the sourcerer: Ode to Bread.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Ode to Bread.

I've always wanted to bake real sourdough bread. The San Francisco stuff with the starter and the heaps of trouble and bedevilment. Baking - especially bread baking, has always made me feel so virtuous. All that kneading - like a farmer's wife!

I pored over those recipes. Page one would have me enthralled, but by the time I reached page four I always seemed to have lost my enthusiasm. Enter No Knead Bread...

Labelled Sourdough in the last Platteland, I made it the very day the magazine arrived.

LIFE CHANGING.

Loaf after loaf after loaf.

There are thousands of variations on the internet. Click here for the basic recipe. Lately I've been making it with rye flour and sometimes have left the dough for almost an entire day before baking it.

So let the dough forgive you and get over the guilt.

For it is true: some things in life are easy.

3 comments:

Leslie said...: Ah, gorgeous bread - bravo! I've been making bread from "Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes A Day" for years, but this recipe is different so will give it a try. Love the rustic look of your loaves. And nothing rivals the taste of home made bread fresh out of the oven. It's the only food I slather with butter before I eat it.; June 10, 2015 at 11:07 PM
Marie said...: Wonderlik, Lily. I love the loaf after loaf pics. How does it look, sliced? I must STILL make it.; June 11, 2015 at 1:08 AM
the sourcerer said...: Yes, the smell as it bakes.... heavenly. Though admittedly I also slather butter on too many other things!
I've been planning to photograph it sliced, but we eat it all before I remember.
I find the more white flour, the bigger the bubbles, the crustier the crust. The more rye, the denser, the moister and not as crusty. But all good.
Next variation is that I will toast some steel cut oats and add to the mix.
X; June 11, 2015 at 9:21 AM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.