Perhaps your favorite bakery has closed temporarily, and you find the pale loaves on ransacked shelves almost as sad as the evening news. Or maybe everyone posting and naming their starters on Instagram as if they were rescued puppies has lured you into the world of bread-baking.
You suddenly have time for such things — for victory gardens, board games and DIY deliciousness. In the past month or so, baking bread, particularly sourdough, has reached a level of popularity not seen since the Gold Rush. Grocery stores are running out of flour and yeast. And to meet demand, bakeries, caterers and restaurants-turned-pantries are selling their own flour, yeast or even starter, also known as levain, the living mixture of flour, water and wild yeasts and bacteria that leaven the bread.
Iliana Berkowitz, founder and baker of San Leandro’s As Kneaded Bakery, calls the fermentation of flour, salt and water a “marvel of science,” which explains why parents are getting their kids into the gluten game, too. Science is notably absent from some distance learning plans these days.
“It’s also edible, nourishing and gives people a feeling of accomplishment, especially right now,” she says.
More options: You can ask a friend for a portion of his starter. Given the vast online resources these days, Berkowitz favors making your own, but keep in mind that creating starter typically requires a few pounds of flour.
Essentially, you mix flour and water together and let the mixture sit for a day or more. After that, you feed the budding culture daily by moving a portion of it to a new mixture of flour and water and discarding the remainder.
In terms of recipes, the no-knead style — coined back in 2006 when Jim Lahey of Brooklyn’s Sullivan Street Bakery introduced his fuss-free sourdough baked in a Dutch oven — is the best way to go, Berkowitz says. Wet, loose-grain breads, like olive-oil-doused foccacia, are also great for newbies.
“It’s an easier one to do if all you have is a bowl and your hands,” she says. “After your mix is developed, you just dimple it with your fingers and bake it in a rimmed sheet pan.”
Sourdough may be crazy popular right now, but it isn’t the only bread worth your time. Measuring and shaping any dough, from easy quick breads to pizza dough and the best handmade tortillas can provide the same feelings of accomplishment and anxiety-relief. You can even make flavorful, New England-style brown bread in a slow cooker using America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe, which calls for molasses, raisins and whole grains.
But if it is sourdough you’re after, check out the website’s just-launched bread newsletter and blog, Wordloaf. In a sign of the times, Andrew Janjigian, a senior editor at Cook’s Illustrated, challenged himself to make a simple sourdough boule with a smaller-than-normal starter — just 10 grams of starter and 10 grams of water — in order to save his precious flour for the actual baking part.
He posted the project on Instagram — #Quarantinystarter — and within days, it went viral, with people from as far away as Australia and Malaysia following him and posting their own micro-levains. His cat, Ono, appears in posts with messages of hope. And Janjigian even quotes his nascent starter, as in Day 5: “I’m not bread yet, but I’m definitely getting there! And I take it back: Even tiny starters can be stinky.”
“When I started this, I had no idea what it was going to become,” says Janjigian, who began the project on March 22 and estimates that up to 3,000 people have joined him. He gets a lot of panicky posts, people wondering why their starters are bubbling too much or not enough. He responds to all of them.
“People tend to doubt themselves and the process,” he says. “I just reassure them that starting this way, from scratch with a sourdough starter, will make you a better baker later.”
And later is something we’re all thinking about.