Bursting at the Seams

 

My sourdough starter has a mind of its own!

The best thing I learned in India was how to make food.  Not even how to grow it, but how to create real, edible food out of the simplest raw materials.  The foods that we can make for ourselves, yet we continue to buy.  Over and over.  As prices go up.  As quality goes down.  Bread.  Yogurt.  Hummus.  Granola. 

Some of you will say, those are simple things; why not go a little more exotic?  Well, I’m a beginner, and for me, these are the essentials.  Especially bread and yogurt.  Bread because it’s the base of so many meals, and yogurt because I just can’t get enough of it.  Matthew and I together consume upwards of two quarts of the good stuff each week, and at four bucks a pop for the creamy organic variety (Pequea is our absolute favorite), it can get a tad expensive for two expat returnees without jobs. 

But let me start with bread.  In India, our host and the mother of the farm, Sujata, reigned supreme over the kitchen.  During our first week in residence there, she approached our group of interns with four squares of chocolate and four mystery herbs.  Placing one secret handful in each of our palms she asked us to guess.  Whoever spoke correctly would get a sweet reward.  Rosemary, cilantro, sage, and . . . was it all spice?  (Yes, this farm had everything). 

She came to us with gifts to nurture our curiosity and singular passions.  When she discovered my ambition of culinary self-sufficiency, she slipped a ball of sticky sourdough inoculum from the loaf she was kneading and whispered crude instructions:  “Add flour and water and a little sugar.  Let it sit in the sun.  Knead it again.  Let it sit again.  Bake it for a while.”  I spent an afternoon with that first loaf of bread, watching it rise under a red-checked cloth in the sun, pressing gingerly into the soft give of its hardening skin, gauging when it was ready for the oven.

In India it was easy.  Bread was made every day, so there was always a rising ball of sourdough from which I could pluck my inoculum and grow my own sustenance out of flour and sugar. 

In the United States, things became a bit more complicated.  Active dry yeast is easy to buy, and rises well enough.  But it wasn’t self-sufficient.  I didn’t want to recreate my inoculum each and every time I started a loaf, which meant keeping a stock of dry yeast on-hand, another purchased ingredient.  It seemed so inefficient, so wasteful, so American. 

Sourdough, as far as I know (and I know very little about these things) simply means that the yeast never stops living.  Once you get a sourdough starter going, and if you nurture it with the respect and diligence that any life deserves, it breathes, and not only that but it creates.  It rises and falls, it secretes liquid, it gathers a sweet smell.  It gives bread, and pancakes, and muffins and more, on and on and on.

So I began my own starter.  I mixed in one packet of dry yeast with flour, water, and sugar and watched it grow.  I stirred it every day for a week, maybe more, until it was ripe with suggestive bubbles of air and a curd-like aroma.  And then I made some bread.  I fed the baby starter, and then I made more bread, bringing one loaf to a dinner party and giving another as a gift.  I have fallen into a sort of scientific love with my jar of sourdough just waiting to happen.

Living like this, off of the muscles in our very own hands (for kneading dough certainly requires them), is just about the most basic instinct we have.  And yet almost no one in my culture does this.  The skill of baking bread, or curdling and preserving milk, is elemental.  The act establishes a link with our grandparents and our most long-ago ancestors.  It creates a space where we can remove ourselves from an overpowering consumer culture and regain a hint of what we, as humans, once were.  And it allows us to grow.  Or perhaps I should speak only for myself, for I can see the mirror into my life that the yeast provides, growing ever more expansive with each new creation.

 

The starter grows into a new, bigger jar.

Homes

Somehow, even being back in Philadelphia, I can’t escape literature about India.  I recently picked up a book that I had tried to read on my very first trip to India six years ago.  This passage, a dialogue between two soldiers – one from Bangladesh and the other Britain - resonated with me:

“ ‘Please.  Do me this one, great favor, Jones.  If ever you hear anyone, when you are back home – if you, if we, get back to our respective homes – if ever you hear anyone speak of the East,’ and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, ‘hold your judgment.  If you are told ‘they are all this’ or ‘they do this’ or ‘their opinions are these,’ withhold your judgment until all the facts are upon you.  Because that land they call ‘India’ goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same among that multitude, then you are mistaken.  It is merely a trick of the moonlight.’ ” – White Teeth, Zadie Smith

This last trip to India was a roller coaster.  It surprised me and rocked my center and taught me many unexpected things.  While during my first trip to India I was moved to extend my stay, this time around I felt instead the overpowering pull of home.  It is good to be back among my family and friends, but I am still sorting through the emotions of the last five months, and especially the final few weeks.

In South India, I saw wild elephants for the first time.  I pulled ginger and turmeric out of the ground, and tasted coffee cherries and raw green peppercorns.  I tugged leeches off my bloody feet and rode a ferris wheel fifteen stories above the ground.  In a way, the months were like an extreme adventure camp, punctuated by attempts to break through communication barriers and do something meaningful and good.  The people I met welcomed me to their homes, and simultaneously pushed me away.  Even while I was learning and connecting and contributing, I was being cut loose.  I was untethered to the community, and the locals could sense it.  So many of my first conversations in India centered on the question:  why would I leave my family and everything I know to come here for a year?  It was a good question and one that, by the end, I couldn’t fully answer.  My life is here on the east coast of the U.S.A.; my work is here; my family is here; and now, I am here.

But even though it wasn’t the experience I had hoped for – not the unself-conscious exchange of cultures or the scene of a breakthrough cooperative movement – I can recognize that it’s not India’s fault, just as it’s not my fault.  India can never be the same experience twice, and neither can I experience India the same way twice.  We are two separate entities that, this time around, passed each other in the night.