Breadmaking

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 
                                                                                         -William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Greetings, faithful readers, on this wondrous Good Friday!  Arthur here, enjoying a work holiday that, as far as I know, few get to enjoy.  Interesting to think about, really, because the sacrifice of Christ on the cross has to be as worthy of a holiday as some of the other things we get time off for.

I digress; what I really want to talk about is what I'm doing with my time off: bread making.  Alex and I have been watching a documentary series on Netflix called "Cooked", and you should too.  The series is broken into four episodes named after the four classic elements in Grecian alchemy: fire, water, air, and earth.  The first two are fairly straightforward, fire talked about cooking with fire and water with water, and they were wonderful and worthy of enjoying and thinking about; but they didn't enrapture my imagination like the final two did.

The episode titled "Air" was really about bread making, air being a reference to the air pockets formed in bread.  Back in bygone bachelorhood, I was a decent baker.  I would make a recipe for Amish white bread found here, combine herbs and olive oil for a dipping sauce, and the result comprised a significant portion of my diet.  So the episode made me feel nostalgic, and I baked two loaves this morning.

A good portion of the episode talked about baking sourdough bread.  I was under the impression that it took something special to start up a sourdough batch, but as the episode shows, the yeast involved in fermenting flour is all around us, it's just a matter of correctly cultivating it.  I was so fascinated, I decided to try to start a sourdough culture myself.  After doing some reading, I decided the way to go about achieving my ends was to juice three apples (using the juicer that doesn't get used as often as it should) to make a sugary drink for my little friends, mixed it with some flour, covered it with plastic wrap (I'm trying to encourage an anaerobic reaction), and we'll wait to see if the gang takes kindly to my hospitality.  My research suggests anywhere from 36 to 48 hours for any signs of life; so you'll have to stay tuned in to see how things turn out.

I find myself thinking of so many experiments I could run with sourdough.  This one was started with fruit sugar (fructose), which is different from sucrose (table sugar), if I very the sugar types, do I get a more diverse mixture of yeasts in my starter?  Does this diversity cause a more complex mixture of flavors in my bread?  If I "specialize" my sourdough, will it get really efficient at processing flour and give me quick rises with a really fluffy texture?  Soda pop is basically fructose and water, would it be a good thing to feed my sourdough?  Honestly, I don't know how crazy I'll get with my experiments; there's a ton I want to learn and discover, but we'll keep you posted as we go.

Anyway, there's two paragraphs that talk about letting living things wriggle around in the food I intend to eat; that might require some further exploration (and is, coincidentally what the earth episode of "Cooked" is all about).  We live surrounded by a world too small for us to see that deeply impacts our lives.  When you walk into a grocery store, it might surprise you to know just how many of the food products available a made by managing the activity of these microscopic organisms.  Bread, cheese, yogurt, salami, some jellies, cottage cheese, ketchup, pickles, wine, salsa, sauerkraut, kemchi, and, everyone's favorite, chocolate, is a small helping of some of the  products made from the fermentation of viable food into something with more flavor and greater nutrition.

A claim in the documentary is that if I gave you the raw ingredients for bread and you never baked it, you could live off of them for a while, but you would eventually die from malnutrition, but you can live off of bread forever. The reactions involved with the metabolism of these little bugs results in products that our bodies can use to synthesize vitamins, protein, and nutrients we otherwise couldn't obtain from the flour.  It's a truly amazing thought.

One of my favorite parts of the documentary is when they showed the surface of a cheese wheel at the microscopic level over time.  The apt analogy used was comparing what was happening to an abandoned field in connect.  The bare ground is quickly inhabited by weeds and quick grasses, and then some longer lasting grasses come in.  Animals show up to eat the new food source, and other animals who want to eat the first set show up, then come shrubs and trees, and soon the bare field is a forest.  The events unfolding over a man's lifetime in our macroscopic world plays out in about a month's time under the microscope.

Anyway, I started this post with a quote from Hamlet, because when I contemplate all these worlds around me, in me (the numbers of cells inside me that don't have my genes outnumber the ones that do by a 1.3:1 ratio), the life inside of soil, in the depths of the oceans, in caves, I just awe that the God who spoke it all into existence cared enough about me to come and die.  What can I say, other than Omnia Vincit Amour.