Why Is Everyone Baking Bread - and why sourdough?

As a baker - but not usually of bread - I was pretty damn annoyed with all of you from about late-March to…well, now. The annoyance came with some amused moments, as I watched all the self-rising flour fly off the shelves and I thought “Someone’s going to be a little surprised if they’re using that for their cookie recipes.” (Self-rising flour already has baking powder and salt in it - generally does not work real well in recipes that do not call for it specifically).

But then the yeast disappeared, and the Jiffy Mix, and the specialty flours, and finally, egads, the gluten-free stuff. What in the world was going on?

Well, we were all home. For HOURS AND DAYS at a time. And with the bread aisle looking a pack of breadivore dinosaurs rumbled through it, many folks turned to the internet thinking “Well, I’ll just bake some. How hard can it be?”

The reality is…it’s actually not hard. It takes a lot of time, and time is what we all had (and still have) in abundance. But bread can be fussy, and it takes some practice. And the instructions can be, well, vague and maybe a little much. Seriously, I read 4 different recipes for making a sourdough starter before I found one that didn’t have me muttering “But what does that MEAN?” And I bake, on a regular basis. While the nerd in me appreciates, say, the nine pages it takes for Peter Reinhart to guide you through the steps to create a sourdough starter in Artisan Breads Every Day , it’s all over when you toss in stuff like testing with pH paper. And three pages for a sourdough bread recipe is really two pages too many, IMO.

Well, why sourdough anyway? What is the deal with everyone making sourdough? Aside from, “it’s tasty!” - see the above problem with finding yeast. Starter - that magical fermented combination of flour and water that leavens, or raises, the bread - eliminates the need for yeast. Problem solved. Maybe.

We had time. Some of us actually had flour. We had internet. And Amazon for the baking stone and the Dutch oven you never knew you needed. Conditions were perfect for that Zen-like process of producing the most basic of sustenance.

Or not. Read on!