Sweet sourdough

One of NPR’s science writers takes on the foundations of making sourdough bread, which makes me think of a couple of things.

I’m a good baker of cakes, pies and cookies, but I’ve never had luck with making bread. (Well—I did manage monkey bread, but it was under someone’s direct tutelage and it was in the last millennium.) I think one of the major issues is the temperature in our kitchen—I just couldn’t get anything to rise.

But back in the 70s, when my dad was an engineer for the Wolf Range company, he studied the science of heat distribution in ovens, and took up bread baking. He got to be quite adept at it, and was making whole-wheat sourdough bread before you could find it anywhere else.

He solved the temperature issue by rigging a 75 watt light bulb in one of the cabinets. It gave off just enough heat to effect the rising of the dough. For him it was an engineering problem.

(He also, after consulting the county agricultural expert, used to bake dirt for potting soil, to get rid of nematodes. But that’s a different story.)

The other thing NPR’s story reminds me of is the advantage of living in California—there’s almost no restaurant that won’t give you the option of sourdough toast with breakfast. They have varying degrees of sourness, of course, but it’s really nice to have that tooth enamel-cleaning sensation of chewy sourdough toast.

Yum.