I am still baffled by the magic of bread. With only flour, water, yeast, and salt, how is it possible to create so many varieties, textures, and flavors?

I’ve started trying out different variations on these four ingredients, starting with the most subtle: the salt and water. I switched from Morton table salt to fine-ground Mediterranian sea salt recently, and from Brita-filtered Boston tap water to French bottled spring water. Having just baked my first loaf of bread with both of these new ingredients, I can’t say that I noticed any flavor difference. I’m not surprised, since I have a hard time telling the difference between these salts and waters alone in a taste test. One day I might try a side-by-side bread comparison, when I have time for a big bake-off, but for now I think I’ll stop buying $1.50 bottles of water and just go with the free stuff until I can convince myself that I’m capable of discerning such loaf subtleties.

The yeast is another ingredient worth playing around with. I have tried both active-dry yeast and instant yeast in the past (no difference, but different quantities are used), but the final frontier is wild yeast. Wild yeast is just out thre, floating in the air, looking for a place to grow. If you give it a nice room temperature bowl of flour and water to develop in, it’ll flourish with no work at all on your part. This is the origin of sourdough.

So I started my first sourdough starter last week. A 100% sourdough loaf does not use any instant yeast at all, it’s just flour, water, salt, and the bacteria living in your kitchen. Some of this bacteria contributes to the flavor and some of it causes the dough to rise.

To make the starter, I started with a ball of dough using dark rye flour and enough water to hydrate it all and hold it together and I let it sit on the counter overnight. The next day I added some bread flour and water, mixed it for a minute, and put it back. A few hours later, it already had a 50% rise with lots of nice little air pockets. It smelled horrible, though, so it had to go on for a couple more days to brighten up. Each day I discarded half of what I had and replaced it with fresh flour and water. After 4 days of this, I had a wild-yeast starter that would double in bulk over 6 hours and smelled like sourdough bread. I mixed this with more flour and water, let it sit for a while, and threw it in the fridge. This is the completed sourdough starter.

Now that the starter is active in my fridge, the real challenge begins. I have to use some of it and feed it fresh flour and water at least every 3 days. So I’m sucked into either baking a loaf every 3 days, giving some starter away to a friend every 3 days, or throwing some starter out every 3 days. If I’m to keep this up for longer than a week, I think I’m going to need the help of my roommate, Whitney.

Luckily the process of making sourdough bread can be split across 3 days, so it’s not one long time-consuming day of work. It’s maybe 10 minutes of work each day, spread out across 3-5 hours, with a little extra work on the 3rd day for baking. On the first day, you mix some of the sourdough starter with fresh flour and water and let it sit on the counter for 4 hours. Then you throw it in the fridge overnight. On the second day, you bring it back out, let it warm up for an hour, chop it up, mix it with more fresh flour and water, shape it, and put it back into the fridge overnight. On the third day, you bring it out, let it sit in a proofing basket for 4-5 hours, and bake it for 30 minutes.

I figure if I write out a schedule for Whitney and I to follow, whomever is around can do a little bit of the work each day. Dough is pretty flexible, so if we miss a day it’s not the end of the world, we just might get a more sour loaf (because the dough has been fermenting for longer). And if we’re both out of town and no one can feed the starter, it can left in the fridge for a couple months and still be recovered without much trouble at all.

Baking bread is the kind of process that can easily be pipelined, where three or sourdough loaves are in various states of completion and are pushed forward by one step each day. Modern bakeries must love this, because they can create a mini-factory to churn out loaves of bread. But at some of the better bakeries in France, and surely some in this country, the bakers are responsible for their loaves from start to finish. Everyone in the kitchen is an expert at all parts of the process. So one day a baker may have 50 loaves in the starter stage, the second day she’d ferment them, and the third day she’d shape, proof, and bake. But for Whitney and I this kind of pipelining would mean baking a loaf every day, and I don’t think we could eat that much bread…