The Sudden Need for Sourdough Starter

This post contains adult language

The night after I mixed together my first go at sourdough starter, I had an awful dream about smelling vomit. I don’t remember much else of that happened, but I was in a room that absolutely reeked as if the smell was coming up from the subfloor.

In the morning, like a kid on Christmas, I excitedly opened the jar of sourdough starter I had already affectionally named Gertrude (Gertie for short thankyouverymuch). I was hit in the face with the toe-curling stink of—you guessed it—hot vom. I immediately panicked and googled answers for how I could have fucked up mixing flour and water so badly. Thanks to this post by The Clever Carrot, I learned that there was actually no need to panic and it’s pretty normal for an urp smell to come from your starter—it’s just hungry. I fed Gertie and read into more ways people tend for their little bubbly pets, and turns out there’s a pretty fun science around keeping a sourdough starter happy and productive. People talk to their starters, play music for them, put them to “sleep” when they go out of town by setting them in the fridge and wake them up again by leaving them in the sun.

Making and maintaining a sourdough starter became a popular pandemic hobby, whether it was to combat rising food prices and ingredient scarcity, or to just have something to occupy one’s focus while the news regurgitated (that was my last one, promise) and endless stream of the worst news we’ve ever heard on a heinous loop interrupted by pseudo-emotional credit card ads. With thousands dying every day, the thin thread some of us were hanging onto was that at least we can keep a jar of bacteria alive. At least we’ve got that going for us.

Now that we are in a “new normal”—which to be honest I still have no clue what that really means—more of my friends have expressed this attitude of “fuck a job, I want to make something.” They want to leave the city, plant a garden, raise some chickens and howl at the moon. A record number of young people are leaving urban areas for a variety of reasons, if not socio-economic (rent for a one-bedroom in my city is averaging out over $4k), then this overall desire to remove complexities and start from scratch. Get closer to the earth. Get healthier. Get acquainted with where our food comes from in a more direct way. Etcetera. We have an evolving relationship with what it means to work, to be productive, and to be creative, which manifests in the smaller daily changes to put just a little more care and love into basic tasks. Maybe it’s like taking the long way home, just because.

This looks to me like a symptom of a larger emotional need to try to make something out of nothing now that The Whole World Has Gone to Shite.

Which brings me back to Gertie, a little bubbly ball of beige goo happily farting away on my countertop right now. To nurse a living thing is obviously gratifying for anybody except your neighborhood sociopath, but Gertie started as nothing more than flour and water in an up-cycled jar and is now seemingly calling out to me in my dreams that she’s hungry. Ok maybe that’s a stretch, but putting a sourdough starter together scratched a part of my brain that I didn’t even know was itchy. And yes I have personified a jar of starter, !It’s A Girl!, shut up.

So this is all to say, tending to a sourdough starter is a small and nearly effortless way to add a little tender loving care to the day-to-day. Which is what I think we all could use right now.

And it’s way cheaper than having a baby.