I’ve been baking our family’s daily bread for more than two years now. My standard recipe is a sourdough peasant bread with roughly 10% rye flour, 20% whole-wheat flour, and 70% white flour. It’s actually pretty close to what everyday preindustrial people ate: their flour wasn’t as refined as today’s white flour and they didn’t have dry, packaged yeast.

1941589_10202119975457451_40284653_oThere’s a lot more flavor in our bread than in store-bought bread. It doesn’t have the tangy flavor of San Francisco sourdough (because our local yeast and water are different), but it’s definitely richer, chewier, and sturdier than anything on the supermarket shelves. Imagine really good, really fresh bread from your favorite bakery. The crust is hard and crackly and the interior is soft and bubbly. Ironically, it has far fewer ingredients, too: just flour, salt, yeast, and water. It’s great for toast, which we eat a lot of, but it also works for dinner, especially with oil & vinegar!

Kristin and I love our bread. One of our three sons doesn’t eat any bread, one will only eat my bread, and one will use my bread for most things but prefers store-bought bread (whole-wheat only) for sandwiches. I’m gratified that four of the five of us greatly prefer the flavor of whole-grain bread over white bread, and I’m also very pleased that we aren’t gobbling up a lot of extra ingredients (mostly preservatives and artificial vitamins) that probably aren’t all that healthy.

It feels like a luxury to have tasty, high-quality, nutritious, artisanally crafted bread for everyday use. One might expect it would be expensive. The truth is that we probably spend less on our bread than most people. The obvious trade-off is that I spend my own time baking it.

We go through a batch (two loaves) in about four or five days, so I often bake twice a week. The only ingredients we buy from the store are the flour and the salt, and we use ordinary, budget-conscious sources for both. The yeast is a culture I started myself a few years back and have been tending to ever since. This is where the flavor comes from, and the key ingredient is time: generation after generation of natural yeast fed on local water, a hodgepodge of flours, and the chemical byproducts of their digestion: mostly sugars and alcohols. Nothing can substitute for this process or the time it takes. After two years, the flavor and complexity of our culture is still developing, and I find the discovery of the process–finding how the flavor and behavior change from month to month–as rewarding as the bread itself.

Baking with sourdough is easy! Every time I bake I use exactly half of the yeast culture: 260 grams. I replenish the culture with an equal amount of water and raw flour: 130 grams of each. I give it an hour or so at room temperature–while I bake–to begin fermenting the new materials, and then it lives in the refrigerator until the next baking day. The 260 grams of culture that I bake with are substituted for 130 grams of water and 130 grams of flour in whatever recipe I’m using. (I simply subtract those amounts–as well as any yeast–from the ingredient list and add the culture.)

Baking with sourdough requires more time than when using active dry yeast. But that’s ok for me: it actually fits better into my daily schedule. I can mix a batch of dough in the morning and–with very little work throughout the day–have a couple of loaves finished by early afternoon. Each step of the process is quick: only a few minutes of folding, stretching, or shaping. The bread practically makes itself.

This method of baking fits very nicely with the popular Pomodoro productivity “hack.” (The Pomodoro technique is essentially 25 minutes of working followed by a brief break, repeat three times, then take a longer break. The theory is that these brief breaks allow one to focus better on one’s work during each 25-minute work period.) My baking stages fit perfectly in the “brief breaks:” every other break is just in time for a baking task.

So of the three options–flavor, economy, and convenience–I’ve picked flavor and economy for my family. We get better quality bread and spend less on it. The cost is convenience: instead of simply grabbing a loaf from the store, I spend my time following the recipe. (And of course, I had to spend a fair amount of time learning how to do this. I even spent a weekend in Ann Arbor learning–in person–from the masters at Zingerman’s Bakehouse!) But it fits well with my work, and the time I spend on it would probably have been wasted anyway, so I’m not sure the convenience cost is all that high.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s fun?

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