How to Make Sourdough Bread
Starter
The starter should be at least a year in the making, two if you began earnestly baking bread in the early days of the pandemic, back when the Cuomo brothers both seemed all right. Your starter may have turned black or the rye began to snowflake across the top, or you moved across the country not once but twice and did not bring equal parts flour and water in a mason jar. The first time you made a starter, it was with flour sold from the closed pizza restaurant down the street in Southern California. There was no yeast or flour at the supermarket. You did not have a kitchen scale, so you mixed the white flour with water until it looked like thick pancake batter and hoped for the best. The mixture gurgled after three days, and you thought it was ready. It was not. You made bread anyway. The flavor was good and the crumb was excellent. The bread was flat, not domed. Later, in a different year, in a different state, you try again.
You use King Arthur’s recipe. You still need a starter and you begin again, feed it twice a day for a week. Wow, you think, how demanding. Sometimes you give it rye and wheat, sometimes just plain white. It looks kinda like the quicksand from The Princess Bride. After a week, it is ready.
Autolyse
You have not lived in Montana since you were a kid in Kalispell, so technically you have moved back, which feels not at all like moving back to Idaho to live with your parents, an act that you are more familiar with than you would like to admit. You pick a town that seems artsy because you want friends and you choose an apartment that’s a little rough around the edges and reminds you of every house where you partied in high school, those that were rented out by emancipated youth. The carpets remind you of those in the Kalispell rental, vomit-colored shag and purple-brown, and you think, This will do.
It is cold outside and you look out the window and see your third deer of the day. You are trying to eat more vegetarian meals. You have tried to cook these meals for your family but they mistake them as side dishes. Four deer, five, six outside your window. You have spent half your life in the Mountain West and you have never held a gun. You should learn how to hunt. But then there are the deer.
Because it is night now, it is time to close the shades. The door is already locked, and has been all day. This feels new to you.
You mix the flour, starter, and water together and then you cover with a towel and wait twenty minutes. This has something to do with gluten. Add some salt.
There are six deer in the yard, you text the family group chat. Also, have you seen the news?
Your dad says he will give you one of his rifles.
Knead and Bulk Rise
You are procrastinating with bread. You have two options. The first option is to knead the dough the old-fashioned way, pushing it away from you and pulling back in. You can slap it on the counter a few times. The sound is satisfying. The second option is to stretch and fold, which means you pull the sides up and fold them back in, perhaps like you are swaddling a baby. You stretch and fold once every hour for three hours. This will give you time to go read some theories on the internet.
You are watching a story unfold very slowly. The story is true, or will be true once the crime is solved. With the exception of Serial, which was very good, you are not generally one for true crime. The obsession, morbid. And yet, here you are.
You know all the details, the fake ones and the real ones, you know all the theories and whether they originated on TikTok or from a psychic on Youtube. Some are truly unhinged. You spend your days reading Reddit but never post. For murder fanfic, there is certainly a lack of creativity. Every comment appears like a game of Mad Libs Clue.
It was [person] because he had bad vibes in the [interview/Facebook comment/video]. He was [bad emotion] and killed [initials of victim] [first/second/third/fourth].
The police say: Four students in Moscow, ID were murdered in their sleep. Someone entered their house and stabbed them all with a knife. Most were found in bed.
A video is released with footage from earlier in the night. Two of the girls order pasta from a food truck.
The internet says: [redacted] is so suspicious! He’s so creepy. I looked up his Facebook. He is a hunter, which means he knows how to use a knife and is not afraid of blood. He has fled the country. His parents are rich. That’s his alibi. His mom’s address is [redacted]. He works at [redacted]. I hope they get the sonofabitch.
The internet says: stop doxxing. The identity has not been confirmed. The internet sleuths are spreading lies. Let the police do their job.
There are obvious flaws in the justice system. You are not a fan of the police but there is no doubt that they know more about solving a murder case than you do. You and the internet have one piece of digital media. The police and the FBI have hundreds. They have thousands of tips. You continue to find it remarkable how so many people disregard expertise. This is perhaps the most interesting part of the true crime community. It is very American. The internet vigilantes rise up.
You never know. They could be lying. This is the first internet crowd. Defenders of the thin blue line. The QAnon folks. Not always but often. The conspiracy theories are telling, and right now, they do not trust the police.
Who doesn’t love a mystery? Who doesn’t love a puzzle? Sure, you do. But there are some things you don’t know, might never know. Hell, you love a good narrative, too, but you don’t have the impulse to invent facts in a true story, to suggest that someone is guilty of committing a violent crime because he was in a fraternity or lived next door.
Initially, you think that everyone on these forums is a middle-aged suburban housewife who watches too much Dateline or Law& Order. People whose obsession with violence is nothing more than entertainment; people who have never known anything like this kind of tragedy in their whole lives. But you see many people on Reddit sharing their stories about being stalked, of having relatives murdered or gone missing. Home invasion. Horrible accidents. There’s empathy. Some people don’t have closure to their own stories. Some people really want to know the truth.
This is when you form the dough into a ball and let it rest for four hours or until it’s puffy.
Shape, Second Rise, Bake
The easiest way to shape a boule is to swirl it into a ball and drag it across the counter with your cupped hands so that tension gathers at the surface. Turn it a quarter turn, and drag again. Again and again and again.
You are thinking of empathy again. You are thinking of the victims and their families, and how empathy still requires a certain level of fictionalization, of imagining the lives of other individuals.
You imagine the life of someone who hunts, whose name appears guilty all over the internet even though he’s innocent. He, too, watched the deer in a field and saw the tracks in the snow.
You are thinking of those Hugo lines: “The jail/turned 70 this year. The only prisoner/ is always in, not knowing what he’s done.”
You promise yourself that you will revise your book tomorrow, the one about murder and violence. You promise yourself that you will revise your one critical chapter tomorrow, the one also about murder and violence.
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. When the dough is puffy, place it in the oven. It will bake for thirty minutes or until dark brown. Let it cool. Keep your starter in the fridge until you’re ready to use it again.
This is great.
The Hugo line reminds me of something I was struck by the other day, editing my own book. It opens at my grandfather's funeral in 1996, and for the first time I realized that, despite it seeming like this old, small town church that had been there forever, at the time of the funeral my grandfather had been alive longer than the church had existed. I don't know why that struck me but it did.