At long last the Meltdown is here!

"She is definitely a real sourdough"

Sourdoughs can be found in two forms around Calypso Farm. One is the sourdough you are probably familiar with. A nice crusty bread with a curious complexity. It begins with a starter of warm water and flour, aged to perfection. Once the starter is made it then requires a feeding of warm water and flour whenever you want to make a new batch.

Before you bake your bread you sit the starter, mixed with warm water and flour, out overnight. Then in the morning you mix in more flour and warm water plus some salt. This is also the point at which to make sourdough pancakes. Yes I have tried them... and yes, they are amazingly good!

You let this sticky/wet mixture rest in a warm place for most of the day, and about 4 or 5 hours before baking, mix in enough flour to make bread dough. Then 3-31/2 hours before baking, it is time to take on the tricky task of forming the loaves. People use many different techniques, but the one I've been sticking with is the pinching method. I knead the dough to get the gluten going, and then make a "gluten blanket" by pinching the dough underneath and into itself. Then let the loaves rise until the wood-fired oven is ready for bread baking (a wood-fired oven is also an essential piece of the sourdough process)!

Tom, the local authority on sourdough bread, will not bake bread any other way. He stands by the fact that using a sourdough starter filled with natural yeasts from the air around the farm is the only way to make really great bread. But Tom is a "sourdough snob" and most other people around the farm use quick acting yeast to make a type of bread called a 'poolish', or in my case... Challahs!

If you haven't noticed already, baking days are a big event here. Every Friday we all plan to make our breads for the week, and then wait anxiously for the oven to be fired up. Normally, we'll make some sort of cracker or pizza to put in the oven when it is still too hot for breads, and then chow down until our bread can actually go in. People on the Atkins diet... would not do well at Calypso Farm.

Besides the actual crusty bread, the other types of sourdoughs you find moving through the farm are actually people! I just learned the other day that people who have lived in Alaska for more than 30 years are called "Sourdoughs." I was talking about one such volunteer to one of the farm apprentices, and they remarked that "yeah, she's a real sourdough." I had to do a double take, because I'd never heard of anyone referred to as a sourdough before... but after thinking about it, I can see the connection. So, for this week, I will leave you with that thought to ponder.