It is a real pleasure to buy something that is exactly what it is supposed to be and that is why I’m pleased to report that we have an excellent new sourdough culture. We make most of our bread at home and have for years. For the last three years we’ve used a starter we got from the best bakery in Maine, Black Crow Breads. With Ellen at work I’ve been doing more of the bakery and at some point I forgot to keep some starter and we lost our line.
Fortunately the intertubes came to the rescue and we got a San Francisco sourdough from sourdo.com . It’s been 20 years since I tried a dried sourdough culture and back then the results were terrible. I’ve learned a lot about sourdough since ( and beer, mead, lactobacilli etc. ) and this worked out really well. Following the instructions it took three days to really come alive but after a couple of trial batches I’m prepared to give it my unqualified approval.
Sourdough bread making takes endless repetition to be able to recognize and count on the growth curves involved. The way we do it is to take the starter from the fridge in the morning, feed it and let it come to room temperature. Then we make a sponge with two cups of starter, two of flour and one and a half of water, stirred, it sits for 2-4 hours. The remaining cup of starter is fed and after those same 2-4 hours returned to the fridge. The sponge is worked into 5-6 cups of flour and another cup or so of water, kneaded for 12 minutes by hand and left to rise over night. The fridge will do but it is better to have it in the forties (F). Cold rising lets the flavors develop a depth and interest. In the morning the dough is allowed to reach room temperature, formed into loaves and allowed to rise at 70F usually for about three hours, followed by baking in the usual way. The results:
We’ve discovered the Chamblin Bookmine in Jacksonville. A huge warren of a place full floor to ceiling with new and used books, it has become a twice a month habit. A wonderful discovery for me is Shusaku Endo. Writing ‘calm and understated’ novels of seventeenth century Japan, he is fascinated by the early interaction between feudal Japanese culture and the first Christian missionaries. ‘The Samurai’ is melancholic yet beautiful and reminded me of Knut Hamsun (high praise from me). On our last trip to Jax I picked up another one, ‘Silence’ and I’m looking forward to it.
A book that really lit me up is ‘The Song of the Dodo, Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction’ by David Quammen. Rare birds and animals, exotic islands, Alfred Wallace and discussions of current understandings of evolution and ecology, all subjects I’ve been interested in since I was just a little twitcher. The first part of the book spends quite some time with Alfred Wallace. I heard about him a couple of years after I first crossed the ‘Wallace Line’ between Bali and Lombok in Indonesia. I had noticed, vaguely but distinctly, that there was a big difference between the islands and that I had crossed something. Looking back at Bali with the sunset lighting up its clouds and mountains I felt I was in a new and different world but I assumed that perhaps all the Indonesian archipelago had the same variations. What Wallace saw was that from Bali west and north to the Malay Peninsula there was a commonality to the flora and fauna that changed drastically to the east and south. Bird species in particular are remarkably different. Using this as a start Quammen looks at the importance of insularity in evolution and what it means for larger issues of rarity and extinction. This is a very important, interesting and entertaining book, I can’t recommend it enough.
