Timothy’s Substack

Sourdough bread is delicious, nutritious, and annoyingly temperamental. It promises the tastiest bread, pancakes, and even donuts that you have ever tasted, but in order to reach that promised land, you have a number of obstacles to overcome, the first being the creation of a healthy Sourdough Starter.

For those who are not currently sourdough bakers, there are at least two different sourdough tutorials on YouTube. I recommend this one. The quick overview is that you add water to bread, and it grows yeast. After a few days this turns into sourdough starter. (People who like giving other people money can also buy sourdough starter). Then, you give this thing more flour and water every time it gets hungry until you are ready to make something bready. Then you put some of the sourdough starter in with the other ingredients for the bready thing, let it sit on your countertop for a few hours, and the new bready thing also gets fluffy. But this isn’t sourdough starter anymore, this is now a Bread Thing, where the difference is that it has more than just flour and water, but also you probably kneaded it at some point. And now it tastes awesome when baked. It’s probably worth noting that there is an alternative to all this for people who don’t like flavor, and that’s packaged yeast or some combination of baking powder and/or baking soda. But I like flavor, so I’m going to focus on the sourdough method.

Some more details on the Sourdough Starter specifically: Sourdough starter, which is the first step of the process mentioned above, is a living creature that humans find tasty. When combined with bread ingredients and allowed to sit out on the counter, it makes thousands of little bubbles which humans think taste good, and makes bakers say things like, “That’s got a good crumb to it.” which doesn’t make any sense, but also doesn’t matter because the bread is delicious.

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