Being & Bacteria

Tuesday, June 02, 2020

I drove to Redmond yesterday to pick up an equine supplement and while there visited Bi-Mart. I don’t often visit Bi-Mart, an interesting store and sort of a mini-Costco. Anyway, I found a bread maker (they’ve stopped calling these “bread machines”). I’ve found that the big retailers have bread makers, but they’re highly expensive, and the cheap ones are out of stock. Mine, ordered from Amazon, has been on back-order without an estimated shipping date.

It’s been interesting during our period of semi-shut-down, that much baking is occurring even though people are worrying greatly about gaining weight. At first it seemed odd all that baking, but after awhile became an interesting phenomenon. I wondered if baking has value as an outlet for energy or is a way of creating and producing art. I began wanting to explore.

My friend, Grant, a bread baker by hand not machine, has lots of sourdough starter. He kindly gave me a container of starter and instructions for “feeding it”. That’s a living mass and creates the pressure of now-limited time, for sourdough will continue growing and must be used. I had to start baking.

My online research suggests that sourdough breads aren’t made in machines. The process with sourdough seems less about kneading and pounding, than repeatedly folding and hand-pushing on sections of a raw mixture. My new machine won’t help in making a sourdough loaf, but its presence has pushed me to start bread-baking. Today, I’ll scoop up some of the starter and by machine or hand create my first loaf of sourdough.

Oh, so many questions floating around in my head.

Might I bake scrumptious bread without gaining weight? Will having a living starter force me into baking routinely? Might some neighbors enjoy receiving fresh sourdough loaves? How will bread making activities interact with my energy and imagination? Well soon, won’t I know answers to these questions and surely others about to rise (no pun intended)?

Dear Friends: We who are guinea pigs to curiosity & imagination are liberated or entrapped. Diana