day 3: things are looking different
My sleep schedule always spirals pretty badly when my days lose structure, and the background anxiety of everything hasn’t helped. Here’s how things have gone most nights over the last week or so. I give up trying to fall asleep around 2 AM, do my best to crawl out of bed without disturbing my girlfriend all too much, go downstairs to drink a few PBRs while I lie on the couch watching YouTube videos or scrolling endlessly through Twitter or checking the latest COVID-19 statistics on the New York Times live updates page. Eventually, I notice that I’m too exhausted to keep my eyes open, so I get off the couch and recycle my PBR cans, go back upstairs as quietly as I can, do my best to crawl into bed without disturbing my girlfriend all too much, and I fall asleep around 3 or 4. I realize that this is a list of bad ideas.
For whatever reason last night was different, and I was able to fall asleep at around 1 without much of a problem. I also woke up relatively early, at least for a Saturday, which was a nice surprise. I felt more rested than I have in a while, but I always feel antsy when I get up early, so crawled over my girlfriend to get us breakfast sandwiches while she slept in.
I live in East Rock, which is where pretty much every other graduate student around here lives, since it’s cute and close to campus and relatively cheap. It was overcast and quiet this morning, and no one was really outside. I listened to an old Phoebe Bridgers song on repeat while I walked.
There are two small grocery stores a few blocks from my house, so I went to the one closest by. I got a pump of hand sanitizer from by the door and ordered two sandwiches. While I waited, I remembered yesterdays failures, so I tried to find some flour and canned tomatoes. Here’s what the shelves looked like.
No luck.
Once my sandwiches were done, I got one more pump of hand sanitizer on my way out the door. It’s not like I had anything else to do at 9:30 AM, so I decided to walk the few blocks further to see if the other grocery store had anything I needed. I walked in, did the hand sanitizer etc., and I went to the baked goods section where the flour shelves were also empty. But I looked to my right and saw a cardboard box piled with flour, and there was an employee restocking the shelves.
I felt happier than I should have.
I kept listening to the Phoebe Bridgers song as I walked home, and my girlfriend was awake by the time I made it to the kitchen, so we ate breakfast and drank coffee together. After she left for her house a few blocks away, I smiled and drank more coffee and put away my groceries.
Before I played Fortnite for a few hours, I wanted to check on my new sourdough starter to see how things looked. Not a lot changed from day 1 to day 2, but yesterday I wrote that things might look different today, and I was happy to see that they did. There are bubbles on the side of the glass, and it’s started to expand. Hopefully, yours looks about the same, but it’s okay if not. There’s a lot going on, and this isn’t an exact science.
At this point, our starter still needs to sort itself out. There are a lot of different strains of wild yeast and bacteria in there that I don’t understand, but we’re hoping to get a stable culture of the right kind of yeast and the right kind of bacteria. It feels weird to smell things, and it feels weird to ask you to smell things, but I’d encourage you to see how your new starter smells at this point.
Don’t quote me on this (again, not a microbiologist), but we haven’t gotten the bacteria we’re looking for yet, the kind that will give our bread the bit of sharpness that makes it taste good. So my fresh starter (I’m still thinking up a name) actually smelled kind of sweet, a bit nutty, and a little round (if that makes sense).
As a point of comparison, here’s what Yeast Rock looked like this morning. You can see how she’s expanded to nearly the top of the container. My new starter only grew a bit, maybe doubled in size, but she’ll start rising dramatically when she’s all grown up. Unlike our new starter, Yeast Rock smells sharp and sour, and the texture is different, too. The new starter is a bit dense and stringy, but it’ll change in time.
This should probably take until next weekend, but at this point the steps are simple. To start, we have to discard most of our starter. This step can be hard, and it takes some getting used to. Maybe you’ll grow attached to your starter, like I did (if you haven’t gotten attached already), and maybe it feels wasteful and a bit painful to wash most of it down the sink every morning.
It was helpful for me to realize that what I’m attached to is an invisible community of bacteria and yeast that are multiplying and growing and living their lives. The flour you add is their food, and what you discard isn’t really the starter, but their waste. A river doesn’t really go anywhere when it flows into the ocean.
So just like we did on day 1, we take a little bit of our starter and add to it equal parts flour and water. Here, I added a tablespoon of my new starter to a jar, and I added a heaping tablespoon of both wheat flour and all purpose flour on top of that. The flour ended up being about 40 grams, so I added 40 grams of water and mixed. I rinsed the old jar in the sink and threw it in the dishwasher.
I said gas would be a problem for later, and later is now. While our starter gets its bearings, it’s going to be bubbling a lot, which means that it needs room for gas to escape.
There are a few ways you can do this. You can cover your container with some cloth and secure it in place with a rubber band or the screw top to your jar (not my preferred method). If you’re using tupperware, you can close three corners and leave the fourth open (or if it’s round, just secure most of it and leave a little bit loose). That way is a bit easier. What I find easiest, though, is to just use a jar and tighten the lid maybe one turn: just enough so that it stays in place and won’t spill if you accidentally knock it over, but there should be enough give for air to escape.
Now, all we have to do is wait until tomorrow, when we’ll check in and do all of this again.
I’ve really enjoyed seeing your photos of your starters, so please keep doing that. It makes my day. I’ve also been answering some questions on Twitter, so please don’t be shy about reaching out (again, @vladchituc on everything, and you can always reply to this email). And please let me know how your starter smells.
Thanks, also, to everyone who has been sharing this newsletter with their friends, it means a lot. Hopefully we’ll do some baking tomorrow.
Until then,
vlad