Transformations
A reflection on my love of bread, beer, and maple syrup making, fly tying...and writing.
As I write this, I’m letting my sourdough “autolyse,” a fancy term for letting the flour and sourdough starter and water I’ve just mixed into a shaggy-doughy mess rest for 30 minutes so the water will be thoroughly absorbed, and the wild yeasts and bacteria in my starter will begin to feast on the newly introduced flour. Then I will add salt. If you do this too early, I’ve read, it inhibits good yeast activity (I guess the critters who live in my sourdough starter prefer their food unsalted). Then I begin to “slap and fold,” where I gather the mound of dough by the edges, flip it up and over itself, and fling it down hard on the counter with a firm slap. There are a range of theories as to why this is the best way to stretch out and stimulate the yeasts and glutens and other microbial matter into giving you a good loaf of bread, but for me I just enjoy the sound of it, the muscularity and technique of it, the feel of the dough progressively becoming a less sticky, more stretchy, elastic and coherent mass beneath my fingers.
When everything “feels just right,” something you can only know if you’ve done it enough times, so you can tell that the process of transforming flour and water and wild yeasts (and their bacterial cohorts) has truly begun, I stretch the ball of dough from its center outward, fold it back into the center, turn the ball so as to do this from four directions, cover, let it rest for 10 minutes and do this all 2 more times. “Stretch and fold,” bread makers call it. Now the dough is set back in the bowl and left to “ferment.” If I’m in no rush, I can place it in my cold basement overnight, or even back into the fridge, and some hardcore sourdough aficionados will insist that a “long fermentation” is essential to get all the benefits out of making bread with wild yeasts, but if, like today, I’ve started the process early in the morning, the first thing I do after my morning coffee, I know eating an indescribably delicious piece of warm-from-the-oven sourdough bread will be the last thing I do before going to bed tonight.
Making sourdough bread is all about transformations. First, you create your starter (or purchase/acquire it from someone who has created it)—literally out of thin air. Set some flour and water out uncovered, keep adding equal weights of water and flour to the mixture and tossing out the extra, until one day bubbles start to appear—the waste product of the wild yeasts and bacteria who have drifted in from the air and started to feast on the flour. Build this mass up, your “starter” or “sponge,” slowly, lovingly. Give it a name. Mine is called “Ruth,” what seems a good, Old Testament, name, and from my very limited knowledge of the Bible/Torah she seems affiliated with heartiness and the blessings of good food. Your starter is a living thing, and what’s going on there is essential to the process of getting your “daily bread.”
For most of human history breads were made in this way, from wild yeasts that just found their way into grains and started transforming them into things we could more easily digest, bake, that could better sustain us. Before we found ways to separate out and culture and mass produce bread using yeasts isolated from the other bacterium that come along with them, wild yeasts and bacteria did a remarkable job of allowing us to create nutritious foods all on their own. Some argue they also did a good job of breaking down the gluten structures in wheat—hence no need for gluten-free alternative grain products for the majority of human history.
I have been fascinated with these kinds of transformations for a long time now—whether it’s another type of yeast that feeds on barley grains giving off CO2 and alcohol as its waste products to create beer (back when I used to always have 5 gallons of home-brew on hand)… or the gallons and gallons of water-like, just-barely-sweet maple sap I’d collect with my children and cook down, down, down…into an increasingly sweet syrup, stopping sometimes at a still-liquidy-sweet substance we turned into maple soda by adding some CO2, or flicked boiling hot, not quite yet syrup, onto some fresh snow, then ate the chewy-sweet-sticky “maple taffy” (or sur la neige, simply “on the snow,” as the French Canadians call it)… Or when I tie feathers and fur onto a hook, transforming these into a facsimile of an insect that will rest delicately in the surface film, hoping a trout will mistake it as food….
And perhaps most engaging to me is the transformation of ordinary words into poetic meaning. In Hemingway’s Nobel acceptance speech, he talked about the “proper degree of alchemy” required of writers. Similarly, the great American writer Flannery O’Connor spoke of the fiction writer’s job as taking that which is “canny” (ordinary, simple) and somehow transforming it into that which is “uncanny” (extraordinary, mysterious). She also used the terms “mystery and manners” to talk and write about this process. Great writers surely do take the base metals of our ordinary lives and transform them into gold. While the process of making a good loaf of sourdough, tying a fly that will bring a trout to hand, patiently, steadily boiling sap until it hits the right temperature and fundamentally changes…are all far easier than crafting words into art, these activities each remind me in ordinary, yet no less mysterious ways, about something I deeply cherish in this life.
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This is gorgeous.