Not A Careful Woman

My Experience With Rapid Onset Sourdough Preoccupation

with sincere apologies to Mike Ehrmantraut

I’m not a careful woman. I’m just not very good at following directions correctly on the first try.

I’ve also never met a social contagion that I wasn’t tempted by. So during the great sourdough craze of the pandemic, I fell in love. The tradwife aesthetic was still exotic and marginal, not overplayed, I had been stuck in my squalid NYC ground floor one-bedroom without a whiff of outside human contact, and I craved tactile beauty and accomplishment. I wanted to greet my husband at the door (not that he left the house either) in my long Hill House knockoff dress holding a golden artisanal loaf.

“Wow,” he would say in my fantasy, biting into a slice covered in melting Kerrygold butter. “This is so much better than anything you can get at the store.”

“I know,” I would say coyly, my daisy-print puff-sleeves fluttering fetchingly in the fetid draft from the nearby subway. “You know why? It’s because it’s made with love.”

My parents mailed me beautiful loaf-rising baskets and clay bakers for my birthday. I dutifully mixed the slurry of flour and tangy starter and water, let it sit in the swirled basket (“hmmm, not rising much, maybe it’ll rise in the oven”, I thought to myself, optimistically), and then into the baker - and what emerged was sorry indeed. Dense, grey, shapeless. It was sour, at least, but bread? I don’t know if it qualified.

I still don’t know what went wrong with the sourdough. The starter must have been dead from the start, or I waited too long for the rise, or else not long enough. Hell if I know. Disappointed but not deterred, I tried again. But each loaf was flat, gross, tragic. I try to be plucky and persistent, but there’s only so many times I can rally in the face of overwhelming failure.

After too many disappointments, I bought a foil packet of quick-rise yeast and tried another recipe. Sourdough starter is fussy, temperamental, romantic, following its own whims. But the industrially produced yeast knew what it was there to do and got the job done. The recipe lacked the romance of the sourdough - no witchy starter goo, bubbling in the fridge like an arcane potion, and the loaves it produced were a lot more pedestrian. But the little yeast loaves were cute, golden, hot, fresh, and delicious. It scratched the itch. Good enough.

It wasn’t the original plan, and it took way longer than it would have for a careful woman, but I am not a careful woman. You can tell from the scarred-over piercings on my ears, crack in my voice, the bruises on my thighs: I sometimes have to learn things the hard way.

More recently, I heard someone talking about Japanese Milk Bread and fell in love again. It looked lightly sweet, dense, and golden. The soft pillowy texture looked entrancing. And there was something about the way it was made with milk and cream that made it feel fortified, healthful, good for children.

I found a recipe that the author assured me had been perfected after months of trials. Well, the first time I tried, sure enough - failure. Not her fault! I let it rise too long, the yeast was exhausted, and when it baked in the oven, the rolls were tough and dense. And the second time, I somehow did even worse. Distracted by my toddler, I forgot the salt, rendering the batch totally bland! (I rescued the second half of the dough by smothering it in garlic butter and salty cheese to make monkey bread).

But the third time, I made sure to add all the ingredients. I kneaded the dough in the Kitchenaid for a very long time. In a little flash of inspiration, I added a generous spoonful of powdered vanilla to the sweet milky dough. Then I let it rise on the radiator. The fragrant orb of dough that I found 2 hours later was perfectly round, domed, white with little vanilla speckles. When I brushed it with one fingertip, it was as soft as my infant son’s cheek.

That batch was sublime. The baby went to work on it with his little teeth in the way he does all bread: methodical, thoughtful, producing vast quantities of crumbs. I was pleasantly surprised that the toddler liked it too. He usually doesn’t go for bread, but he scooped out the soft white innards and left the golden chewy rind behind. My husband ate his normal egg sandwich on it - a huge improvement from an English Muffin. Finally, success. I glowed, simpered, gave away half loaves to friends so they would compliment me on my baking acumen.

As I write this, my kids are sleeping and my next batch is baking in the oven. I added vanilla again, but it’s taking much longer to bake than I expected. I hope it turns out okay, but I don’t know - maybe I forgot the stupid yeast this time. What can I do, but put it back in the oven and cross my fingers?

Bread update: the crust got too dark and tough, but overall, still yummy

Bread recipe appendix:

Milk bread - this is really good. If you follow the instructions, you will be rewarded.

Easy Perfect Yeast Bread - this is indeed easy. All the satisfaction, none of the pain.