It starts small. 28 grams to be exact. Hardly anything. You look down into the bowl at that tiny bit of starter and marvel: This? This is going to raise two whole loaves of bread? No way.
Add a scoop of flour and a bit of water—just enough to form the most unappetizingly stiff ball you’ve seen in your life. Cover it; walk away.
The next morning, you wake up to a bizarre finding: That tough dough has gotten all soft and puffy.
It’s a strange thing—time. It’s the most common ingredient in a baker’s kitchen—his most precious resource. We all have so little, yet baking rewards those willing to measure it out generously.
You fill a bowl with water, rend the soft leaven, and baptize it. More flour, some salt.
The simplicity of the recipe is frustrating. Good things should require more than patience . . . and patience. They should take specialized skills, exotic techniques, expensive elements. Why should the best things in life be so freely accessible to anyone willing to wait?
Pressing the ingredients together, your hands grow caked. The mess is a part of the process. It gets on everything—the counter, the faucet handle, the drawer pull.
You keep working the dough, pressing it out, folding it over itself, kneading. The bread will be an airless disc if you skip this step. It’s funny: To get a soft loaf, you have to discipline toughness into the dough.
Then, rest.
Fold, the rest again.
And again.
Every time you return to the bowl, the dough feels different. Smoother, silkier. But you are literally doing nothing—just trusting that the best thing you can do is leave it alone.
You form it into a loaf, and leave it again.
You return with a knife. Quickly, you cut the thing you have made. You cut again, and again, because you know the more you score this precious thing, the more beautiful will be its rise.
You put it into the dark for one last time. A blazing dutch oven sears on contact as you quickly place the lid. Twenty fitful minutes pass.
Then the moment of truth. Lifting the lid, it’s the big reveal. The rise is always so surprising: Such a tiny bit of leaven—how? I put a flat pancake into the oven, and now it’s the size of a football!
The finish line is in sight; it just needs a little more time. The aroma fills the house. Finally, you open the oven and receive the reward for all your labor.
Three ingredients: Flour, water, and salt. The only thing more required for this transformation? Time.
I feel like there’s a metaphor buried in there somewhere? Like how we’re a lot like loaves of bread, and life is like baking, and leaven and faith and such—seems like I’ve read something like that before . . .
He told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.”
Pain au levain.
Our favorite sourdough recipe was given to us by our beloved friends the Doligets—along with our sourdough starter “Jennifer.” We first had pain au levain when Shara brought two loaves to share at a summer picnic. My kids single-handedly consumed an entire loaf themselves—they absolutely love “Miss Shara’s bread.”
Spread some slices with softened butter, and that’s basically all we need for dinner.
You can find the recipe at King Arthur Baking: