When things nearly turned sour over sourdough

Talk about domestic disaster narrowly avoided!

One of the delights – far from the most important, though still a source of great pleasure – of being married to Danielle is the constant supply of sourdough bread. The stuff is great. Far better than anything you can buy in shops.  

One of Danielle’s fine loaves

The story of how she got to be so good at it is a good one. Let me tell you about it.

Danielle learned to make sourdough before we last left England (our second exit, and I suspect this one will be permanent). She’d taught herself and was moderately satisfied with the results until, one day, she came across some exceptionally good loaves in a local café-cum-bakery. She asked repeatedly for the baker’s contact details, but they wouldn’t budge: they took the journalist’s stance of never revealing their sources.

So Danielle had to go on line, scouring the internet with every combination she dream up of words like ‘Luton’ (where we lived at the time), ‘sourdough´, ‘bakery’, ‘specialist’ or just plain ‘special’.

It took her a while, but eventually she struck gold. One of her searches took her to a Facebook page for ‘Jo’s Loaves’. The photos of the loaves were enough for an expert eye like hers: this was the bread she had liked so much. 

Danielle got in touch with Jo through Facebook, asking just one question: “I already bake sourdough bread but would like to spend a short time as an assistant to you, before we leave for Spain, so I can learn to do it properly.”

At first Jo wasn’t keen. She really didn’t want an apprentice. But Danielle talked her into it. After all, at the very least, she would be an extra pair of hands. For free. Jo could try it out for a couple of days and then decide whether she could keep Danielle on or not. What was there to lose?

Nothing, as it turned out. In fact, when Danielle had to tell her a few weeks later that their collaboration was going to have to come to an end, it was Jo who asked whether she might not reconsider and stay on working with her. Danielle brings a lot of innate skill and a great deal of commitment to the jobs she takes on (including in this instance the daybreak start to the day), and it makes it hard for people to part company with her. 

As well as learning a lot more about the art of sourdough – “I was much better after working with Jo than before,” she assures me – she also came away with a gift from Jo, of some of her starter, the essential ingredient, as the name implies, in getting a sourdough bake going. 

Sourdough starter is a bit like an attractive plant, which allows you to take cuttings from it without suffering irreparable loss. Danielle could take some starter from Jo, without reducing her capacity to keep on making bread.

Danielle brought it with her to Spain. Here, she has in turn passed on portions of starter to other people. In effect, they too are now using Jo’s starter. Or, as Danielle assures me, not really Jo’s, because each person imprints their own personality on their sourdough. Their hands, perhaps even their breath, the flour they use, the way they treat the dough, all change the bread in their own distinctive way. 

Everything was now perfectly satisfactory on our sourdough front. Until, that is, Danielle headed to the Madrid region for a week or so’s grandparenting. I was left at home alone (well, if you don’t count a cat and two toy poodles). And, as if to prove how risky that can be, I proceeded to screw up. But bigly, if I may use Donald Trump’s fine term.

The fridge was well stocked. Which meant that if I wanted to get at anything in it, I had to take various things out first. Obviously, the idea was to put them all back again afterwards. But on one occasion I forgot to put one thing back, and it was a pretty damn important thing.

Sourdough starter, where it belongs between bakings,
in the fridge, where I failed to leave it

It was the Danielle-Jo starter.

Danielle tried to put a brave face on it when she got back. 

“Perhaps I can still resuscitate it,” she said, looking at the rather sad white substance at the bottom of a jar, clearly none the happier for having been kept at room temperature for several days.

She tried. She tried hard. She tried making two batches of bread from the starter I’d killed and, though they turned out to be bread of sorts, they were dull, lifeless things, that had barely risen from when they were first formed into shape.

I felt terrible. I mean, let’s not got over the top. It didn’t feel like I’d killed a child. But certainly I felt as bad as if I’d killed a pet. The starter was a living thing which only needed looking after, and in return provided us with excellent bread. And I’d killed it through sheer negligence. 

Imagine my sense of guilt.

But then, thanks to my daughter-in-law Sheena, a solution appeared. Danielle had provided a starter for a friend of hers. Starter, therefore, from the same genetic line. The friend had then passed Sheena a part of it.

That meant that, when on my own grandparenting visit I told Sheena my shameful story, she had an answer at hand. She gave me a new batch of starter to take home with me. 

She explained to me that starter needs feeding, just like a living thing. I ensured it was well fed, working with meticulous attention to deliver the exact quantities of flour and water it required. I gave it all the love and care it could possibly wish for. No second batch of starter was going to die on my watch. Not now, not ever.

Starter starting a loaf

The results were all we could hope for. We got the starter home. Danielle was delighted. And sourdough production is back up to pre-starter-destruction days. Indeed, now that I feel so personally involved, I’ve even been helping. Stretching the dough, for instance, where you grab it from underneath and literally draw part of it out and then drop it back into the mass. It’s a pleasant and comforting activity. 

I also enjoy being able to declare that sourdough needs no kneading. 

Anyway, it was a massive relief. I’d ducked a domestic disaster. We would not now see all hope of sourdough dashed from our nerveless fingers. 

Of course, nothing is ever simple these days. We may still be cheated of our loaves. Shops are running out of what’s known as strong flour, an essential ingredient. Apparently, much of it came from poor, suffering Ukraine.

At least that’s not my fault. It’s Vladimir Putin’s. And, one of his offences – far from the most important, though still a source of great displeasure to me – is that he may be about to deprive me of my sourdough bread. Maybe we could get that crime added to the list of charges against him, if he ever gets hauled before the International Criminal Court.

As he richly deserves.