Sourdough Therapy and the Coronavirus
Sometimes it takes a crisis to make life simple again
“Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts.” — James Beard
It feels odd to write about bread when the world is grappling with a major viral outbreak, the likes of which most of us haven’t experienced in our lifetimes. But for some of us, what is a joy and indulgence during good times can become a coping mechanism during the bad. The way I’m dealing with the stress of being sheltered at home during the coronavirus pandemic is to center myself, breathe and focus on home-based pleasures, and right now that means baking sourdough bread.
During rough times, the mundane tasks of everyday domestic life become beautiful. I remember struggling after my daughter was born with a rare disease. My best friend would send me email updates on her daily life in upstate New York and give me a therapeutic glimpse into normalcy. I read about her days spent refinishing the deck, weeding the garden, walking the dog, planning the weekly menu and baking granola. Just like you don’t know how good it feels to be healthy until you’re sick, the privilege of “normal life” is hidden until crisis strikes. Suddenly, the simple pleasures shine like the gems that they are.
There’s something good about every crisis. In the weeks since the shelter in place order was imposed in California, people who don’t have dogs are walking. Whole families are out jogging. The air is clear with less pollution, and new mountain views appear on the horizon. Life is happening at a slower pace, and more importantly, more people are cooking at home.
I’m grateful my family and I are healthy. But like many people, I’m a little caught off guard by the fact that this crisis has granted one of my wishes. My number one complaint over the past few years was that there wasn’t enough time for daily life, for being at home and focusing on the present. Suddenly I have more time at home than I ever imagined possible, and I no longer have any excuse not to bake sourdough bread.
Bread has always interested me. For much of history, baking bread fulfilled our basic survival needs and uplifted the spirit. In Christianity bread is a symbol of the nourishment of the word of God, and for many it represents living in the present. For centuries bread was one of the main sources of sustenance in many countries around the world, and baking it was considered a life skill. It has only been in the last century that we’ve outsourced bread baking from artisan bakers and knowledgeable home cooks to industry.
Baking bread—without the presence of the coronavirus that is— is considered an unproductive use of time and as such is a labor of love. I’m young enough (and a part of a large enough family) to have grown up eating mostly convenience foods like frozen tater tots, not homemade bread. Nevertheless, my parents were born in the late 1940’s and had a short hippie phase. They wore denim overalls, and my father baked a whole grain variety of bread, so one of the stories I’ve adopted is that bread baking is woven into my family history.
I have two photos of that time. One is of my parents before they had kids, holding hands on the patio of my grandparents’ house in rural Oklahoma. They’re both wearing sandals that resembled Birkenstocks, and my mom’s dark hair is tied back with a bandana. During those days they were vegetarians and made their own yogurt. The other photo, taken a few years later, is of me and my dad kneading bread dough on his wooden bread board in our Albuquerque kitchen. It was a worn and oiled cutting board, a sacred object that he used for bread only. I was standing in a brown cupboard drawer and looking on, drooling a little and turning around to smile at the camera. I like to think that I knew what would come out of the oven a few hours later.
My parents divorced when I was little, and homemade bread didn’t come back into my life until I was a young parent living in Barcelona, trying to learn the local language and missing the United States. In my English bubble I’d subscribed to the international version of the New York Times, and in the magazine there was an article about artisan bread making a comeback in the United States with home cooks, using a Tartine Bakery recipe in particular. It pulled my heartstrings right between my nostalgia for my old life in San Francisco and the way I’d begun to fancy myself knowledgeable of artisan foods, now that I was frequenting Barcelona’s open-air markets. I got it into my head that I’d figure out how to bake bread myself.
The problem was that long-fermented sourdough bread was available just down the street at Baluard, a nearby bakery that was gaining local acclaim. I’d literally had my first contractions of labor with my first child at Tartine Bakery while eating a croissant, so bakeries hold a special place in my heart. I was happy to remain a loyal customer rather than squeeze bread baking into my schedule. I never did end up trying my hand at baking while living in Catalonia, where masa madre (natural starter) is so important that it’s protected by law.
Until recently I was so busy as a working parent that I’d forgotten about my interest in learning to bake bread. Even with the coronavirus sweeping the world and newfound time at home, I still felt doubtful I would actually do something to better myself. I’d tried to get motivated many times before without any luck. On the other hand, I had to do something to keep my spirits up, and our local co-op had not only sold out of toilet paper, but also of bread. Apparently I wasn’t the only one with these sentiments, because slowly flour and even yeast have disappeared from store shelves.
Thanks to Facebook I got my hands on some ingredients, when an ad popped up for a local artisan baker I’d never known about. I owe my successful sourdough baking to this individual, a former restaurateur between jobs who had started a pop-up meal service and bread operation. He kindly gave me not only bread flour but a couple of tablespoons of his sourdough starter. Armed with the starter and my Tartine Bread book, I set about following it’s 20+ pages of detailed instructions on the standard country loaf and produced two golden, crackly and totally edible loaves of bread for my family.
Maybe it’s the role that bread briefly played in my hippie family, or the magical way that intuition and ingredients came together in the process, but making those first loaves was thoroughly therapeutic. During my bread-making hours I had the opportunity (the necessity, actually) of clearing my mind of everything coronavirus-related. The only thing that was allowed into my awareness was the bread. It seemed a leap of faith to believe that what I was doing with my hands could possibly lead to something resembling the photo on the book cover. But every step was deeply fulfilling and seemed to use all of me: body, mind and spirit.
Over the past weeks bread-baking has become the meditative medicine that gets me out of my head. For many (many) hours, there’s no place to worry about the long-term effects of this crisis, something I can’t control but that threatens to overtake my mind and emotions. The faintly sweet and acidic smell of the levain is refreshing to my senses, and my hands indulge in the tactile quality of the dough at different points: dry, sticky, smooth, and soft. I find a focused but joyful concentration, with tiny sparks of inspiration that ignite excitement, like the a’ha moment I had when my dough seemed to have a billowy quality just like the book said it would. Best of all is turning out the loaves onto a board not unlike my father’s old bread board, after baking them for fifty minutes at 450 degrees.
Even my first loaves were as beautiful as anything I’ve ever produced, except my two children, of course. And I’d made them with my own hands, thanks to weeks in quarantine and the generosity of my neighbor. Now I know there’s a part of me that can produce something akin to art in the kitchen, but clearly, I’m not alone in the endeavor — something magical is also at work, helping me to “just know” what to do.
“You just know” is a phrase home cooks know well. Without the benefit of professional training, we can’t say how we know what to do when we cook. I imagine the hobby bread baker also just knows many things — when to give the dough another turn in the bowl, when to sprinkle on a little extra flour; you even just know when something’s gone awry. Baking is as much a product of awareness as it is of experience or formal training. To practice and trust in “just knowing” is therapy if I ever knew it. And I’m somewhat of an expert, having dabbled in most of the self-help techniques on the planet.
This crisis has made a few of my values more clear for me: the values of being at home, of taking time, doing things for ourselves and making do, and retaking an old dream, with seeds planted long ago. I’ve made sourdough bread every week since the shelter in place order began, and I hope I’ll continue when it ends, because it makes me so happy. Happiness is most often found in life’s simple pleasures, and paradoxically, sometimes only a crisis can make life simple again.
