Another Day in the Country
Give us this day our daily bread
© Another Day in the Country
In my family, my mother was the bread baker. She enjoyed making it and experimented with all kinds of recipes and flours — even grinding grain to make her own flour.
While I enjoyed the smell of bread baking in a house, I never got into making bread.
I love bread, but if push came to shove, I’d probably choose a baked potato over a slice of bread even though I relished Mom’s freshly baked bread and looked forward to baking day when she’d save some dough to make frybread for supper.
Bread making was something I left to other people — mostly professional bakers.
As long as I could get my favorite sunflower cracked-wheat bread at the market, I was a happy camper. Sometimes, English muffins reigned supreme in my grocery cart, and a weekly loaf of bread was left behind.
In California, French bread, cheese, and grapes were a yummy meal as far as I was concerned.
However, I couldn’t find the kind of French bread in Kansas that I was used to when we first came back to live in the country.
I learned to like sourdough bread in California, but store-bought sourdough bread isn’t always that great. So, I sort of gave up on bread.
I suppose I could have tried making my own French bread, but baking bread seemed like a lot of work for nothing as far as I was concerned.
Through the years, I’d tried others’ recipes for bread on occasion — but it absolutely never turned out the way it was supposed to. It was always a disappointment. So, I just accepted that bread making was not my gift.
My cooking style is more a “meat and potatoes” style, light on the meat since I’m mostly vegetarian.
My sister’s forte is desserts, so I’ve pretty much relinquished the baking to her. She loves making elegant, four-layer cakes with tricky fillings and fluffy frostings, and it seems that the more complicated the recipe, the more she enjoys the outcome.
Jess has a friend from work who is a sourdough aficionado. Sometimes she’d give my sister a whole loaf of bread for some gifty occasion like Christmas or Jessica’s birthday. I’d get a couple of slices of freshly baked sourdough, and that would be a treat.
So, when I got the bright idea to buy Jess a fancy sourdough bread cookbook for her birthday, it seemed like a really fantastic gift, especially when I saw all the specialty items suggested along with a 24-hour timeline.
This is going to be Jess’s cup of tea, I thought. But it wasn’t.
When my daughter’s husband found out I was coming to California in May he said, “Good news! I’ll make you sourdough waffles when you get here, and you can take some of the sourdough starter back with you to Kansas.”
He, too, thought that Jess-the-baker would jump at the idea of making sourdough bread.
I discounted Richard’s offer of some 200-year-old sourdough starter that had come West with the Gold Rush, thinking that was never going to happen.
His making me waffles was just about as far-fetched as Jess making sourdough bread.
It turned out my grandson made the waffles, and I actually took Richard up on his offer of historic sourdough starter (sealed in my suitcase), mostly because he was so enthusiastic about it.
When I got home, I emptied the goo into a glass container and wondered whether it was still alive as I put it in the fridge.
“Don’t forget to feed it,” my grandson said.
I felt as if I had some weird alien form in the house.
First, I tried getting Jess to try the starter. She wouldn’t bite.
“So, give me that fancy-schmancy cookbook I bought you,” I said. “I’m going to try this.”
I’d hauled this gook from California for Pete’s sake. I couldn’t just let it languish.
I got home Wednesday night, and now it was Friday evening. I opened the recipe book and read how all sourdough recipes begin: “the day before,” when you receive instructions on “feeding” the “mother.”
Weird, weird, weird. And what do you feed it but flour? Good flour — the most nutritious, untampered with, healthy flour you can find at your local store.
I fed the “mother,” per instructions, and waited overnight. There was not a lot of action.
I decided it was because my air-conditioned house was not conducive to bread rising, so I re-fed the glob and put the concoction out on the porch in the sun. Now I saw action.
Already I’d broken sourdough rules several times. I wasn’t “weighing” things. I didn’t have special tools. Any action was taking place during daylight. Could I go ahead and make this dough, or was I doomed to failure by my ignorance and “make-do” attitude?
This just had to work! It was my last try at bread making. If this didn’t work, I was going to flush the whole historic business down the toilet and wash my hands.
The instructions said that I needed the dough to rest for 12 hours in the fridge.
I mean, I’m having to change plans for the weekend to accommodate this bread business!
“Doesn’t all bread need to rest?” Richard wanted to know when I complained about all the steps.
It was cloudy this weekend. My house was on the cool side, so once again the bread came out of the fridge and went straight to the porch, where I found a little patch of sun.
“Cover with a cotton feed sack towel,” the instructions stated, but I had only a cotton bar towel.
“Do you think this needs music to rise?” I quipped to my sister.
Finally, when the loaf had expanded sufficiently, I popped it into the oven and waited.
Fifty minutes later, on Sunday afternoon, my loaf of sourdough bread from a 200-year-old starter came out of the oven, and it was perfect — crusty, yummy, chewy, light, warm, tiny bits of salt on the crust, absolutely lovely.
It was the perfect ending for something I’d begun on another day in the country.