Have you taken up the sourdough life during quarantine? Here’s help from an expert baker.
For the moment, life is lived indoors. And in the past month, there has emerged a mascot for these times. One showing that even in small, cramped spaces, looking out on the world through glass, there’s still life within.
Say hello to your sourdough starter, the somewhat breathing, somewhat living creation of flour and water that you may have right now on your countertop.
Since quarantines and stay-at-home orders were put in place, sourdough starter has filled the feeds of Twitter and Instagram. With bread shortages and yeast in short supply, people are taking up sourdough baking, partly out of boredom, partly out of necessity.
Raleigh’s Hannah Page is something of an expert home baker and has the 145,000 Instagram followers to prove it. By day, Page is a history teacher at Raleigh Charter High School, but in her spare time, usually in those quiet pre-dawn hours, she is a formidable baker, turning out loaves of crusty sourdough and ornate flatbreads cut like leaves or trees.
Her magnificent Instagram account is Blondie and Rye, named for her sourdough starters.
Page caught the sourdough wave five years ago and since then has baked more days than she hasn’t.
“It’s uniquely fun and uniquely addictive,” Page said. “You’re baking bread with something that you created for yourself. And knowing that there’s a little element of something that you created in every loaf you bake, it pulls you in and you become a little obsessed with it.”
In this quarantined age, Page said she understands sourdough’s current rise, one where bread aisles and yeast can be hard to find and sourdough starter offers an avenue of self-reliance. For those making the foray into baking, Page has a few full-baked guidelines.
Name your starter
Every starter needs a name, Page said. Five years ago she created Blondie, a friend as well as a starter, who has been a piece of hundreds of different baked goods.
“She was strong enough to create my first loaf in eight days,” Page said. “That first loaf was not great. In fact the first many loaves were not very good. ... After six months I knew the process and started to bake things that were fun to me.”
Start small
There are already reports of starter fatigue.
While this stay-at-home moment has propelled the rise of starter, Page cautions that commercial yeast may really be the place to start for baking beginners. Page spent four months baking with store-bought dry yeast until stepping up to a sourdough starter.
But for those bound and determined, and frankly with no other options, Page recommends trying to start small, by using as little as 50 grams of flour and water, leaving not much daily discard in that important first week.
You may become obsessed
When people think of sourdough or just really great bread, it’s usually those deeply browned crusty hearth loaves. A thump on the bottom rings rich and dull, and inside the bread is tangy and chewy. Page is on a different tangent and encourages bakers to, you know, follow their hearts. That tangent is intricate flatbreads that, in the depths of winter offered color, and now that we’re largely watching spring from indoors, something resembling a bountiful garden.
This baking trend itself is a bit of a tangent, a hands-on break from the work-from-home world and Zoom calls.
“Technology is so consuming right now,” Page said. “This is something that is really tactile, pre-iPhone. Your hands are in something that is at the heart and history of people.”
It’s theater
Page claims she’s never been artistic, calling herself a bad painter and drawer. But her flatbreads are works of art, ornate patterns cut into dough, studded with herbs and vegetables, colorful and vibrant in ways bread often isn’t. Page sees baking as more of a dramatic art than a visual one.
“It’s like theater,” she said. “It’s this thing you do, you appreciate it, you love it, then you strike the set because you have another one coming. It’s a heightened version of that right now, a way to deal with anxiety and frustration. Baking is an important release and outlet right now.”
Be a bread fairy
To Page’s great disappointment, she was caught for the first time this month dropping off a baked care package on a friend’s doorstep. If you bake every day you’re naturally going to end up with a lot of bread. Most of what Page bakes, she gives away. In normal times, it often went to teachers at her school, but more and more now, it’s dropped off to someone she knows who could really use something baked from the heart.
“I love to give it away,” Page said. “One of my favorite things is to tailor loaves for someone, especially someone going through something challenging. Maybe they’re not having the best week, but they feel so nourished. A good loaf of bread is really all you need.”
This story was originally published April 17, 2020 at 12:31 PM with the headline "Have you taken up the sourdough life during quarantine? Here’s help from an expert baker.."
