This is the recipe that will make or break me.
Tartine's basic Country Bread.
It sounds so innocent. So simple. And at its core, it is. The ingredients include whole wheat flour, all purpose flour, water and salt. Nothing else. There is nothing to hide behind, no novelty trick or flavouring that can save a botched attempt.
Oh, and the recipe takes 2 weeks to complete.
This is my first venture into the stunningly scientific but simultaneously intuition-dependent world of sourdough bread baking. Everything else has been minor league stuff, a warm up for the main event. Not only do you have to, quite literally, harvest yeast from the air (no convenient paper packets here!) but you have to create a starter dough to catch said yeast, and then feed it every day for about a week or so. You don't even get to touch an oven until the very end of the 2 weeks. And for all that blood, sweat, and most likely tears, you get two loaves of bread. Two pristine, professional quality, loaves of artisanal sourdough bread.
If this project has taught me anything, it's that it's worth it.
That's not to say that this recipe isn't already annoying me to no end. My starter, while promisingly bubbly at first (a good sign of fermenting dough and healthy yeast cultures), has fallen silent, offering little to no change in the past few days (I'm on my fourth day of feeding it) and I'm worried I've somehow killed it. I've followed every word of the recipe so far, but as I said, bread baking falls in a strange grey zone in the baking world.
If cooking is an art, baking is supposed to be a science. You weigh and measure ingredients exactly, in the hopes that the desired result will be achieved with clinical precision. With bread baking, this is still true, but it's a living thing you're working with, and it needs to be cared for. Is it not rising fast enough? It might be cold, throw a tea towel on it. Did your yeast not foam up during the proofing? You might have killed it if the water was too hot. Learning how to walk that balance between art and science has been the biggest lesson I've learned from this project, and I honestly believe that I'm becoming a better cook and baker as a result. Unfortunately, I don't have much more information to offer at this stage as to the Tartine bread itself, but I will do my best to keep my starter alive, and hopefully in a little over a week I'll be able to share! In the meantime, I plan to read up more on the science behind fermenting dough, and what could vs. should be done to be successful. Reading testimonials from other home cooks might offer some insight as to why my experiment is less than picture perfect at the moment. Wish me luck!
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