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…
