And just like a baby, it’s going to create a tumultuous mess. Messy tables, messy drawers, messy hands. The flour will end up in every nook and cranny and crevice, and settle on your hands and arms, clinging to your hair like crisp white leeches. Oh, and washing it up wreaks even more havoc, clogging your sink as a miniature loaf of bread begins to reveal itself in the pipes.
3) You will consume your body weight in butter
Salt and pepper, Lennon and McCartney, Belushi and Aykroyd, sourdough bread and butter. Of course, all breads pair beautifully with butter, but there’s something about sourdough and thick smears of salted dark yellow butter that’s so greedy it’ll have you hitting seconds and thirds.
There’s also the fact that, yes, a lot of sourdough breads are made with giant holes (for real nerds, this comes from the trends of the West Coast of the United States, where big holes are an obsession) . This means that, when heated, your 50g of butter melts right through, requiring a double Nigella spread and, of course, more bread to mop up the resulting rock pools.
4) You will join around four WhatsApp groups
No one, except maybe vegans and hairdressers, likes a chat more than sourdough-loving bakers. All tips, needs, failures and brags are best kept in WhatsApp groups which will (mostly) be made up of genuinely interested people.
5) It’s really hard, but then quite easy
Newbies frequently text me with questions, which is understandable. At first, the sourdough is delicate, unpredictable, frustrating and frankly a bit of a mystery. Kind of like math, at least for me.
There are so many variables and so many ways to ruin your bread: too much water, not enough water; under-proven, over-proven; it might stick to the basket, collapse in the oven, taste too sour, not sour enough. As a consolation, most failures are okay to eat.
But like an equation, once you know how to solve it, it’s pretty straightforward and intuitive. You’ll even find that, no, it doesn’t take 36 hours. Well it does, but only about 10 minutes of actual work.
6) you will be snobbish about supermarket versions
Supermarkets have taken the leaven train in recent years. This is not surprising, as customers will pay more for breads with words like “sourdough,” “artisanal” and “freshly baked” attached to them. The problem is, these words aren’t protected, with a Which? survey concluding that one in five sourdough bread was bogus.
Oh, and there is another problem. Whether real or not, most supermarkets are poor imitations of what you’d get in bakeries and intermediate home bakers.
7) it’s an expensive habit
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Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
This notice was published: 2021-07-28 09:43:58
