My Quest to Make a Good Loaf of Bread

My friend Viva handed me an inspiring gift as I left her house in Connecticut last time I visited. She sent me home with a portion of her sourdough starter, which is decades old and traveled to her from North Carolina. What ensued has been my quest to bake a crusty, airy loaf of sourdough bread.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out that making bread is hard and can be discouraging, to say the least. My first loaf was the product of a recipe I found through a google search. My first mistake happened when I ignored all the advice to be exact when measuring. I ended up with a large, super-dense, somewhat flat disk that could travel for weeks on the back of a nomad and not go stale.

The blow of failure was harder than it should have been because I thought I would genetically be good at this. My mother used to make a still-talked-about sourdough bread, which she sold at a local consignment shop near where we lived in Haworth, New Jersey. Her bread was so good that former President Nixon’s chef would buy it every week, and finally asked if my mom would make it exclusively for the Nixons. She said no. (I thought it was a political statement, but she claims she was just too busy.) It’s clear that I did not inherit her baking talent. But that’s no reason to give up.

Soon after my depressing first attempt, Viva sent me the recipe for a well-known New York City bakery’s artisan sourdough bread. I followed the kneading methods to a tee, but carelessly used stone ground whole-wheat flour to dry the dough in the mixer because that was all I had. Looking back, I must have added two extra cups, which my research after the fact told me created my second loaf of dense nomad bread.

Take three. I did my research. I bought my favorite new book—The King Arthur Flour Company’s Bakers Companion (kingarthurflour.com)—and pored over it like it was a good gossip magazine. This time I decided to err on the side of caution measuring-wise. My dough didn’t stick to the bowl, but it was definitely sticky. There were dark moments, like when I tried to take the floured towel off my lovely risen bread and it stuck to and deflated the bread—and my ego. But I went forward anyway and found that this loaf was better than the last. Good enough that I can continue my quest. Next step: Seeing if my mother will swoop in for a private lesson. -Denise Shoukas