Sourdough for people who *actually* don’t bake.
3 min readAug 24, 2020
- 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 no quitter and you’ve already shared progress on Instagram.
- Leave
- Tip out onto a floured bench and give a final fold before resting for an hour.
- Panic message your friend about overfolding. Be reassured you’re doing great.
- Read instruction to put in a Dutch oven; something you neither knew existed nor owned.
- Panic message your friend about Dutch ovens. Learn how to make one out of a bread tin and metal bowl
- Realise you don’t have a bread tin or a metal bowl. Improvise the substitute with a round cake tin and a baking tray.
- Forget you need to preheat the oven. Preheat the oven to 240 celcius.
- Bake for 25 minutes, remove baking tray/dutch oven lid and bake for another 15
- Remove from oven and go to sleep because it’s now 9pm
- Wake up, realise your bread is fan-fucking-tastic.
- Carefully curate a careless assembly of bread, knife, tea towel for Instagram pictures, accompanied by a contractictively self-depricating boast about how you practically accidentally whipped up this 22-hour home made bread.
- Swear to make bread every week
- Never make it again.
