Sourdough for people who *actually* don’t bake.

Sarah Pollok
3 min readAug 24, 2020
  1. Collect the starter from your friend. When they assure you it’s okay if you don’t feed it for a week, nod as though the concept of feeding dough is something you’re totally familiar with.
  2. Google ‘feeding sourdough starter’ and realise you can kill dough. Given your track record with living things like cacti or Tamagotchis, this isn’t a great start.
  3. Compare two recipes; one which takes 2 hours, another which takes 22.
  4. Select the latter because you have a rampant achievement complex.
  5. Drag yourself out of bed at 10pm because you forgot you must mix 1tbsp starter with 3 cups of flour.
  6. Sleep
  7. Wake up at 6am. Question why you can’t get up at this time for the gym but can do it for dough.
  8. Discover you don’t have wholemeal flour. Use wheatmeal instead and convince yourself there is no difference.
  9. Take note of the note “Don’t forget salt!” next to the ½ tbsp salt. Add extra salt because then maybe it will turn out better.
  10. Immediately regret extra salt.
  11. Stick dough in the linen cupboard, go back to sleep
  12. Wake up an hour later, read instruction to ‘fold’. Easy, you know how to fold.
  13. Realise you have no fucking clue what folding means.
  14. Search Youtube and learn there are minimum 23 different kinds of folding.
  15. Watch 6 videos of 65+ yr old Americans folding dough. Settle on the “stretch and fold technique” because Peter from California looks like he’s got his shit together.
  16. Re-read cruelly vague instructions; “fold again every 30–60mins, 3–4 times” and realise this recipe is probably for those who can “eye up” or “feel”.
  17. Cover all bases and plan to fold in 30, 60 and 45-minute intervals.
  18. Forget about it for an hour and a half.
  19. Stretch, fold, and set alarms on your phone for the next folds
  20. Leave
  21. Fold
  22. Leave
  23. (Repeat steps 20–22 approximately 14 times)
  24. Consider giving up but persist because mama didn’t raise…
Sarah Pollok

just another word writing, coffee addicted millenial