After reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food (see last week’s post), I’m trying to eliminate processed foods from my diet. It’s hard and weird and not so easy when you’re starving and all you want is macaroni and cheese. But I’m trying, and I realize that until I move off the grid, it might be impossible to be 100% processed-free. I decided to bake my own bread, since that’s one of the foods that Pollan discusses. He argues that bread should be simple, with only a handful of ingredients, whereas grocery-store bread typically has almost 20 listed ingredients, not to mention sugar, and a ton of other stuff you don’t need to be putting into your body.
I wanted to try sourdough, since it’s difficult to find in New York. For this type of bread, you need a sourdough starter (essentially flour, water, and yeast), which is what will help the bread rise. A friend of a friend, and fellow baker and vinegar maker, detailed this process. He said that I could collect wild yeast from the air, instead of buying it at the store. The whole science-experiment nature of the task had me sold.
One of my nearest and dearest, Evie, is a pastry chef. I call her my bread master. She gave me some of her sourdough starter (from a Nancy Silverton/La Brea Bakery recipe), so I didn’t have to start my own. It was a small dried amount that I could reactivate at home. Reactivation happens by feeding it flour and water, which allows the starter to grow and collect the yeast in the air. I used all-purpose organic flour from King Arthur and filtered tap water. I crushed up the starter and began to feed it every twelve hours. Within a day and a half, the starter began to bubble and take on a sour smell. After feeding it for two weeks, I was ready to bake.
I love that I can make my own bread. I just recently started making my own starter and I am learning so much.