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I think there are three things in my life in which I have reached a much-more-than-average level of skill: tennis, dancing and baking bread. At least, these are three activities that I chose to pursue directly, unlike editing text that is a big part of my proper job that I kind of fell into and that I guess I am now very good at.
But of these three things — I was a champion junior tennis player and a professional dancer (technically I still am, although very middle-aged) — it’s fermenting sourdough bread that has sneaked up on me the most. I started making bread out of frustration with the loaves I was able to buy here in the UK and then, very gradually, my skill and curiosity increased.
Fermenting sourdough is both a craft and a science. You can certainly get pretty heady with it: the calculations of hydration, quantities, scaling, and keeping spreadsheets of temperatures and results, etc. There’s quite a big part of my brain that is drawn to the science and technical aspects of fermenting sourdough.
But as I’ve grown more experienced and more deeply caught up in sourdough-ville, I found myself taking deep pleasure in the craft of making sourdough: the feel of the dough; how it changes in time, how its temperature affects my skin, and my capacity to adapt as I am going along.
I don’t write any of this to skite (a word we use in Aotearoa New Zealand to mean ‘show-off’). Rather, I write to articulate the strange sense of awe that comes from slowly learning a hand craft through doing. And simply by mixing flour, water and salt I have inadvertantly become part of something that we human beings have been doing for more than 10000 years.
