Sourdough

I bake cakes and cookies with whole-wheat pastry flour, whole spelt flour, or ground oatmeal. I replace half the oil with unsweetened applesauce (usually organic). I cut back on the (organic) sweetener in most recipes. I know you won’t believe me, but many, including kids, love it anyway.

Since bread and I have a tumultuous relationship (I discovered as a teenager that white flour doesn’t like me) the next project was a trendy one: sourdough bread. The wild yeast! The gluten breakdown! Digestion-friendly! Sign me up!

But one can’t just sashay into a kitchen and bake sourdough bread. The sourdough starter needs to be cultivated first. The instructions I found enthused that starter is ready to go after a week, but I decided to tackle this in the winter, in a rather chilly house. Some recommended leaving it in the oven with the light on, but I wasn’t going to burn out my oven light for this. I would wait.

And wait I did.

I don’t like to wait. I’m an early bird by nature, so I usually end up waiting for everyone and everything. I spent my childhood waiting in the doorway for carpool to come. I was first at a vort in Boro Park on a Motzaei Shabbos, arriving before the engaged couple, and I’d traveled in from Monsey. I waited over ten years for my bashert.