Sourdough for people who *actually* don’t bake.
3 min readAug 24, 2020
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- 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.
- 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.
- Compare two recipes; one which takes 2 hours, another which takes 22.
- Select the latter because you have a rampant achievement complex.
- Drag yourself out of bed at 10pm because you forgot you must mix 1tbsp starter with 3 cups of flour.
- Sleep
- Wake up at 6am. Question why you can’t get up at this time for the gym but can do it for dough.
- Discover you don’t have wholemeal flour. Use wheatmeal instead and convince yourself there is no difference.
- 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.
- Immediately regret extra salt.
- Stick dough in the linen cupboard, go back to sleep
- Wake up an hour later, read instruction to ‘fold’. Easy, you know how to fold.
- Realise you have no fucking clue what folding means.
- Search Youtube and learn there are minimum 23 different kinds of folding.
- 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.
- 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”.
- Cover all bases and plan to fold in 30, 60 and 45-minute intervals.
- Forget about it for an hour and a half.
- Stretch, fold, and set alarms on your phone for the next folds
- Leave
- Fold
- Leave
- (Repeat steps 20–22 approximately 14 times)
- Consider giving up but persist because mama didn’t raise…
