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Why Did We All Think of Sourdough?
How the bread-making trend shows that we’re all plugged in to the motherboard
I swear that I was ahead of the sourdough fad. Even though I birthed my first loaf just this morning, that slightly charred final product, which was gone by evening, took weeks of preparation to achieve.
By week two of quarantine (just a guess, as I no longer have a working concept of time) I was already baking bread. My first attempt was a simple French bread recipe that utilized the active dry yeast I’d long neglected in my fridge. The result was a bit bland and dismally pale in color, but it looked and tasted much like “real” bread, which couldn’t be found at the store. Just having bread in my house made me feel accomplished and more self-sufficient; if I, with zero experience, could make food out of flour, water, and yeast, what else could I make with the things I already had lying around? Hand sanitizer? A potato farm?
I stuck with bread — probably because making it is a tactile, cheap and learnable process that yields a relatively quick and tasty reward. With a little time and elbow grease, anyone can make bread. And apparently, everyone was. Suddenly, yeast was selling out like it was toilet paper.
Little did I know that there is an entire subgenre of rugged yet approachable millennial artisans teaching gals like me how to make hearty, rock-hard loaves the size of my head in my own kitchen.
What if I run out of yeast? Or flour? the doomsday prepper inside me, who has gotten out of the trunk to ride shotgun since the pandemic ensued, worried. I ordered one of the last 25-pound bags of restaurant-grade, all purpose flour from Amazon and waited. As I waited, I thought of all the delicious creations I could bring into the world with 25 pounds of flour. My imagination ventured to tomato soup with sourdough bread and sharp cheddar grilled cheese…
