A few weeks ago, my SO slow roasted a 5 lb. Cuban pork Roast in our little clay oven, loaded with citrus, garlic, and onions. I made a giant batch of oil and vinegar slaw, because weekends are a good opportunity to make too much food and make meals during the week just a little easier. We feasted, and added corn tortillas to the shopping list, because tacos are a logical next step when you’ve got pounds of roasted pork, am I right?
Then I remembered the deli ham in the freezer. We didn’t have Swiss, but we did have Pepper Jack, which I find a reasonable substitute. We didn’t have large dill pickles I could make proper sandwich planks out of, but we did have some little cornichons that could work in a pinch. I wanted Cubanos. And because Facebook is always listening, it wasn’t long before a video from Food Wishes on assembling a proper Cubano appeared in my newsfeed. I was surprised to hear that Chef Jon wasn’t very impressed with Cubanos until he had one on the proper bread, and I trust Chef Jon, and I would be wise to lean into practicing my baking skills, since I’m in another baking lab at school this semester, so I followed the link to his tutorial on baking proper Cubano bread. Which started with a starter.
The Bread baking trend that arose with the Pandemic missed me, but not my household. My SO, ever the experimenter, jumped on the bandwagon and started turning out fluffy and divine dinner rolls and crusty loaves, all while I was still trying to lean Whole30 and not eat too much grain. At some point, the whole thing became discard and fresh baked goods disappeared from our kitchen like the trend disappeared from social media. I decided last week, 3 1/2 years after the onset of the Pandemic and way behind the trend, to commit to a yeast baby. Turtles are not my personal mascot for no reason.
Meet Flora!
Carefully following Chef Jon’s instructions, I started my starter and held my breath a little, since I’ve had spotty results with yeast in the past, mostly because it was probably dead before I fed it. I was delighted to wake the nmext morning to a happy, bubbly, doubled in size, lively yeast baby. I proceeded to make proper Cubano bread, and some hearty and soul satisfying Cubanos, more than once during the week, all the while nurturing, feeding, and growing my new starter. I decided I should name it to encourage me to develop an attachment and be appropriately caring for this actually not so delicate little creature. I thought about crowd sourcing a name, though I think I like Flora. I’ll still consider your suggestions, so send me what you’ve got.
As I went down the rabbit hole of learning to properly feed and care for my new yeast baby, I’ve started gathering discard recipes, making some pretty damn delicious sourdough chocolate chip scones, a sourdough country loaf (mostly so I could make croutons for a Caesar salad I intended to sweep the fridge with), an interesting and delicious sourdough lemon cake, delightful sourdough butter crackers, and some sourdough tortillas that were, well, a learning experience.
It hasn’t even been two weeks and I’ve learned that the internet is a wild west of sourdough enthusiasts loaded with their own experiences and opinions, some perhaps based in science, and that growing and managing a sourdough starter is a lot like cooking rice or boiling eggs–we all have a method that we swear by as the best, and at the end of the day, we all have rice and boiled eggs that are probably pretty good, and that sourdough starters are not nearly as delicate as some make them out to be. If some guy can make bread from scrapings from a 4,500 year old Egyptian vessel, killing your starter is probably a lot harder than you think. I also realized very quickly that I came to the table with a little sourdough privilege that gave me some Imposter Syndrome and may have prevented me from possible illness. In life, I generally tend to overthink things way too much and I’ve come to recognize that this trait often inhibits me from starting or sometimes finishing things. I am now thinking of an impulsive trip to Indonesia I made in my early twenties and starting a sourdough obsession as a couple of examples where my impulse control and brain were on some kind of coffee break and I’m better for it. Being obsessed with food waste, I immediately started using my discard for extra bakes, something you can do when your starter comes with a healthy yeast population right from the beginning, as mine did. After hours of browsing the internet, I realized that I have had the luxury of skipping right over the stress and agony of the first few weeks and months of getting a colony going with nothing but flour and water, and the hazards of using any of that goo until the epic battle between yeast and bacteria ends in a victory for the yeast, a harmonious symbiosis is achieved, and your starter really begins to develop per your care, feeding, and taste preferences that drive them.
FrankenSliders on Tiny Griddle Breads
Being a little more laissez faire with my starter maintenance and not so focused on precision feeding and monitoring, since it’s a more intuitive practice to learn than just numbers and routine feedings, I inadvertently fed too large a portion of starter and wound up with way more than I really need to keep a healthy colony between bakes, so the discard recipes ramped up this week, first pulling together some tortilla dough to cold ferment, then baking off those crisp and buttery crackers. I still had too much starter, so after working through the near disaster of tortillas that were really just little griddle breads and serendipitously became a Sweep The Fridge dinner last night, I pulled together a second batch of tortilla dough with the aim of tweaking a few things that didn’t go so great the first time. The recipe calls to portion the dough before cold fermenting, which I flubbed thanks to a weighing error that resulted in improvised division of dough that left me with 18 instead of 16 portions. My street tacos got tinier. Per recipe instructions, stashed the portioned dough in the fridge to cold ferment covered with a tea towel. Found them 24 hours later beginning to develop a dry crust, and I pressed on, literally. Lacking a rolling pin I like and too stubborn to hunt around for an improvised alternative, I thought it very clever to press the balls between two plates, which worked, sort of, though really lacked the true shaping precision of the small dowel I wanted and didn’t have. I was probably a little generous with the flour to balance the still sticky undersides and keep them from sticking to the plate and failed to adequately dust them off before laying them in my hot cast iron, resulting in an accumulation of flour in my pan, not a game ender, though not great, either. When the SO popped downstairs and inquired about dinner plans, I said, “I’ve got little griddle breads…they’re not exactly tortillas at this point, though they are good fresh and hot with butter melted all over them. This might be dinner.” Not always the poster child for healthy living, either of us, really, he was agreeable. Light bulbs started pinging on and we sprang into Sweep The Fridge action, I grabbed that last little hunk of Pepper Jack Cheese, he grabbed the remains of the deli ham we’d defrosted for Cubanos. He added a savory cherry chutney he’d recently made and we demolished all the little griddle breads as ham sliders of some mutant variety. And, with breads gone and ham and cheese remaining, we made short work of that rolling cheese and pickles in ham rolls, which I thought I might do for my constrained Monday lunch needs. That’s okay, because I’ve been packing what the internet apparently now calls Girl Dinners for years, and with 6 back to back hours of classes on Mondays necessitating something that travels easily, doesn’t require refrigeration or heating, and can be grazed on near the end of my morning online class before I sprint to an adjacent building for the in-person afternoon session, I’ve been resurrecting this habit, and being one of those weirdos who likes sardines, I’m looking forward to packing my sourdough butter crackers to go with a tin on Monday.
As for Flora, I think we’ve got the starter of something beautiful and I look forward to the many lessons I’ll learn from her, and with a little more experience and courage under my belt, I’ll tackle the more fundamental skill of developing my very own yeast colony from flour and water alone. Also taking names for this yet to be science project and looking forward to seeing what bubbles up.