When life gives you, or rather, doesn’t give you yeast, make sourdough.

I have been on and off sourdough since encountering it in Von’s 1000Spirits in Seattle in 2012. I was relatively late to the party (compared to the Epgyptians in 1500 BCE), but in my defence, it wasn’t much of a thing in Northern Ireland. Unless you were really into bread, at was a largely unknown entity. I had made plenty of conventional yeast-risen bread at that stage, so the natural transition was to try something a bit trickier and requiring some more finesse. And then bludgeoning it by not caring for it at all. Don’t get me wrong. In the beginning I tried really hard to get it right, and struggled to make anything other than incredibly dense and overwhelmingly sour blocks. It was fine for toast, but not the ideal loaf. Then at some point over the years, it clicked. And like most people, I baked even more in 2020 (although I’m not convinced that everyone hoarding flour could actually bake). In my defence, I was doing it before lockdown as evidenced by a post in February 2020. Who’s chasing trends now, huh?

In a time where bread flour was scarce, keeping a starter alive was difficult. What was even more difficult was getting hold of yeast. I contemplated posting some over to my brother in Dublin, but the postage was extortionate. Being able to make a normal tasting loaf but with a sourdough starter freed me from dependency on commercial yeast. Then I soured on sourdough. After a while the daily feeding becomes something of a chore, and if you’re not baking often then having to discard excess starter is also a bit depressing. Yes you can make some other things from it, but who has time to bake something else when you’re just trying to keep the damn thing alive.

This is the cycle. Get really into sourdough. Forget about the starter. Stick it in the back of the fridge. Give up. Start again a few years later. I don’t know what triggered the latest batch – I believe I had some flour scraped off the counter after making some overnight no knead bread rolls which I collected in a jar, and started to add water and some more flour. I wanted to prove to myself that I could get a starter going from nothing. Instead of intense methods describing a day by day plan, I was sticking water and flour in a jar. Proportions? Some of each. Mix. Repeat the next day. And you know what? It worked perfectly fine. My conclusion is that most of the “science” or “method” described by some authors is a complete and utter fabrication. An attempt to add a method to something that doesn’t require it. And unfortunately, that’s a lot of breadmaking. There are methods, but so much of it is feel. Every flour behaves differently so it’s not as simple as “add this amount of water every time” in order to get the same result. There is a certain amount of feel and knowing what to expect from the dough.

I am by no means perfect, but I am getting better as I adhere less rigidly to formal methods and do more by feel. The first loaf from this new starter was better than I expected, but a little dense. The second one was perfect. Surprisingly light and airy with a great rise, and with the advantage of lasting much longer than conventional bread (apparently due to the increased acidity). I made a couple of small semi-pointed rolls as well which were an experiment in shaping the dough, but it wasn’t firm enough to retain its shape. The loaf itself was proofed in a banneton and baked in a pre-heated dutch oven.

Have I soured on sourdough? It’s a handy way of making bread when you don’t have access to commercial yeast (because if you’re me, it’s more hassle to walk five minutes to the shop than to keep an organism alive…) and it’s a bit more of a challenge. I don’t make a loaf every week, but there is quite a lot of satisfaction when you get it right.

On the more conventional front, here’s our latest birthday cake project. A two tier four layer victoria sponge with a lot of buttercream. I made an obscene amount (approximately 1.7kg buttercream) although there is a little bit left over for another day.