having my right arm in a cast gets in the way of just about all of my hobbies, and one of those is bread baking. even no-knead recipes are basically impossible, as you still need two hands to shape the loaf. so, i took this as an opportunity to start a masters class in bread-baking: making my own sourdough starter. san francisco is famous for its excellent sourdough bread because apparently the strains of yeast native to the air in the bay area are particularly tasty.

and smelly, as i’ve learned in the past 10 days. who knew that a mixture of what is essentially papier mache paste could bubble and expand and ferment and smell SO strongly? the process is simple enough: leave a bowl of flour and water, covered, out on your counter for days and see what grows in there. if it’s mold, throw it out. if it’s yeast, use it to bake bread. from there its gets more complicated: the exact quantity and temperature of the flour and water which must be “fed” to the starter each day. tap water must be left to stand overnight so that the chlorine evaporates out (that might kill the delicate yeasties, which, in fact, is exactly why they put chlorine into our drinking water). utensils must be sterilized to keep from introducing unwanted bacteria.

the author of one of my bread baking books suggested that you give your starter a name. (she calls hers Billo, for reasons that were not explained). another book explained that the starter is sometimes called the chef, or the mother. and somehow that’s the one that stuck, in our household. we have begun referring to this smelly lump of dough as “the mother”*. as in, “the mother must be fed.” when i went out of town this weekend i had to move the mother into a suspended state of animation in the fridge since i wouldn’t be around to feed her daily.

just as soon as i get the use of my arm back (somewhere between 4 days and two months from now, depending on what the doctor decides next week) i will attempt bake bread out of this science experiment. in the mean time, the mother lays quietly dormant in our fridge with a note on the lid which says, “I am NOT pancake batter!”

pls. note: this is made somewhat less weird by the fact that my OWN maternal relative has always been “mom” to me, not “mother”.

* pls. note: this is made somewhat less weird by the fact that my OWN maternal relative has always been “mom” to me, not “mother”.