Home life

I walked with my daughter after dinner earlier this evening and we turned back because the rain started falling hard and we didn’t feel like getting wet, even though it was an April shower rather than cold March sleet. Yesterday we celebrated Easter, and with everyone home for the past month it was nice to break out the good china for dinner. A few weeks ago I decided to get a lot of starts going for my garden, including herbs like parsley and holy basil, which are slow to germinate and sometimes forgotten until it’s too late to plant them. Being home all the time, it’s easy to make sure they stay sufficiently moist and warm and it’s nice to see that everything is coming along fine. Because the ground is still quite soggy I also started beets and mustard greens in flats, which I usually direct seed. One of the reasons I like starting spring plants like beets indoors is that when I transplant them I can ensure that there’s some regularity to the spacing, which doesn’t always happen when I start them in the ground. It often rains while the seeds are still germinating, and half the seeds end up pooling in a six inch square space while the rest of the row is staggered with one plant every foot or two.
I’ve been happy to read that yeast is in such demand these days that it is selling out in stores around the country, and when I look at our own kitchen I’m not surprised. My youngest daughter loves to bake and it seems like she’s in the kitchen most nights after dinner, wondering what she can make. Sourdough breads are experiencing a home renaissance, too, and as a dedicated sourdough baker I am so happy that people everywhere are beginning to taste how good a loaf of home baked sourdough is, and that yeast shortages aren’t a cause for concern! Hopefully it’s more than a Covid fad and more people begin to bake their bread regularly. I have never been exact with timing or measurements when I make bread and as a result I’ve had my fair share of loaves that have failed to some degree, but I’m okay with that because I bake through the ups and downs of work and parenting and schedules that pull me from the kitchen, and my indifference to most schedules and rules for kneading and rising has shown me that dough has a very wide range of tolerances. The gold standard for a good sourdough loaf these days seems to be those big-holed, high hydration loaves that taste great and look beautiful on social media, but in my many years of baking I’ve never aimed for them. Maybe I don’t have the patience for weighing my water or taking notes, but I also like a more uniform crumb so when I make sandwiches the butter and honey and mustard and melted cheese doesn’t fall through the holes. Pragmatic failure, perhaps.
After St. Patrick’s Day my son and I made a big batch of sauerkraut and this weekend, a month since it began percolating on the kitchen counter, I put a half gallon or so into a smaller container in the fridge, and put the remainder into a cool, dark corner in the garage. With a diagnosis earlier this year of high blood pressure, I have significantly reduced my salt intake, much of which comes from fermented foods, and this batch of kraut is the first since I’ve started taking medication, so in response to it I’m rinsing all the kraut off before I eat it; I think a significant amount of the salt remains in the brine I dredge the sauerkraut from, and by further rinsing it I hope that my blood pressure remains in a healthy range. If not, it may be the end of fermented foods for me, which would be sad because I have a big crock of Korean doenjang fermenting for more than a year on the back porch, and an even larger crock of gochujang right next to it.
We go through phases of eating certain things and when my wife recently found an old pack of sprouting seeds I began watering them, and am happy to see that long-expired seed still has good viability. The sprouts will be ready in another day or two and after a few batches we’ll get sick of eating them and won’t make another batch for a year or two. As long as we don’t lose the strainer lid, we’re good to go whenever the mood strikes us. Eat well, stay well!

We go back to the beginning

Early April and cold rain falling, chilly enough in our house that I still have to bring my starter into the living room where the wood stove is pulsing its heat, the most basic slurry of wheat and water dancing an evolutionary chemical dance with wild yeasts as we go back to the beginning and start again. Wheat and rye both beckon still in the raw spring air, and this lump of life I pulled from the fridge after dinner last night will today be split into bowls and for the next few days the bubble and slush of a growing starter reminds me that the very space we inhabit, the air we breathe is a biome of its own with dust and disease and fungi and bacteria and small bits of life we knew nothing about in previous centuries but had, through luck and practice and observation and long told stories that documented the hows and whys, developed scientific thinking through what we even today call superstitions or mumbo jumbo that contained embedded collective wisdom passed on across generations and today we may not think it necessary to drag clean linen over dew beneath an apple tree, and squeeze that moisture onto the wet flour mix, but they knew how to start a starter, and with all our advances in knowledge and science we almost ignored the old ways to make bread or preserve cabbages, ferment milk or brew our beer, and thirty years ago it looked almost as though our doom had been pronounced and we in these United States would be relegated to eating factory food and dead nutrition but in pockets around the country and globe, in small towns and crowded cities, still there were a few who continued to say yes to the old ways of teasing yeasts from the air or the skin of an apple from a long abandoned tree, a remnant of last century’s orchards now neglected and half dead, mostly overgrown, part of a hedgerow or just forgotten down in a gully, its unpruned branches a jumble of angles, and now a new generation has relearned many of the traditions of their grandparents and great grandparents and it’s not just cideries and bakeries that are doing this but you and I, who bake and press apples and say yes again to the possibilities of simple wild-yeast fermented food, the nutritional, caloric foundation of life in much of the world for millennia, and every time we knead a mass of dough or pull an umbered loaf from a hot oven and listen to its skin crackle as it cools, waiting, waiting just long enough to pull it apart and taste the transformation and spread it with butter and honey or wait a few days and grill it with cheese in an olive oiled pan, even though it’s just a weekday lunch or a snack before bed, the bread, beginning with its tug on our jaw, the edge of char almost realized, heating a mass of dough until it dries just as it pushes and prepares to burst, we bow to the ordinary, and every time we sit together and pass the peas and sop up the gravy with a hearty crust we’re in the midst of it all, and a deep love of the daily, which in these days of sheltering, working from home, and re-imagining family life, this return to the beginning, starting with the most basic forms of life – yeast – means we can begin to meditate on what tomorrow could look like, when the rain stops falling.