#but a grilled cheese from me is guaranteed cheese-melted and perfectly-golden every time. just saying.

[dykedragons]

put an egg in my grilled cheese and idk if im ever gonna go back to the eggless grilled cheese life. tbh.

[mrtroy]

Starter

Every time I go to Wikipedia to look something up – either for work or when I’m writing for fun – I chuckle a little bit thinking back to high school writing classes. <Artificially nostalgic voice > Way back in the early 2000s, the Wikipedia was very much frowned upon in the realm of the academic trustworthiness. <End artificial voice usage>

Now, I mostly just use it to get a quick blurb of information about subjects I don’t know much about. And whether the academic community frowns upon that or not, I like it. I like Wikipedia. And today, I really liked it.

I’m writing this post about bread starter and in the midst of doing my cursory research on what makes up a starter, I learned one of its alternate names is ‘mother dough.’ As you’ll soon find out, this was a very fitting thing to learn, indeed.

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In August of 1986, my mother was given a sourdough bread starter. I don’t have a lot of details on the origin of the starter, but given some other things I know about my mom’s life in the mid 80s, if I had to guess, it was given to her by a lady with a Midwestern sounding name from the neighborhood. My parents have lived in a picturesque suburban neighborhood since 1984, and back in the early days of the neighborhood, residents did a lot of neighborly activities together. Ladies named Kathy hosted bi-monthly games of mahjong and bunko. I seem to remember at least two different Sharons that hosted Tupperware parties. My dad played on a neighborhood softball team and looking back on it now, it seems like the kind of place that developers have in mind when they pitch the idea of a large sprawling neighborhood to a Chamber of Commerce.

I realize there’s a twinge of sarcasm in setting things up this way. And while the Sharons and Kathys – and the 80s hair I am picturing them with – are both real and tongue-and-cheek all at the same time, there’s something spectacular about the fact that the neighborhood functioned the way neighborhoods are supposed to function. More on that in another post, perhaps. Let’s get back to bread.

I was moved to write on this topic today when I cut myself a few slices of sourdough bread for breakfast. The same sourdough bread, from the same starter, that my mom has been making every few weeks since August of 1986. The sheer fact that this bread has been a part of our family for 32 years now is amazing in its own right. What it means beyond that is what makes this topic worthy to write about.

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A bread starter works when a pre-ferment is made (thanks Wikipedia). The pre-ferment contains an active ingredient like yeast that grows, is fed, can be split, and then grows again. In the process of bread making, this translates to starting with a ‘starter,’ which is like your base. You feed the base by adding  ingredients to it, it grows, you take half of what grew and make bread out of it, and you put half of it back to start the process all over again in a few weeks.

This is more of an old fashioned or artisanal way of making bread. There are ways to make bread – even using yeast to make it – that don’t require the use of a starter. There are also bread machines that can be used to speed the process of making bread as well. Mom’s bread doesn’t use a bread machine, and is very much old fashioned. She feeds the starter, she lets the new dough rise over night. She then punches the starter down do some sort of air releasing, or yeast activating something or other and bakes the bread in the oven at a low and slow 275 degrees for one hour. In the midst of this process, she saves half of the starter and puts it in the refrigerator to grow again over the next few weeks until she begins the process again.

The loaves of bread that come from this process are nearly magical in my own mind.

I’ve eaten this bread since I was a year old.

It was in my lunches slathered with peanut butter and honey when I sat at the lunch tables in elementary school. I probably had the bread a little less than half the time for those lunches. It takes time for the starter to revitalize itself, and the time that took was always longer than the time it took to eat the loaves it produced. So, that meant that there were days when you got a sandwich on ‘Mom’s bread,’ and there were days you got a sandwich on something from the store. I always knew which days those were going to be – as I was acutely aware of what the Mom’s bread inventory was – but even knowing this, un-Velcro-ing my lunchbox to find a sandwich on Mom’s bread was always one of the best feelings. Early on in my school career, Mom sent me with Tuppeware containers (probably purchased at one of the Sharons Tupperware parties). After losing the lids on those containers, Mom switched to packing sandwiches in the fold top sandwich bags. Never Ziploc. Always fold top. Fold top bags require a certain level of care during the process of bagging and unbagging the sandwich. Gentle on the way in and on the way out – so as not to damage the corners of the sandwich masterpiece. Mom’s sourdough can be a bit crumbly, so achieving a perfect extraction from the fold top bag without breaking off a corner of the sandwich became one of my favorite daily challenges.

As a family, we also ate the Mom’s bread prepared as toast with a topping of cinnamon sugar. Few things in this world taste better than a piping hot slice of bread with a crunchy layer of cinnamon and sugar. We had a toaster oven in our kitchen growing up, and I used to enjoy watching each slice crisp to a goldenness that just started to show some burnt corners. This level of doneness guaranteed that the center of the slice was amply toasted. After removing the slice from the toaster oven, you had about fifteen seconds to apply the slightest amount of butter and then sprinkle cinnamon sugar over top to ensure that the bread was still hot enough to fully melt the butter and create the optimal level of cohesion between the sugary mixture and the breaded base. Mmmm. My mouth is watering right now as I think about it! Some of my fondest memories from growing up are in the kitchen with each of us preparing our slices of toast. Mom – if she ever did add cinnamon sugar – applying it ever so lightly. Patch applying his much more liberally, however, always taking great care with sugar application so as not to lose any of the precious topping. And Pops, well, he liked his toast a little more well done. After his sugar application there was a distinctively crunchier sound as he bit into each of his slices. I loved Sunday mornings when the whole family was together eating toast on Mom’s bread.

And while I’ve described both a breakfast and a lunch scenario where Mom’s bread shined, I’d be remiss not to mention its versatility around dinner time.

At more formal occasions, it serves perfectly as an accompaniment to a fine dinner. Cut each of the normal-sized, large-loaf-pan slices in half width-wise, and you have yourself a perfect morsel to have along with your meal. (Although, this has spawned the great butter debate with my grandfather. One of our only true arguments in life. He insists on having his with butter. I contend that sourdough never needs butter. I feel deep in my heart that I’m right on this one, but we’ve been at a stalemate on the issue for years….)

Beyond its use as a side item, Mom’s bread is also the foundation for a mean – if not the meanest – grilled cheese sandwich you may ever have. Pair a perfectly golden brown sandwich with two and a half slices of your favorite cheese, and you have yourself a perfect Fall dinner. Served with apple slices, and if you’re my dad, a bowl of tomato soup, it’s hard to top this classic.

Now, I’ve made it through each of the meals – and I could have spent more time on the viability of a Mom’s slice with a thick layer of peanut butter, open face, heated in the microwave for eight seconds – but I want to go beyond this bread’s tangible value into the intangible.

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For 32 years my mom has made this bread. Let’s say roughly 650 times. Every few weeks she has fed the starter, mixed in the other ingredients, punched down the dough, split that ball of dough into two smaller loaves to put in loaf pans. Etc. Etc.

As I stop and think about this, it blows me away. What has any of us done for 32 straight years? For me, breathing is all I’ve got…

Now, it hasn’t come without trial.

A few times, Mom has experimented with different flour. Sometimes it’s all white flour. Sometimes all wheat. Sometimes a mixture. Some of those times have produced good results, others have fallen flat. There have been times she has absentmindedly forgotten to add the requisite sugar called for in the recipe. Those were NOT good loaves. There have been times where the duration in between making the bread was too long, and the starter had over-fermented to the point where the made bread hardly rose. There was even a time when the started died all together. Luckily, she had split it and given a batch to her best friend who was then able to re-split it and give it back to her to keep it alive.

As I was cutting myself a slice today, it was the above paragraph that provided the perspective I really wanted to share in this post.

Life isn’t perfect. Sometimes you experiment and in those experiments things work out well. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes we forget key ingredients and things fall flat. Sometimes we have close calls to the point where we almost ruin things and we have to endure the consequences. Sometimes we can literally almost kill the best things we ever have going for us. And when that happens, if we’re lucky, we have best friends who can bail us out.

Mom has given me her starter two different times. I’ve successfully made her bread a few times. A few other times I messed up somewhere in the process and my loaves have fallen woefully flat. One time, I accidentally let the starter die. Another, I gave it back to her right before I moved. Someday, I hope I can get it back again and keep it going. I hope it’s something I can pass down through the family until it’s 100 years old.

I hope I can give it to dozens more people if they’d like it. To use it as a tool to teach about baking and about life. To model longevity and discipline. To provide a tangible link to an intangible love.

As I finish this post and go to close the Wikipedia tab on my Internet browser, I am reminded that a starter is sometimes referred to as Mother Dough because new bread and new life grows from the original. And yes, I think this is quite fitting.

Mom, thank you for starting that starter 32 years ago. I’m sure you had no idea at the time what it would eventually start, but man, has it started something special. Thank you for your dedication to keeping it going. Thank you for all of the life lessons and good times it has spawned. Thank you for perfectly timing when you make fresh loaves with holidays, or the times Patch is home to enjoy it. Thank you for giving me loaves to take home when I know you and Pops would enjoy it so much for yourselves. I know you already know how I feel about your bread, but I figured you might like to see it in print – it’s the best.

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To anyone else reading this note, what can be your starter?

It might not be sourdough bread, but it can be just as meaningful. Start something meaningful today. Commit to it. Keep at it. Share it with those that you care about. It doesn’t have to be anything on a grand scale. It doesn’t have to be a once-a-year holiday tradition or anything that costs a lot of money. But whatever it is, know that it has the power to do amazing things as an example of longevity and of love.