TheBanyanTree: quarantine sourdough

[Theta Brentnall]

I had a sourdough starter years ago. Someone gave it to me (which is another way to deal with the excess, apparently, although some recipients may never speak to you again.). Make bread, they said. It’s easy, they said. After tending the starter, which I never got around to naming, and baking “bread” which could be used for doorstops, one day I dumped the whole thing in the trash and never looked back. So, nope, no sourdough starter for me. 

Theta

Sent from my iPad

> On May 26, 2020, at 3:02 PM, Teague, Julie Anna <jateague at indiana.edu> wrote:
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> 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.
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> 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.
> 
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> Julie
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