Thinking About Getting Into: Bread Baking

I made a loaf of banana bread the other day. It seemed like the economical thing to do; the mass of bananas I had bought at the grocery store down the street had started to spot before I could finish them off, as if transformed overnight by Kusama.

I eyed them, acknowledging their skin gone thin, and went back to the store. I picked up some more baking soda, coconut oil, and a bar of chocolate.

I returned, greased my baking dish, and set to work, chopping up the chocolate into meltable chunks, microwaving the coconut oil to a liquid consistency. I mashed the bananas. I sprinkled some nutmeg into my flour, I preheated the oven and then, 45 minutes later, I had a loaf of bread.

It's amazing what you can create with something that had been predestined for the trash.

It's no coincidence that at this time I was reading Sourdough, a novel by Robin Sloan. It's a bit sci-fi, and a bit quirky, and its characters exist primarily in extremes, but the descriptions of the bread: oh, the bread.

Sourdough requires a starter, which can seem like a mythical creature. If I want to bake a sourdough, I think, I should acquire a special starter—this is, of course, an important plot point in the novel. I wonder if I can get such a thing at the farmers market or if the bakers would safeguard their trusted microbes. I see that King Arthur Flour sells one online, but this starter in particular is made the butt of many jokes in the book as well.

I want to bake a loaf of sourdough because I want to create something nourishing from a gloppy mess of flour and water. I want to have nursed a starter for days, ensuring that its microbiome maintains its optimal levels of...whatever it needs. I want to take my one nice knife and knick some symbols in the raw dough: maybe a crescent moon, or maybe some leaves. I imagine my apartment filling with the scent of life-giving bread. I imagine the heat from the oven warming me against these cool, early autumn breezes.

Surely, I would also need a new mixing bowl, and a proofing bowl, and I think I would also need a special stone on which the bread to sit as it nests in the oven. Is my oven even big enough? Surely I can move around some racks and make space.

I don't have nice enough flour. Mine is from Trader Joes and I'm pretty sure it's expired but can flour really expire, anyway? I remain unconvinced.

I imagine subsisting on cabbage soup and fresh sourdough, and I feel light, airy. I could wake up early each morning and do yoga as the bread sits in the oven. I could read more. I could force myself to finish any piece of fiction I've started but abandoned because I just don't have the ideas in me; they haven't sprouted yet, so I do not have the tools I need to create the perfect story.

When I was little, all I wanted to eat for a great period of time, was bread and butter or bread and cheese. For a long time, we got Portuguese rolls, dusty with flour, that I would tear into with no accessory. In later years, we ate the crispiest, most golden rolls from Costco. I would microwave them and tear them apart, steam exuding from its porous, bubbled interior. If you suffered from trypophobia, you'd get chills.

I realize, now, that I can make my own sourdough starter with just flour and water. It helps if I have a kitchen scale, which I do not have, but I do have a postal scale, which should work fine enough. I have a container it could grow in, but can I really commit to bringing a living thing into the world right now?

That's what a starter is, after all. It's alive.

I can't commit to shelling out $6 or $7 at the farmer's market for a loaf, either. I know that these loaves take hard work, but still, the cost is not negligible. The cost is not negligible if I make it, either. Really, I shouldn't even be eating bread to begin with.

If I don't create anything, then I feel like my time is a waste, and then I sink into a pit of two parts self-loathing and one part despair. I see others around me creating things from apparent scratch; I know that some had the tools to begin with, but you cannot seriously tell me that everyone has one of those baking stones.

I know that other people are figuring it out as they go and that I should too, but I worry about the time and resources I may waste if my efforts go terribly wrong. I can imagine the final result so vividly that I'm transfixed by mere images in my mind. I want to have it, to taste it, and to have created it. I want it so badly.

I close out of the King Arthur website and Instagram. I open a new Google doc, and I start to make new plans, new characters, new motivations and dreams and deterrents and tragedies. And then I write.