Fermenting in the kitchen

If I wasn’t feeding a family, I could eat runny eggs, aged cheddar, homemade bread with salty butter and a rotating pile of greens for nearly every meal. As the other three members of the household object to this, I cook other things, too. I’ve been making those meals for 15 years now, a seemingly endless cycle of preparation and clean up.

For awhile I’d still make things I loved, hoping my kids would learn to love them too. But it was hard to make time for complicated dishes, and eventually they fell by the wayside.

I hung on to my breadmaking, though. I love making bread, and I had a simple no-knead recipe I could make from memory. But not everyone enjoyed the crusty loaves as much as I did. They didn’t make great sandwiches. The crust was tough. It required a grownup to slice.

Feeding half a loaf of handmade bread to the chickens wore away at my spirits. We want to raise free-range chickens that live happy lives, but artisanal bread is a step too far. So breadmaking became a special occasion activity, reserved for holidays.

But recently, in an effort to rediscover what I actually like to cook and eat, I’ve picked up my bread hook again, working my way through new loaves and some old favorites. Breadmaking has reemerged as a way to play in the kitchen, something I do for pleasure. The tactile work of making bread is satisfying in a way that feeding children is not. There is an end point; the satisfaction of pulling the loaf out of the oven, eating a slice with salty butter.

So naturally, I feel guilty about it. I should be making meals or cleaning the kitchen, not making it dirtier and leaving the rest of the meal to my husband while I faff around with sourdough starter. If I enjoy it, it must be selfish, or so the martyr in my head insists.

Imagine my surprise when my teenager asked specifically if I could make sourdough last week. He missed my bread while he was at camp. I was astonished. They like my bread!

So much of parenting is an exercise in lobbing good intentions into the void, hoping a functional, wholehearted adult emerges someday. The immediate feedback is usually negative: “No!” repeated ad infinitum. Then they graduate to “I don’t want/like/need that.” With my teenager, I’ve taken to asking directly for positive feedback: What was something good today?

But unsolicited kudos? Plus the discovery that something I did for myself was giving joy to others? Well, that was a rare victory.

The loaf vanished. Lucky I doubled the batch. The second loaf was going into the freezer, but it looks like we’ll need it tomorrow.