This same time, years previous: feeding my family, gado gado, right now, the quotidian (4.13.15), the quotidian (4.14.14), fun and fiasco 1, wild hair.

My younger son continues to make home improvements to his little top-of-the-stairs bedroom nook.
The other day he built a little stair-step footstool for his plants.

He’s growing a whole menagerie. (Can one have a menagerie of plants?). From a letter he wrote to his grandmother back at the beginning of the month:

I’ve planted tomato plants, and it’s been 14 days and half of them have grown about 1½ inches. I have around 60 tomato plants. I’m hoping that we can transplant them into our garden. I also have two spider plants that are babies but are growing fast. I also have two aloe plants; one of them I took from Mom’s aloe plant, and the other I got from Grandmommy, and two peace lilies, one from Grandmommy and one from Mom’s peace lily that is not doing too well, but is still alive. I’m trying to grow an avocado tree from a seed from an avocado. I have a grape vine that I hope will grow. And finally, I have one stalk of corn.

In lieu of a closet, he built himself a stick-out wooden bar upon which to hang his Sunday shirts (that he has since determined can probably go up to the attic, taking into consideration Covid-19 and all).

And also built a towel rack to hang on the back of the door.

“I should’ve put it up higher,” he told me when I stuck my head in to check it out. “My towel hangs down over the hook for my backpack, but oh well.”

As I already mentioned, the kid gave up added sugar for lent. When Covid-19 hit, and I began using baked goods for emotional boosters, he was forlorn.

“You can quit,” I told him. “No one expects you to give up sugar on top of everything else you’re giving up. God will still love you.”

But nope. He never even wavered.

Which kind of annoyed me. Now that we were all at home, I wanted to bake more, but without my trusty human garbage disposal, I kept getting a backlog of food. Plus, some of our foods, like rhubarb crunch and granola bars and monster cookies and granola and baked oatmeal, are actually substantial parts of our meals but, since they had added sugar, he declared them off limits.

He ate a lot of peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and when I bought him an entire Costco bag of celery sticks, he was over the moon.

All week, he’s been counting down the days until Sunday. When I said I was going to make pumpkin pies this week, he pleaded with me to wait until next week, but I didn’t listen. I did, though, save the last piece for him. It’s tucked in the back of the fridge, along with a bowl of wilting whipped cream. 

This same time, years previous: fifteenth spring, when popcorn won’t pop, Mr. Tiny, an evening walk, deviled eggs, on fire, lemons and goat cheese, cream of tomato soup.

A local baker recently inspired me to up my sourdough game. This person’s sourdough is 40 percent whole wheat — a percentage I’ve never even come close to reaching. I mean, I suppose I’ve made breads with similar whole wheat amounts but, for me, any bread with a substantial amount of whole wheat always seems to turn leaden and, if it’s sourdough, too tangy-sour. Of course then no one wants to actually eat a hunk of dense yuck, which ends up defeating the whole purpose of making bread in the first place.

Not good.

But this new-to-me method has yielded the best whole wheat sourdough that I’ve ever made. In fact, when we did a side-by-side taste test of both my regular white sourdough and the new whole wheat sourdough, five out of six people voted in favor of the whole wheat.

!!!!!!!!

Need I say more?

Why yes, as a matter of fact, I do! Because you, naturally, would like to make it, too, am I right, am I right?

I can’t share the exact recipe — the details are under wraps — but I have been graciously permitted to share both approximate percentages and techniques. Hopefully it will be enough to get you started down a delicious new path of whole wheaty-ness.

The main difference between this bread and my regular white sourdough is that, besides using lots of whole wheat flour, the dough is super wet — it uses a lot more water. Proportions are 40 percent whole wheat to 60 percent white bread flour, but when adding up the total weight, water makes up approximately 40 percent, the flours 50 percent, the starter 7 percent (much less than I’m accustomed to using), and the salt 1 percent. Or thereabouts. Good luck with that.

A note about the ingredients. This winter, I purchased some NuEast hard red winter wheat that’s been grown in Virginia; I grind it myself (says the little red hen). My high-gluten white flour usually comes from Costco. My starter is made with all white flour, approximately a 50% hydration. I use Morton’s coarse kosher salt. Warm tap water.

Now, for the method.

First, mix the flours and warm water together and autolyze for 15 minutes.

Then add the starter, salt, and a wee bit more water and mix on low for a good five minutes.

Then, and this is the different part, the dough gets poured (yes, poured — it’s wet) into an ungreased pan (I used a 9×13 pyrex pan) and rests for about five hours.

The dough’s supposed to be about 80 degrees the whole time, so I use my oven’s proof setting to warm it up and then, if it’s a cool day, I keep it in the oven the whole time. I find that once the dough’s warm, it holds its temperature fairly well.

Every hour or so, I gently lift and fold the dough (need a visual? click here). It’s impossibly wet and sticky, but by the end of the five hours, it will have thickened somewhat and be easier to handle.

Plus, it will have increased in bulk by about 30 percent.

Which is soooo cool!!!!

Now the dough is ready to be pinched in half and gently shaped and rested on the counter for thirty minutes.

Confession: I don’t do the thirty minute rest anymore. My dough is always too wet and ends up creeping across the counter most naughtily. But if your dough holds its shape, do it.

Place the shaped loaves — I just scoop them up and gently lift/plop the dough, smooth side down — into cloth-lined (and floured!) round pyrex bowls.

Cover the bowls with shower caps and let them sit at room temperature for two hours or so before transferring to the fridge for the night.

In the morning, bake! The loaves go directly from the fridge to the oven.

Place two Dutch ovens in the oven and preheat it to 500 degrees. Once the oven’s hot, remove the loaves from the fridge, gently invert them onto pieces of parchment paper, and flour the top of the loaves.

Score them deeply — I go over my cuts several times. (My husband got me this lame for my birthday. I love it.)

Remove one Dutch oven from the stove, gently lower the loaf into the pan, parchment paper and all. Tuck 4-6 ice cubes between the paper and pan — careful: the steam will burn you — clap on the lid and slip into the oven.

Repeat the process with the second loaf. Reduce the oven to 450 degrees and bake for 20 minutes.

Remove the lids — this is the best part because you get to see how much the dough has risen! — and reduce the heat to 400 degrees and bake another 20 minutes.

Transfer loaves to a baking rack to cool.

The final bread is both tender and chewy, only slightly sour, and deliciously full-flavored. It’s addictive and satisfying and wonderful no matter how you serve it: fresh with loads of butter, toasted, in sandwiches, French toast, etc, etc, etc. Truly, it’s a marvel.

P.S. For my regular white sourdough, I’ve taken to using this scoring and baking method. The loaves get consistently fabulously high.

Next time I do a round of baking, I want to mess with my ratios of flour and water for the white sourdough — how will the bread’s texture change if my dough is wetter, like the whole wheat bread? Ooh-la-la, such excitement!

This same time, years previous: making space, beginner’s bread, the quotidian (4.11.16), millet muffins, the greening, the quotidian (4.9.12), this slow, wet day, asparagus with lemon and butter.