by Angela Lovell.
When Dottie and Lottie decided to give making sourdough bread a whirl a few years ago, Lottie, knowing the extreme limitations of her patience, left Dottie to make the sourdough starter from scratch. After watching thirty or so YouTube videos on the subject, Dottie sallied forth into the sourdough adventure with calendar cleared for the five days the process was supposed to take.
Two months later, Dottie emerged triumphant with a baby food jar of sourdough starter after several incidences of cremation (having turned on the oven and forgotten she had left the starter in it with the light on) and quite a few measurement errors because she’d set the digital scale to ounces instead of grams.
When Lottie commented on Dottie’s disheveled appearance and suggested the bags under her eyes would be handy at the grocery store, that was no longer giving out plastic ones, she only avoided starter dumped on her head because Dottie remembered, at the very last second, the many sleepless nights involved in having to get up every five hours to feed it.
With starter in hand and anticipating the aroma of fresh baked bread at last, the two friends went about preparing their first batch of sourdough bread.
Because the digital scale had proven so capricious, Lottie decided to use trusty old measuring cups to assemble the ingredients, which was fine until she and Dottie had a disagreement over whether the recipe called for the four cups of flour to be scooped or poured and levelled with a knife. Lottie, sensing she might not be back in time for her favourite British TV comedy if this debate continued, agreed that she would pour and level, defiantly dumping a couple of scoops in when Dottie had to visit the bathroom.
When they finally had everything mixed together, Dottie suddenly had a crisis because she wasn’t sure if she’d used a tablespoon or a teaspoon for the salt, but Lottie was cheerfully pummeling away at the dough on the counter, plunging her sticky, dough-webbed fingers into the flour tin to grab handfuls for dusting and making Dottie apoplectic that she hadn’t set some aside in a separate bowl for the purpose.
Before long the dough was smooth and elastic and it was time to put it to rest under a damp teacloth and set the alarm every thirty minutes to fold it for the rest of the night, a task which fell to Dottie of course as the dough was residing at her house, and Lottie had absconded to watch reruns of ‘Doc Martin’.
Next morning, Lottie arrived early for the unveiling of the dough prior to it going in the oven. Dottie flushed with pride as she told her how it had risen into a dome that stuck to the tea towel the last time she checked it before passing out on the chesterfield the previous night. Oddly, no dome was evident as they approached the bowl this morning, the teacloth sagging limply.
To their horror, the bread had risen and sunk again and now assumed a form resembling a fedora hat.
Unfazed, they heated the oven and in went the loaf to emerge about 45 minutes later somewhat compacted but edible. The texture was acceptable (there were one or two air holes present) and the taste was heavenly (especially with a generous smothering of butter and blueberry jam).
All in all, a triumph of humanity over sourdough. For now.
Photo by Alicia Christin Gerald on Unsplash
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by angela lovell 