Building a Better Bread

4 February 2010

If I don’t have a project going in the kitchen, something long-term that won’t be ready to eat for at least another month or so, then I just don’t feel right. Idle hands, you know? That’s why last week I decided to try for myself one of the oldest food preparation techniques known to man: a sourdough starter.

Bread making began at the same time civilization appeared, between 10,000 and 8,000 B.C.E. It was probably one of the first prepared foods, and its intricate complexity and simultaneous simplicity makes it my favorite thing to eat and make myself. At its simplest, it contains only flour and water, but with any simple thing, every little detail counts. Those who have made bread before would ask, what about yeast? The dried-up little buggers that come in 7 gram packets in the grocery store are just brewer’s yeast scraped off the sides of beer tanks after they are emptied, but they are only one type of that particular microorganism; thousands exist all over the world. They’re everywhere, from the air we breathe to the water we drink, and all they do is eat and pass gas, which is responsible for making bread rise.

Sure, you can make reliable, good bread from store bought yeast, but the best breads in the world are manufactured from sourdough starters containing wild yeast. To make a starter, all you really have to do is mix flour and water and “feed” it by regularly adding more flour and water. My guess is some prehistoric foodie accidentally left his flatbread dough out in a warm place for a few days, forgot about it, and returned to find the resulting dough baked into a lighter, more delicious bread. It’ll take some time, but eventually you’ll have a healthy colony of yeast and their accompanying bacteria strong enough to raise a few loaves of bread and give it a wonderful complex taste. I really wanted to try it, not only to have something fun for me to do, but something good to eat. Like I said, good honest bread is my favorite thing in the world to eat, but Indian’s just don’t like it. They get their complex carbs from chapatti, an unleavened flatbread made from nothing but whole-wheat flour and water. It’s good, but it’s also plain and almost too simple, lacking complex flavor and completely devoid of texture.

My starter did not start out so well. I bought a 10-kilo bag of whole-wheat flour, because it’s so darn cheap, and a kilo of grapes for their juice to get the yeast going. Grapes are notorious for having delicious and strong yeast, which is why wine is made from them. I ran into problems right from the start. The mud hut is quite cold, and yeast needs a warm environment to grow and reproduce. I put it on top of the refrigerator to get some residual heat from the regulator, but I didn’t think it would be warm enough. Heck, it gets downright frosty in the kitchen at night. In addition, Shammi kept moving it off the fridge, which was the warmest spot in the house, so he could use it to make yogurt (yes, he makes yogurt from scratch, and it’s so much better than Dannon). Finally, I don’t even have an oven. Even if it did work, I wouldn’t be able to do anything with it. I was just doing something for poops and giggles to keep myself occupied, and I didn’t even have a goal in sight. Plus, there are so many different kinds of wild yeast, and it’s entirely possible that Indians don’t bake bread because the yeast in the area is either too weak or simply doesn’t taste too good. For the next few days of feeding my starter (I want to name it, any ideas?) there were no signs of life. I felt kind of worthless, like there were so many elements in my project that were against me from the start, even though nobody was to blame.

Actually, it started to mirror my work at KLB, both in cooking American foods and completing the nutrition profile for the girls at the hostel. So many people here want me to whip out these amazing baked goods and American snacks for them immediately, and I just keep falling a bit short. I tried making a different batch of eggless brownies as per a recipe tested from a friend back home who promised it would result in a fudgy and delicious confection (for more of her baking exploits, check out Whisk Kid). You know the saying that baking is an exact science? I hate it, because it’s wrong. You can never bake the same thing twice, and if you add an extra tablespoon of flour or play around with the spices, it’ll turn out just fine.

Having said that, there are quite a few things in baking that need to go right and occur in the correct order for your ventures to be a success. Today with the brownies, that just wasn’t happening. The ingredients here are different for one. Flour is coarser, sugar comes in giant crystals that never seem to dissolve, and butter simply isn’t the same in taste or composition (because some of it comes from buffalo. Fancy that). The equipment here is not suited for baking at all, and it is only appropriate for cooking simple Indian dishes. Most homes don’t have ovens, and the one that I am using in the hostel is the size of a microwave and is a bit stronger than a microwave oven. It’s really good at browning the top of the brownies and burning the edges, but not at cooking the inside of a baked product. I had to purchase metric measuring cups, which only come in one size; nothing here is measured in the kitchen. Kitchen scales for weighing ingredients are way too expensive, so all of my metric recipes calling for flour or sugar in grams are automatically going to be way off. I can’t even find a rubber, plastic or silicone spatula in any of the shops in town, and in my opinion, that’s the most important tool for any baker besides his bare (but squeaky clean) hands.

The problem as I’m starting to see it is that American and Indian cuisines are more than just a world apart. Indian recipes haven’t changed for the past several thousand years, and there is no outside influence or domestic desire to make them change. As a result, anybody who comes in and tries something different is bound to run into difficulties. The two styles are just incompatible. These were the thoughts going through my head as I pulled yet another batch of substandard brownies from my pathetic little oven. They were overly sweet, not chocolate-y enough, and still a bit runny in the center. I couldn’t get them out of the makeshift baking pan without them falling apart. It’s not the fault of the recipe, there were just too many circumstances going against it. Everybody loved them, but only because they were new and different. I think they were just trying to be polite.

I couldn’t even finish the nutritional profile on which I’ve been working for over a week. I have no internet access at the mud hut to look up nutrition facts for all the ingredients, so I can only do that work at KLB. But at KLB, I’m too busy botching brownies and getting mobbed by giggling girls to sit down for much time and research. When I finally do get the time, the internet is usually so slow that I can hardly load any pages or look up any new ideas for recipes.

To be honest, I was probably just feeling a bit down because Agata, my temporary Polish roommate, was leaving that day to go back home. Her visit was short, but we clicked so well. She’s an amazing dancer and shares with me a love of good food and a fondness for trying new things. It helped that we were the only two white people for a hundred kilometers, which meant we both got stared at constantly. We loved to joke about the Indian way of doing things (TII), and every evening when we got home from our work, I would open my computer, play some music, and the two of us would just spend the rest of the night dancing, eating and swapping stories. What more could you ask from a roommate?

On the walk home (uphill for 30 minutes, try that 5 times a week) from work today, I just felt a little bit frustrated. Even though I wasn’t remotely close to completely losing hope and giving India the finger, it made me feel somewhat lost and upset. I knew that I was coming home to an empty house and a dead sourdough starter. After dropping my backpack, I resolved to just 86 the ungrateful mass of wet dough and call it quits.

Wait… are those bubbles on the surface?

And what’s that smell? It’s like… wine, or beer. Definitely alcoholic…

…is it just me, or did it rise a little since this morning?

It’s… IT’S ALIVE! MWAHAHAHA!

I couldn’t believe it. Despite the relatively freezing temperatures and otherwise hostile environment, a colony of yeast and bacteria was able to thrive and begin fermentation. It was able to surpass all odds and make its own destiny, free from the oppression of… okay, I’ll stop, this is starting to sound like a bad Disney movie. Even so, coming home to find that at least one thing worked exactly the way it should have, even though I fully expected it to fail, made me feel at least a little better about being here. The canteen kitchen is tiny and cramped, the oven is a piece of rubbish, the ingredients are limited, the internet sucks, and everything I make here turns out burnt or undercooked, but at least they keep giving me another shot.

And I’ve finally got bread. Sort of.