Hopefully, by now, your sourdough starter should be ready to go. Every day for the last week or so, I’ve been discarding most of my starter, adding equal parts flour and water, and giving it time to grow. Late last week, I noticed that it was rising and falling at about the same rate as my existing starter, and its smell had gotten sharper. Even so, it still smelled like mellow cheese.
Maybe your starter has reached a happy equilibrium of bacteria and wild yeast, too. Here’s what to look for.
Next time you feed your starter, take note of how far up the sides it goes. After about 5 or 6 hours, look again (depending on how cold your kitchen is, it may be more like 8 hours). If all’s as it should be, your starter will be twice as big, and there should be a lot of bubbles. When I fed my new starter on Saturday, it went up to about the 100 mL line on my jar, and by the evening it’d made it to around 250mL (if your jar doesn’t have markings along the side, you can just use a marker or a bit of tape).
If your starter isn’t there yet, just give it a bit more time. Keep discarding and feeding and keeping an eye on it. This isn’t an exact science, and I don’t believe anyone who tells me they understand how this works.
The second thing to look out for—and this is what tells you, really, if its ready to bake—is whether your starter floats in water. When we eventually bake with our starter, it works by eating gluten and releasing gas, which is what makes the bread rise instead of commercial yeast.
Once your starter is risen and bubbly, take a little less than a tablespoon and drop it into a glass or a bowl of water. Hopefully, it’ll float. On the right is my new starter, and on the left is my old. Be mindful not to try this too late. After a while, the bubbles will start to collapse and the starter will fall back in on itself.
My new starter looked like it was holding up fine compared to my old one, but just to be sure, I baked a loaf of bread with my new starter this weekend. I’m really, really happy with how it came out.
It’s a straightforward recipe (I’ll share it soon), but it was good to bake some sourdough for the first time in what felt like a while. I have no idea how long it’s actually been. I also don’t know how it’s been more than a week since my last letter, and I wish I could account for the time. I also wish I could taste more of a difference between the loaves that my old starter makes compared to my new, but I’m happy enough that both are good and that she’s finally making bread.
I’ve been talking to a mentor of mine, genuinely one of the best people I know, and I was flattered and touched to hear that she’s been making a sourdough starter, too (apparently a lot of people in my department are). She named her starter “Yeast of Burden,” which I thought was tremendously clever, and I’ve been getting updates and photos, which I’ve really appreciated. She said it made her happy to have something small to take care of.
It’s nice to remember that we can find help carrying this weight. It’s nice to know that there there are a lot of small things we can take care of.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what to name my new starter. I named my old one “Yeast Rock” once I started grad school, after the neighborhood I moved to and bakery I daydream of opening whenever I’m overwhelmed with my academic work or otherwise feeling anxious and depressed, which, to be clear, is often.
A close friend I used to live with, an MD/PhD student here at Yale, calls this an “escape fantasy,” and he thinks everyone has one. My friend dreams of going to a culinary school in the woods (The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park). My girlfriend dreams of buying a motorbike and moving to Vietnam to sell coffee. When I was younger, I dreamed of making music and touring in a band, but now I just think about writing and baking bread. It’s quiet there, and my dog is alive again, eating scraps of bread and sleeping in the sun out back.
Like most of my ideas, I was in the middle of something else entirely when I was reminded of a W.B. Yeats poem yesterday afternoon. It’s called “The Second Coming,” and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, one of my favorite books of essays by one of my favorite writers, takes its name from the last line. The poem is about the apocalypse: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold // Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Here’s how it ends:
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
It’s hard not to feel like the world is ending, so its hard not to feel like this fits for a name. A few weeks ago, I would have hated the idea of naming a sourdough starter “what rough yeast slouches.” The wordplay is too cute, it’s a bit melodramatic, and I need to think and talk about a writer who isn’t Joan Didion. But even then, I would have appreciated that “wrys” as an acronym and nickname is nearly perfect for a sourdough starter.
Thanks to everyone who has sent me photos of their starters, and thanks for telling me their names. I hope yours are ready to bake soon, too.
vlad