TheBanyanTree: quarantine sourdough

[Kitty Park]

Well written, Jules.  I had a big smile on my face reading about your need
to tend June.  We will want to see a photo of your first loaf of bread!

Kitty

On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 6:02 PM Teague, Julie Anna <jateague at indiana.edu>
wrote:

> I swore I'd never. I didn't need another damn mouth to feed.  People give
> them names like they are children and I'm still recovering from getting my
> sons launched, and now I have a dog and a husband (two things I also swore
> I'd never have) and although people have tried to lure me in for years,
> I've resisted all their photos of beautiful loaves of sourdough bread
> because I didn't want to make or feed a sourdough starter. Life is
> complicated enough.
>
>
> Then came the coronavirus and now I'm home all the damn time, working but
> also looking at instagram and reading blogs and remembering the young woman
> who dreamed of sustainability and homesteading because, having no money and
> two young children, she was home all the damn time. That woman grew
> strawberries, made jam, canned tomatoes, kept chickens, hung her laundry on
> a line, and baked bread.  Who was she again, that lovely young thing with
> the long hair and strong back?  In our family we suffer the curse of being
> very in touch with our inner five year old, our inner twelve year old, our
> inner thirty-five year old, even while our outsides wither with age, our
> knees give out, and our backs hurt.  I guess that's my excuse.  During this
> time, I've  channeled my inner thirty-five year old who was more in tune
> with the slow movement of the days and the seasons and all the
> possibilities that some healthy effort could bring.  I planted
> strawberries, radishes, tomatoes, the ever-popular zucch
>  ini, and a whole host of other flowers, herbs, and vegetables.  I dug and
> weeded and mulched and nurtured until I don't have room for one more thing
> in my garden.  Looking around, all pleased with myself but still stuck at
> home and not much to do in the garden now except pull weeds and wait, I got
> sourdough envy and made a sourdough starter.  Her name is June.  June is a
> week old today.  She's bubbly and full of life.
>
>
> Here's the main problem with a sourdough starter.  Yes, it requires
> regular feeding, but, ok, I'm here all day every day, I can feed the damn
> thing.  There are days when I resent feeding the husband or even feeding
> myself, but June's feedings are not ordeals of heat and chopping and timing
> and sink fulls of dirty dishes.  However, each time June is fed, a certain
> amount must be siphoned off into the "discard" pile.  I straight up hate
> discarding food of any sort.  The husband and I got into a big row just a
> couple of weeks ago because his impending mental decrepitude caused him to
> re-buy fresh vegetables and bread, all the same things, three times in one
> week, meaning that food was rather unsuccessfully wedged into the fridge
> and was going to go to waste.  We had four heads of broccoli.  I like
> broccoli just fine, but we'd have had to eat it every day.  Roasted
> broccoli, steamed broccoli, broccoli pancakes. When he left one day, I
> cleared out a bunch of stuff and gave it to my son.
>  We had enough to feed two families, and then some.  You can see my
> dilemma as I moved over half of the sourdough starter, June, into another
> container which was supposed to be discarded, while mentally calculating
> how many starving people that flour would have fed.
>
>
> This must be a common malady because the website for the starter also has
> recipes to use up the "discard" starter, all of them baked buttery goodness
> which I do not need right now, having already gained my quarantine ten and
> working on my nobody-is-wearing-their-fucking-mask-anymore fifteen.   This,
> in a nutshell, is the thing--sourdough starter (and discard) forces you to
> waste or bake.   I'm not a waster, so I bake.  And it's hot.  And we can't
> possibly eat it all.  I've baked discard muffins and discard biscuits and
> looking at a recipe for waffles.  I feel the guilt radiating from the top
> of the stove where June and the discard sit,  bubbling away and making more
> of them selves all the time.   I'm baking things to give away, and while I
> don't mind doing that, it's a hot job.
>
>
> The whole process does slow down, and I'm just about ready to pop the
> thing into the fridge if I can find a spot.  (Husband repeated his
> over-purchasing even after the argument because I'm pretty sure he didn't
> remember the argument, much less the reason for it.)  Then I can feed and
> use some of the starter for baking once a week instead of twice a day.
> June is just about mature enough that I can stop worrying about her
> multiple times a day--a stage of development I'll never get to with my
> kids.  Maybe then I'll be glad to have gone through it.  I'll gladly bake
> my loaf of sourdough bread or make my sourdough pizza crust with no yeastie
> beasties needed.  The world could go crazy (crazier?) and yeast could be as
> rare as arborio rice (do you have any kind of short-grain rice where you
> live?  It doesn't exist in Bloomington, Indiana, anymore), and I'll be
> happy to have my starter.
>
>
> Julie
>
>
>
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-- 
Kitty
kcp-parkplace.blogspot.com