated three times (since the original recipe actually yielded two loaves), so 5:20am, 6:10am, and 7:00am.
I started researching whether I could just leave the whole thing alone overnight and then start up again in the morning, but it seemed dicey. Another friend suggested putting it in the fridge to pause the process, but I don’t currently have much fridge real estate on account of stocking up on groceries, and I was worried about ruining the whole thing.
Under normal circumstances, I would probably have gambled on leaving it overnight. But completely ruining a sourdough starter during a global pandemic seemed just too stupid and callous to risk for the sake of one night’s sleep. I knew that even if the three loaves I was baking didn’t turn out, if I went through the whole process correctly, I’d end up with a “put-away farm” which can then be used to make more bread and things. I didn’t want to waste the time and effort and materials that had gone into the initial starter.
So I embarked on a long and tedious night. I did get some sleep during the 3 hour “prove” time, but once I was up around 4:30am, that was it for me. I spent the night tending to this bread and otherwise killing time. I improvised proofing baskets, I rearranged the oven shelves, and I chatted with online friends in Australia.
Since I had forgotten to add salt to the initial dough, I decided to try and add it at the “folding” step by spreading it around the dough and mixing it in as best I could with the folds. But I only did that to one of the loaves, trying to hedge my bets about what would be worse for the bread.
By the time they were ready to bake, I had three loaves: one Experimental Loaf that had completely unknown ratios of flour, water, and starter, one Saltless Normal Loaf, and one Salt-Folded Normal Loaf. I baked the Experimental Loaf first, the Saltless Normal Loaf second, and the Salt-Folded Normal Loaf Third.
The Experimental Loaf came out looking pretty alright! I tried a slice, and it was a bit too dense and gummy, but otherwise it was good. It’s a bit of a workout for your jaw, especially with the crust, but the rosemary olive oil seems to have helped and the flavor is okay. I have been eating it with butter, or olive oil and fancy balsamic vinegar.
The Saltless Normal Loaf also came out okay, although the texture was also not great. There’s one giant bubble inside that looks like a bread cave, and it’s very bland.
Later in the day, I made a grilled cheese and ham sandwich for Kiddo with it, hoping that the butter, ham, and cheese would make up for the saltlessness of the bread. He was impressed by the look of it, but not a fan of the taste. He was a good sport and ate most of it, but was honest with me about not wanting to repeat the experience. (Since then, I have been using normal, store-bought bread for his stuff, hoping the two loaves I was able to buy will last long enough for me to get this bread situation figured out.)
I decided to leave the third loaf for a while, because since I was awake at 6am it seemed like a prudent time to go to the grocery store. Visiting a grocery store at 6am after getting less than 3 hours sleep would be an odd experience anyway, but the surreality was compounded by the fact that my whole area is under a “shelter in place” order and everything felt weird and apocalyptic.
I got back home, put away all the groceries, then decided to put the third loaf in. Unfortunately, I had exhausted all my stores of competence by 7am, and was beginning to engage in a power struggle with my kid (who had stayed up the entire night and was trying to go to bed at 7:30am, despite needing to be up for “virtual school” at 8:20), so I was distracted and ended up leaving that loaf in the oven for at least an hour longer than the suggested bake time.
When I remembered about it, it was a hard, flat loaf, burned on the bottom. I thought maybe it could work as a soup bread bowl, or crackers or something, but I couldn’t get a knife through any part of it. I tried just nibbling on it but even my teeth were like “nah, that’s not happening.” Had to just toss it in the garbage, though if anyone needs to fill a pothole or replace a garden stone, I can dig it back out.
So here is the current tally of my breadmaking adventures:
Attempt One: Inedible soggy beer bread; barely redeemed into buttery crumbles
Attempt Two: Bitter beery pound cake; redeemed with lots of butter and sugar for a passable breakfast
Attempt Three: Dense, gummy rosemary bread; edible but not supremely enjoyable
Attempt Four: Bland, chewy sad bread; good for one (1) sandwich’s worth of my kid’s tolerance for this nonsense
Attempt Five: Overproofed, overbaked, entirely irredeemable
(If you missed Part One, click here to read about the misery that is Bisquick Beer Bread).
