Sourdough Quotes

Here’s a thing I believe about people my age: we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted.

No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can't put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.

The internet: always proving that you're not quite as special as you suspected.

I have come to believe that food is history of the deepest kind. Everything we eat tells a tale of ingenuity and creation, domination and injustice-and does so more vividly than any other artifact, any other medium.

Greatest among us are those who can deploy “my friend” to total strangers in a way that is not hollow, but somehow real and deeply felt; those who can make you, within seconds of first contact, believe it.

He doesn’t seem to mind me taking bits to make bread, and it’s still the best sourdough in town. We just don’t tell anybody about the eating-rats thing.

Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again, because every time, the solution was consumed. I mean, really: chewed and digested. Thus, the problem was ongoing. Thus, the problem was perhaps the point.

I felt the disorientation of a generous offer that in no way lines up with anything you want to do: like a promotion to senior alligator wrestling, or an all-expenses paid trip to Gary, Indiana.

If you really want to make a friend, go round someone's house with a freshly baked loaf of sourdough bread!

Ironically I am publishing this in the midst of COVID-19, when we all started making sourdough at home and then started protesting police brutality. Suddenly a twelve year old book was actually relevant. Go figure.

On Sundays Mom invariably ran out of money, which is when she cracked eggs into the skillet over cubes of fried black sourdough bread. It was, I think, the most delicious and eloquent expression of pauperism.

I told them I didn't have time for this bullshit, and if either of them wanted to ask a lady out, he could do it by text message like a normal person.

Well... I have this... thing". Saying I have a homicidal sourdough starter sounded much too bizarre.

feeding people is really freakin’ great. There’s nothing better.

I needed a more interesting life. I could start by learning something. I could start with the starter.

my great weakness: if a task was even mildly challenging, any sense of injustice drained away and I simply worked quietly until I was done.

Southeastern Michigan is flat, almost concave; here was a world with a z-axis.

Whenever I hurt myself, my mother says it is the universe’s way of telling me to slow down. She also tells me to put some coconut oil on it. It doesn’t matter what it is. She often hides stones underneath my pillow when I come home for the weekend. The stones are a formula for sweet dreams and clarity. I dig them out from the streets, she tells me what each one is for. My throat hurts, so she grinds black pepper into a spoonful of honey, makes me eat the entire thing. My mother knows how to tie knots like a ship captain, but doesn’t know how I got that sailor mouth. She falls asleep in front of the TV only until I turn it off, shouts, I was watching that! The sourdough she bakes on Friday is older than I am. She sneaks it back and forth across the country when she flies by putting the starter in small containers next to a bag of carrots. They think it’s ranch dressing, she giggles. She makes tea by hand. Nettles, slippery elm, turmeric, cinnamon- my mother is a recipe for warm throats and belly laughs. Once she fell off of a ladder when I was three. She says all she was worried about was my face as I watched her fall.

To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest - on behalf of the senses and the microbes - against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much prefer we remain passive consumers of its standardized commodities, rather than creators of idiosyncratic products expressive of ourselves and of the places where we live, because your pale ale or sourdough bread or kimchi is going to taste nothing like mine or anyone else's.

It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

It felt, also, like an empty spaceship, and, as a rule, you do not enter an empty spaceship without first knowing the fate of the crew.

He had the sourdough smell of age. His chest sagged into shrivelled teats; his lovemaking was unreliable, yet she found it strangely wholesome in a way that defied sense.

I know I have strong opinions about everything - I can’t help it, I do - but this one’s the strongest. I waited too long to get out of that office. Much too long. I weep for those years.

It's always new and astonishing when it's yours

It's always new and astonishing when it's yours. Infatuation; sex; card tricks.

IT’S A MESS when strange events smack into the windscreen of a resolutely rational mind.

He felt something on his neck. Warmth. He hesitated, then turned weary eyes toward the sky. Sunlight bathed his face. He gaped; it seemed so long since he’d seen pure sunlight. It shone down through a large break in the clouds, comforting, like the warmth of an oven baking a loaf of Adrinne’s thick sourdough bread. Almen stood, raising a hand to shade his eyes. He took a deep, long breath, and smelled… apple blossoms? He spun with a start. The apple trees were flowering. That was plain ridiculous. He rubbed his eyes, but that didn’t dispel the image. They were blooming, all of them, white flowers breaking out between the leaves. [...] What was happening? Apple trees didn’t blossom twice. Was he going mad? Footsteps sounded softly on the path that ran past the orchard. Almen spun to find a tall young man walking down out of the foothills. He had deep red hair and he wore ragged clothing: a brown cloak with loose sleeves and a simple white linen shirt beneath. The trousers were finer, black with a delicate embroidery of gold at the cuff. “Ho, stranger,” Almen said, raising a hand, not knowing what else to say, not even sure if he’d seen what he thought he’d seen. “Did you… did you get lost up in the foothills?” The man stopped, turning sharply. He seemed surprised to find Almen there. With a start, Almen realized the man’s left arm ended in a stump. The stranger looked about, then breathed in deeply. “No. I’m not lost. Finally. It feels like a great long time since I’ve understood the path before me.

The baker’s skill in managing fermentation, not the type of oven used, is what makes good bread.

I told him God didn’t invent grocery stores. He told me that I had no proof of this, and wouldn’t I feel stupid when I died and went to heaven and saw God’s Food Mart? I told him that was a dumb name for a grocery store. He told me that I couldn’t do any better. I told him God’s grocery store was named God’s Amazing Food Emporium and that they had weekly specials on the Body Of Christ Sourdough bread loaves. He told me I was sacrilegious. I told him we weren’t any kind of religious.

You are considered a Cheechako if you are new to the state. If you have been in the state for a while , you are considered a sourdough. Sour on the state, but you do not have enough dough to leave.

There had to be a scale somewhere—the scale of stars, the scale of far-off cosmic super-beings—upon which we ourselves, we humans with our cities and bridges and subterranean markets, would look like the lactobacilli and the yeast.

On top of the city with my Loises all around me, I felt a tremor of something. Was it possible? I had become interesting.

It was a fungal party hellscape.

I have clinched and closed with the naked North, I have learned to defy and defend; Shoulder to shoulder we have fought it out — yet the Wild must win in the end.

I told them both I didn’t have time for this bullshit, and if anybody wanted to ask a lady out, he could do it via text message like a normal person.

Shortly before seven, he made Katie her sourdough toast and coffee, and woke her up with breakfast in bed. The tire shop he managed was closed on Sunday, so this was the only day he could relieve his wife of what would otherwise be a seven-day-a-week job. Taking care of the kids so she could sleep in an hour was, she frequently assured him, so romantic, and so sexy—and on most Sunday nights after the kids went to bed, she showed him exactly how much she appreciated the gesture. But

The house was large and deeply lived-in, all the shelves and surfaces stacked with books and boxes, framed pictures, old greeting cards set up like tent cities...Every single surface told a story. A long one. With digressions.

In your message, you told me about your family, how you don’t have any traditions. The first time I read that, it made me sad, but then I thought about it for a while and started to feel jealous. Lois, think about it! No one cares if your restaurant has tables. You can build robots, or bake bread, or do something else entirely. You’re unencumbered by culture. You’re... light!

Nettie set out a loaf of sourdough bread from Baker's Way Bakers, a wodge of runny Camembert, and a container of leftover lamb, rich with garlic and rosemary, nestled on a bed of spicy arugula from the home garden. She'd plucked two sharp green apples from one of the trees in their tiny orchard, and she placed a waxed bag of caramel shortbread beside them.

Did I see faces? I did not see faces. The power outlet looked like a little dude, but power outlets always look like little dudes.

If weeds constantly overrun your garden rows, ask yourself what those are and why they are growing there. Put down the hoe long enough to consider what the weeds are telling you.

And even if I fail-this is always the archivist's consolation-perhaps I will have laid a foundation for someone wiser.

yeast, which is a fungus, and lactobacillus, a bacteria. They eat flour—its sugars—and poop out acid—thus, sour—

The menu charmed me, and as a result, my night, and my life, bent off on a different track.

There comes a point in your life when you need to stop eating other people's bread and make your own!

My core is a hearty fungus onto which much technology has been layered, at extraordinary expense. “Sourdough starter with a mech suit,

Sourdough? Well, next to the Bible, sourdough is the most important possession on the frontier. You can make flapjacks and biscuits with it, patch a crack in the cabin, treat wounds, and even make brew.

Sourdough causes certain endocrine glands to secrete hormones that affect your feelings and behavior by making you happy. Therefore, it counteracts depression, in turn reducing the stress of depression. Your stress-free life helps you maintain a youthful disposition, both physically and mentally. So, eat lots of sourdough bread! - I'll be honest, I stole a quote about chocolate, but I'm sure it still counts!

Sourdough starters scavenge wild yeasts like Saccharomyces exiguus, Candida milleri, and Candida humilis from the environment, which do not cause vaginal yeast infections (they also scavenge S. cerevisiae). If

On both sides, they've failed us...of course, we know about the industrialists. Their corn syrup and cheese product. Their factory farms ringed by rivers of blood and shit, blazing bonfires of disease barely contained by antibiotic blankets. These are among the most disgusting scenes in the history of this planet... But on the other side...the organic farms, the precious restaurants...these are toy supply chains. 'Farm to table,' they say. Well. When you go from farm to table, you leave a lot of people out...I think more poorly of these people than I do of the industrialists, because they know better. They know it's all broken, and what do they do? They plant vegetables in the backyard.

there’s a part of us which is still yearning for the tales that we were told as children, the ones that shaped us, the ones that taught us the value of imagination. Fairy tales may very well be the greatest of all the tales we’ll ever read; when we’re first given them they seem so simple, so easily recognisable—and as we grow older, we see the darkness behind them, their passions and their horrors.

This isn’t hyperbole, not exactly. Kurume treats tonkotsu like a French country baker treats a sourdough starter—feeding it, regenerating, keeping some small fraction of the original soup alive in perpetuity. Old bones out, new bones in, but the base never changes. The mother of all ramen.

Is it an eggageration to say Clement Soup and Sourdough saved me? At night, instead of fitfully reviewing the day's error while my stomach swam and churned, I... fell asleep. My course steadied. I had taken on ballast in the form of spicy broth and fragrant bread and, maybe, two new friends, or sort-of-friends, or something.

Sourdough begins with a starter, which is also known as a leaven, a chief, a head, a pre-ferment, or my favorite—a mother. There are several different types of starter, depending on the ratio of water to flour, so you may have a loose and sticky starter or a stiff and heavy starter. What I am trying to say is: there is more than one way to begin.

I’ll attach the album. I like some tracks better than others (it gets oonce-y...), but mostly, I’m proud of my brother for making something that’s truly his.

She was on her fifth espresso and seemed finally to have found her equilibrium.

Some lost things are meant to stay that way and it’s best not to go looking. Sometimes the lost things—they look back.

The internet: always proving that you’re not quite as special as you suspected

The loaf had a face. It was an illusion, of course. Jesus Christ in an English muffin. It’s called pareidolia. Humans see faces in everything. Even so, the illusion was

I felt the disorientation of a generous offer that in no way lines up with anything you want to do: like a promotion to senior alligator wrestler, or an all-expenses-paid trip to Gary, Indiana.

I could see why [Candide] appealed to Charlotte Clingstone. It was a rejection of ambition, a blueprint for her small, perfect, human-scale restaurant-- a safe space set apart from the scrum of the world.

At General Dexterity, I was contributing to an effort to make repetitive labor obsolete. After a trainer in the Task Acquisition Center taught an arm how to do something, all the arms did it perfectly, forever, In other words, you solved a problem once, and then you moved on to other more interesting things. Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again, because every time, the solution was consumed. I mean, really: chewed and digested. Thus, the problem was ongoing. Thus, the problem was perhaps the point.

Those are the moments I’m proud of. The times I saw through them. The times I made them work to break me, even though I knew they would. The times I questioned the lies being fed to me, though everyone around me believed. I learned early that if everyone around you has their head bowed, their eyes shut tight—keep your eyes open and look around. I’m reflexively suspicious of anyone who stands on a soapbox. Tell me you have the answers and I’ll know you’re trying to sell me something. I’m as wary of certainty as I am of good vibes and positive thinking. They’re delusions that allow you to ignore reality and lay the blame at the feet of those suffering. They just didn’t follow the rules, or think positively enough. They brought it on themselves. I don’t have the answers. Maybe depression’s the natural reaction to a world full of cruelty and pain. But the thing I know about depression is if you want to survive it, you have to train yourself to hold on; when you can see no reason to keep going, you cannot imagine a future worth seeing, you keep moving anyway. That’s not delusion. That’s hope. It’s a muscle you exercise so it’s strong when you need it. You feed it with books and art and dogs who rest their head on your leg, and human connection with people who are genuinely interested and excited; you feed it with growing a tomato and baking sourdough and making a baby laugh and standing at the edge of oceans and feeling a horse’s whiskers on your palm and bear hugs and late-night talks over whiskey and a warm happy sigh on your neck and the unexpected perfect song on the radio, and mushroom trips with a friend who giggles at the way the trees aren’t acting right, and jumping in creeks, and lying in the grass under the stars, and driving with the windows down on a swirly two-lane road. You stock up like a fucking prepper buying tubs of chipped beef and powdered milk and ammo. You stock up so some part of you knows and remembers, even in the dark, all that’s worth saving in this world. It’s comforting to know what happens next. But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that no one fucking knows. And it’s terrifying. I don’t dream of a home and a family, a career and financial stability. I dream of living. And my inner voice, defective though it may be, still tells me happiness and peace, belonging and love, all lie just around the next corner, the next city, the next country. Just keep moving and hope the next place will be better. It has to be. Just around the next bend, everything is beautiful. And it breaks my heart.

Compaq Lois spoke. Her voice was not kind or coddling, but stern. “Do you like your job?” My hesitation answered for me. “I know I have strong opinions about everything—I can’t help it, I do—but this one’s the strongest. I waited too long to get out of that office. Much too long. I weep for those years.” The seriousness of her statement quieted the room.

I grab the nonstick skillet, put it on the stove, and fetch four slices of bread from the breadbox. I've been playing with a new bread recipe, a cross between sourdough and English muffin, baked in a sliceable loaf. Makes fantastic toast, and I've been craving grilled cheese with it since I brought it home yesterday. I literally butter all four slices all the way to each edge, place them butter-side down in the skillet, and top each with a thick slice of American cheese. That way, as the pan slowly heats up, the cheese starts to melt, and by the time the outsides are crunchy and crispy, the cheese is a goo-fest, and nothing gets burnt. And I always make two, because one grilled cheese sandwich is never enough.

Freedom sounds phenomenal to the preoccupied young. But when one is an adult and has “free days” there is simply not much to do. Even in Los Angeles, where everything was. There was an unspoken spell of solitude cast on the city. Once one has been to the main parts of town, and had their fair share at the beach, Los Angeles turned unbreathably lonely. The biggest risks took place in grocery stores where a quiet shopper chose to switch to multi-grain bread after two years on sourdough. One could use their afternoons to create art— maybe writing a poem or painting a picture—all of which pass time but are isolating activities in and of themselves. The child begs for freedom and the adult wants to be told what to do.

At some point, Sabine began spending most of her weekends in Arklow, and they started going to the farmers’ market together on Saturday mornings. She didn’t seem to mind the expense and bought freely: loaves of sourdough bread, organic fruits and vegetables, plaice and sole and mussels off the fish van, which came up from Kilmore Quay. Once, he’d seen her pay three euros for an ordinary-looking head of cabbage. In August, she went out along the back roads with the colander, picking blackberries off the hedges. Then, in September, a local farmer told her that she could gather the wild mushrooms from his fields. She made blackberry jam, mushroom soup. Almost everything she brought home she cooked with apparent light-handedness and ease, with what Cathal took to be love.

Sourdough isn't only for bread. Any grain-based baked good- from crackers to waffles, from muffins to pasta, can be made with a wild yeast starter. Why would the home baker want to incorporate sourdough into their regular baking? First, it's an excellent way to use the starter you remove during feedings. Instead of throwing the excess in the trash, add it to your pancake batter or chocolate chip cookies. Second, a sourdough starter is an ecosystem of wild yeasts and beneficial bacteria that work together to add B-vitamins to grains, to break down gluten for better digestion, and to neutralize phytic acid and enzyme inhibitors. In other words, it's good for you. And finally, because sourdough eventually becomes a way of life. Experimenting with different ways of using it is one of the most satisfying aspects of using wild yeast in your kitchen.

Sauté, stirring regularly, the butter, onions, garlic, baby leaves, thyme, a pinch of salt and few grinds of pepper, until the onions are translucent. Meanwhile, remove the cord, membranes, and any clots from the placenta. Rinse it under cold water. Quarter it, set three quarters aside for another use, and add the remaining quarter to the sauté. Remove placenta when it is cooked through. Slice thin and set aside. Continue cooking the onions, stirring regularly, until they become brown.Add wine and simmer until the liquid evaporates and the onions lose their form. Add flour. Mix well. With a low flame, cook, stirring regularly, for 5 minutes. Add water, beef, placenta or chicken stock, and sliced placenta. Simmer for 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. To serve: preheat broiler. In oven-friendly serving bowls or pot, cover the hot soup with cubed sourdough bread and the bread with grated cheese. Broil until the cheese melts

Punctuation! We knew it was holy. Every sentence we cherished was sturdy and Biblical in its form, carved somehow by hand-dragged implement or slapped onto sheets by an inky key. For sentences were sculptural, were we the only ones who understood? Sentences were bodies, too, as horny as the flesh-envelopes we wore around the house all day. Erotically enjambed in our loft bed, Clea patrolled my utterances for subject, verb, predicate, as a chef in a five-star kitchen would minister a recipe, insuring that a soufflé or sourdough would rise. A good brave sentence (“I can hardly bear your heel at my nape without roaring”) might jolly Clea to instant climax. We’d rise from the bed giggling, clutching for glasses of cold water that sat in pools of their own sweat on bedside tables. The sentences had liberated our higher orgasms, nothing to sneeze at. Similarly, we were also sure that sentences of the right quality could end this hideous endless war, if only certain standards were adopted at the higher levels. They never would be. All the media trumpeted the Administration’s lousy grammar.

Before them were soups and stews filled with various tubers, roasted venison, long hot loaves of sourdough bread, and rows of honeycakes dripped with raspberry preserve. In a bed of greens lay filleted trout garnished with parsley, and on the side, pickled eel stared forlornly at an urn of cheese, as if hoping to somehow escape back into a river. A swan sat on each table, surrounded by a flock of stuffed partridges, geese, and ducks. Mushrooms were everywhere: broiled in juicy strips, placed atop a bird’s head like a bonnet, or carved in the shape of castles amid moats of gravy. An incredible variety was on display, from puffy white mushrooms the size of Eragon’s fist, to ones he could have mistaken for gnarled bark, to delicate toadstools sliced neatly in half to showcase their blue flesh. Then the centerpiece of the feast was revealed: a gigantic roasted boar, glistening with sauce. At least Eragon thought it was a boar, for the carcass was as large as Snowfire and took six dwarves to carry. The tusks were longer than his forearms, the snout as wide as his head. And the smell, it overwhelmed all others in pungent waves that made his eyes water from their strength.

James and Colleen Simmons, authors of Daniel's Challenge and Original Fast Foods, and owners of LDShealth.ning.com, have this to say on the subject: “The commercial bread-making industry figured out how to isolate strains of yeast that made bread raise very quickly compared to the old-fashion bread-making method; soon sourdough starts became a thing of the past for most of us. What we didn't know when we traded Old-World leavening techniques for quick-rise yeasts, is that not everything in wheat is good for you. In fact, there are several elements in wheat that are down-right problematic and that have led to grain intolerances in about 20 percent of today's population. When you compare what happens to the bread when it is leavened with commercial yeasts versus a good sourdough starter, another story unfolds…. The sourdough starter contains several natural strains of friendly bacteria and yeasts that also cause bread to rise; however, these friendly bacteria also neutralize the harmful effects of the grain. They neutralize phytic acids that otherwise prevent minerals found in the grain from being absorbed properly; they predigest the gluten, and they also neutralize lignans and tanins found in wheat.”1

I make a great fried egg sandwich. Want to try it?" Chloe stared at her with an encouraging smile until Josey finally laughed and nodded. "Okay." "Great!" Chloe put on a pair of disposable gloves, then she took butter and two eggs from the under-the-counter fridge. "Go ahead and take a business card. You can call me here if you want. And the bottom number is my cell." She plopped a pat of butter onto the grill. When the butter melted, she cracked the eggs into it, close enough for their whites to merge. While they sizzled, she buttered two slices of sourdough bread and put them on the grill. "I didn't know this place was called Red's," Josey said, reading the card. Chloe smiled when she thought of her great-grandfather. "Another family tradition. My great-grandfather had red hair. So did my mother." Chloe sprinkled the eggs with salt and pepper and a pinch of dill, then turned them over with her spatula. She flipped the quickly toasting bread too. She'd spent her childhood watching her great-grandfather do this, and here at the shop was the only time she felt him near anymore. "Do you want this for here or to go?" "To go." Chloe sprinkled a little more salt and pepper on the eggs, made sure the yolks had firmed ever so slightly, then topped them with cheese. She let the cheese melt before scooping the eggs up and putting them on the buttered sourdough.

Domenico, my pen pal and the master of ceremonies, emerges from the kitchen in a cobalt suit bearing a plate of bite-sized snacks: ricotta caramel, smoked hake, baby artichoke with shaved bottarga. The first course lands on the table with a wink from Domenico: raw shrimp, raw sheep, and a shower of wild herbs and flowers- an edible landscape of the island. I raise my fork tentatively, expecting the intensity of a mountain flock, but the sheep is amazingly delicate- somehow lighter than the tiny shrimp beside it. The intensity arrives with the next dish, the calf's liver we bought at the market, transformed from a dense purple lobe into an orb of pâté, coated in crushed hazelnuts, surrounded by fruit from the market this morning. The boneless sea anemones come cloaked in crispy semolina and bobbing atop a sticky potato-parsley puree. Bread is fundamental to the island, and S'Apposentu's frequent carb deliveries prove the point: a hulking basket overflowing with half a dozen housemade varieties from thin, crispy breadsticks to a dense sourdough loaf encased in a dark, gently bitter crust. The last savory course, one of Roberto's signature dishes, is the most stunning of all: ravioli stuffed with suckling pig and bathed in a pecorino fondue. This is modernist cooking at its most magnificent: two fundamental flavors of the island (spit-roasted pig and sheep's-milk cheese) cooked down and refined into a few explosive bites. The kind of dish you build a career on.

Soon, things were heating up in the kitchen. The first course was a variation on a French recipe that had been around since Escoffier, Baccala Brandade. Angelina created a silky forcemeat with milk, codfish, olive oil, pepper, and slow-roasted garlic, a drizzle of lemon juice, and a shower of fresh parsley, then served it as a dip with sliced sourdough and warmed pita-bread wedges, paired with glasses of bubbly Prosecco. The second course had been a favorite of her mother's called Angels on Horseback- freshly shucked oysters, wrapped in thin slices of prosciutto, then broiled on slices of herb-buttered bread. When the oysters cooked, they curled up to resemble tiny angels' wings. Angelina accented the freshness of the oyster with a dab of anchovy paste and wasabi on each hors d'oeuvre. She'd loved the Angels since she was a little girl; they were a heavenly mouthful. This was followed by a Caesar salad topped with hot, batter-dipped, deep-fried smelts. Angelina's father used to crunch his way through the small, silvery fish like French fries. Tonight, Angelina arranged them artfully around mounds of Caesar salad on each plate and ushered them out the door. For the fifth course, Angelina had prepared a big pot of her Mediterranean Clam Soup the night before, a lighter version of Manhattan clam chowder. The last two courses were Parmesan-Stuffed Poached Calamari over Linguine in Red Sauce, and the piece de resistance, Broiled Flounder with a Coriander Reduction.

In the white bowl, the paper caught fire, burning like a desperate flower, blooming and dying at the same time. Its scents came on tendrils of smoke, wrapping themselves around me. We missed you. I inhaled, and Victoria's kitchen disappeared around me. It was early morning in the cabin, winter; I could smell the woodstove working to keep the frost at bay. My father had fed the sourdough starter, and the tang of it played off the warm scent of coffee grounds. I could smell my own warmth in the air, rising from the blankets I'd tossed aside. I remembered that morning. It was the first time I ever saw the machine. I must have been three, maybe four years old. I'd woken up and seen my father, standing in the middle of the room, a box in his hands, bright and shiny and magical. I remembered racing across the floor, my bare feet tingling from the chill. What is it, Papa? It's wonderful. I want to know. And he'd put the shiny box aside and lifted me up high and said, You are the most wonderful thing in the world, little lark. The last of the paper crumbled to ash. I stood there, trying to remember what had happened next- but I couldn't. Did my father show me the machine, or did we go outside and chop wood? You'd think I'd remember, but I didn't. What I remembered was how it felt to be held in his arms. To be loved that way, before everything else happened. And in that moment, I felt whole. "Oh," I heard Victoria say, and when I turned to her, her eyes were filled with tears.

One Friday, after a particularly shattering day at the office, in which my code reviews had all come back red with snotty comments, and my manager, Peter, had gently inquired about the pace of my refactoring ("perhaps not sufficiently turbo-charged"), I arrived home in a swirl of angst, with petulance and self-recrimination locked in ritual combat to determine which would ruin my night. On the phone with Beoreg, I ordered my food with a rattling sigh, and when his brother arrived at my door, he carried something different: a more compact tub containing a fiery red broth and not one but two slabs of bread for dipping. "Secret spicy," he whispered. The soup was so hot it burned the frustration out of my, and I went to bed feeling like a fresh plate, scalded and scraped clean.

Kamimura has been whispering all week of a sacred twenty-four-hour ramen spot located on a two-lane highway in Kurume where truckers go for the taste of true ramen. The shop is massive by ramen standards, big enough to fit a few trucks along with those drivers, and in the midafternoon a loose assortment of castaways and road warriors sit slurping their noodles. Near the entrance a thick, sweaty cauldron boils so aggressively that a haze of pork fat hangs over the kitchen like waterfall mist. While few are audacious enough to claim ramen is healthy, tonkotsu enthusiasts love to point out that the collagen in pork bones is great for the skin. "Look at their faces!" says Kamimura. "They're almost seventy years old and not a wrinkle! That's the collagen. Where there is tonkotsu, there is rarely a wrinkle." He's right: the woman wears a faded purple bandana and sad, sunken eyes, but even then she doesn't look a day over fifty. She's stirring a massive cauldron of broth, and I ask her how long it's been simmering for. "Sixty years," she says flatly. This isn't hyperbole, not exactly. Kurume treats tonkotsu like a French country baker treats a sourdough starter- feeding it, regenerating, keeping some small fraction of the original soup alive in perpetuity. Old bones out, new bones in, but the base never changes. The mother of all ramen. Maruboshi Ramen opened in 1958, and you can taste every one of those years in the simple bowl they serve. There is no fancy tare, no double broth, no secret spice or unexpected toppings: just pork bones, noodles, and three generations of constant simmering. The flavor is pig in its purest form, a milky broth with no aromatics or condiments to mitigate the purity of its porcine essence.

The menu is spectacular. Passed hors d'oeuvres include caramelized shallot tartlets topped with Gorgonzola, cubes of crispy pork belly skewered with fresh fig, espresso cups of chilled corn soup topped with spicy popcorn, mini arepas filled with rare skirt steak and chimichurri and pickle onions, and prawn dumplings with a mango serrano salsa. There is a raw bar set up with three kinds of oysters, and a raclette station where we have a whole wheel of the nutty cheese being melted to order, with baby potatoes, chunks of garlic sausage, spears of fresh fennel, lightly pickled Brussels sprouts, and hunks of sourdough bread to pour it over. When we head up for dinner, we will start with a classic Dover sole amandine with a featherlight spinach flan, followed by a choice of seared veal chops or duck breast, both served with creamy polenta, roasted mushrooms, and lacinato kale. Next is a light salad of butter lettuce with a sharp lemon Dijon vinaigrette, then a cheese course with each table receiving a platter of five cheeses with dried fruits and nuts and three kinds of bread, followed by the panna cottas. Then the cake, and coffee and sweets. And at midnight, chorizo tamales served with scrambled eggs, waffle sticks with chicken fingers and spicy maple butter, candied bacon strips, sausage biscuit sandwiches, and vanilla Greek yogurt parfaits with granola and berries on the "breakfast" buffet, plus cheeseburger sliders, mini Chicago hot dogs, little Chinese take-out containers of pork fried rice and spicy sesame noodles, a macaroni-and-cheese bar, and little stuffed pizzas on the "snack food" buffet. There will also be tiny four-ounce milk bottles filled with either vanilla malted milk shakes, root beer floats made with hard root beer, Bloody Marys, or mimosas.

2. Users of bells and whistles such as grapes and milk in their starter vs. flour-and-water minimalists. (Lest you reflexively award moral victory to the purists, note that the grapes side includes such heavy hitters as Nancy Silverton and the man Anthony Bourdain describes as “[God’s] personal bread baker.”) 3. Protective vs. permissive starter parents. (“The California gold rush prospectors made sourdough from whatever they had at hand. River water and whole grain flour. Maybe some old coffee. Hell, throw in some grapes. They fed it whatever they had, however often they could. None of this coddling the sourdough, giving it regular feedings, just the right amount of pablum. You ruin a good sour that way. Turns out to be weak and citified. Doesn’t have the gumption to properly raise a little pancake much less a loaf of bread. Nope.”) .

At Crowley Control Systems in Southfield, the message we received from Clark Crowley, delivered in an amble around the office every month or so, was: Keep up the fine work folks! At General Dexterity in San Francisco, the message we received from Andrei, delivered in a quantitative business update every Tuesday and Thursday, was: We are on a mission to remake the conditions of human labor, so push harder, all of you. I began to wonder if, in fact, I knew how to push hard. In Michigan, my family all had families and extremely serious hobbies. Here, the wraiths were stripped bare: human-shaped generators of CAD and code.

I looked down at the loaves on the baking stone, which, just as before, carried in their crusts the overwhelming illusion of dark eyes, upturned noses, fissured mouths. Upon closer inspection, these faces were different from the last loaf's. They were disturbing. Their eyes squinted merrily and their mouths curled into ragged, jack-o'-lantern grins. The bread knife was the solution to all my problems. I sawed and sawed and sawed until the faces were no more.

He pressed his lips together and I saw the muscles of his jaw working. This was Peter's being-a-manager face. It meant he was figuring out how to help you.

There was more to upgrade. I went to a shop in downtown Oakland that sold salt of every kind and color, black and pink and blue. Each variety sat shimmering in a glass canister, priced by the ounce, with a handwritten card recounting its biography: here, salt from the beaches of Gujarat; there, salt from the pans of Brittany; behold, salt from the suburbs of Portland. I backed slowly out the door. I would stick with Diamond Crystal.

I agree," Mona said. As if she had any choice.

As I was doing this, I was also reading the book that Charlotte Clingstone had selected from Horace's library and left for me, Candide-- her cafe's namesake. It was, unexpectedly, a screwball action comedy. The hapless main character, whose name was Candide, travelled with a band of companions from Europe to the New World and back. Along the way, characters were flogged, ship-wrecked, enslaved and nearly executed several times. There were earthquakes and tsunamis and missing body parts. One of Candide's companions, Pangloss, whose name I recognized from the hundred-dollar adjective he inspired-- I'd never known the etymology-- insisted throughout that all their misfortunes were for the best, for they delivered the companions into situations that seemed, at first, pretty good. Until those situations, too, went to shit. The story concluded on a small farm outside Istanbul, where Candide plunked a hoe into the dirt and declared his intention to retreat from adventure (and suffering) and simply tend his garden. The way the author told it-- the book was written in 1959-- it was clear I was supposed to think Candide had finally discovered something important.

She was suddenly sweet and solicitous, and it was very strange. She should have stayed sharp and brusque. She should have commanded: Let me work with that muck of yours! I would have complied in a moment.

I returned to the airfield the next day because the others had spoken the truth: Agrippa was a genius. Maybe also an asshole. But I believed he had something to teach me; I believed he understood the starter in a way that I didn’t, or couldn’t.

Ravi and Zuri were determined to save Bertram from the iBall’s premonitions, so they were removing all the bread in the apartment. “We must protect Bertram,” Ravi declared as he tossed out a bag of sourdough rolls. “Okay, guys, I appreciate you monitoring my carb intake, but this is going too far,” Bertram said as he walked in and found them. “The next prediction is you’re going to choke on stuffing,” Zuri explained. “Then a shadowy figure’s going to take you away for a

Sourdough is basically a gastronomic alternative to The Sims.

Scoping myself out in my standup mirror, I turned and gently twerked.

The internet: always proving that you’re not quite as special as you suspected.

People, said Sybille, were not meant to be alone. Men and women, women and women, men and men, all should find each other. Solitude was for those broken beyond repair.

She lifted a piece of sourdough bruschetta slathered with seafood and a light-colored sauce. She bit carefully into the creation. Her mouth exploded with flavor. Prawns and lobster swimming in the most delectable sauce. Buttery and layered, with whisky and leeks and onions and simple herbs. Sophia moaned. There was more than just one bite on this plate. Thank God. Not strictly a true amuse-bouche, but Sophia didn't care. Was it bad form to lick the plate in a cooking competition? This drab little plate had miraculously fixed her taste bud deficiency. Unbelievable. The moment had just shifted from black-and-white to color, like a scene from the Wizard of Oz. Who had created this dish? Someone with a sophisticated palate but no eye for visual presentation. The last plate beckoned, but she already knew it was a lost cause. There was no way it could best that seafood stew. It was a lovely crepe, packed with grilled eggplant and goat cheese. And now that Sophia's taste had been awakened from hibernation, she was able to enjoy every bite. But it still wasn't enough to out-shine the prawns. Those prawns sang to her, and they needed her. They demanded color and brightness. The sauce was bold and rich. That plate clamored for the balance of her garden. She could imagine a prickly little salad to offer texture and bite, to complement that exquisite sauce. Those prawns needed her.

It is no small thing to change a culture,” Horace said simply. “But I think interesting things are growing here. Lucrative enterprises. Provocative tastes.

You went to Greenland...on purpose," Naz said.

He said wouldn't it be brilliant to have a food emporium on the ground floor of Fenton's, like Harrods, but have everything organic and locally grown." Diana paused to let the idea sink in. "I said not the ground floor of course, Fenton's isn't a supermarket, but the basement has been a dead zone for years. A whole floor dedicated to stationery when no one writes letters anymore." "A food emporium," Cassie repeated. "Fresh fish caught in the bay, oysters, crab when it's in season. Counters of vegetables you only find in the farmers market, those cheeses they make in Sonoma that smell so bad they taste good. Wines from Napa Valley, Ghirardelli chocolates, sourdough bread, sauces made by Michael Mina and Thomas Keller. Everything locally produced. And maybe a long counter with stools so you could sample bread and cheese, cut fruit, sliced vegetables. Not a true cafe because we'd keep the one on the fourth floor. It would have more the feel of a food bazaar, with the salespeople wearing aprons and white caps." Cassie closed her eyes and saw large baskets of vegetables, glass cases filled with goat cheese and baguettes, stands brimming with chocolate-covered strawberries.

Is there anything I can do?" He gave her a tired grin. "Crawl in bed with me." She glared at him, then got up and tossed him a terry-cloth robe she found hanging on the back of the bathroom door. "Meet me in the kitchen. I'll make you a sandwich." "You don't need to make me a sandwich." "But I'm going to." She left the room before he could protest further. In the kitchen, she layered grilled pancetta, tomato and lettuce on toasted thick slabs of sourdough. She added some chopped cornichons, Dijon mustard and fresh snipped tarragon to the mayo, just to show off. Around Bella Vista, her PLT's were legendary. Mac wasn't wearing the robe when he came downstairs. He'd thrown on a pair of lived-in cutoffs, faded in all the right places, and a rumpled but clean T-shirt with a logo from a kiteboarding resort in Australia. She cut the sandwich into quarters and set it on a pottery plate, along with a side of grapes and parmesan chips, and a beer in a frosty mug. He regarded the small feast on the table. "I hope you don't mind if I moan in ecstasy while I eat this." "I'd rather you didn't," she said, helping herself to a quarter of the sandwich. "Cook's tax," she explained.

NOURISHING TRADITIONAL FOODS Proteins: Fresh, pasture-raised meat including beef, lamb, game, chicken, turkey, duck and other fowl; organ meats from pastured animals; seafood of all types from deep sea waters; fresh shellfish in season; fish eggs; fresh eggs from pastured poultry; organic fermented soy products in small amounts. Fats: Fresh butter and cream from pasture-fed cows, preferably raw and cultured; lard and beef, lamb, goose and duck fat from pastured animals; extra virgin olive oil; unrefined flax seed oil in small amounts; coconut oil and palm oil. Dairy: Raw, whole milk and cultured dairy products, such as yoghurt, piima milk, kefir and raw cheese, from traditional breeds of pasture-fed cows and goats. Carbohydrates: Organic whole grain products properly treated for the removal of phytates, such as sourdough and sprouted grain bread and soaked or sprouted cereal grains; soaked and fermented legumes including lentils, beans, and chickpeas; sprouted or soaked seeds and nuts; fresh fruits and vegetables, both raw and cooked; fermented vegetables. Beverages: Filtered, high-mineral water; lacto-fermented drinks made from grain or fruit; meat stocks and vegetable broths. Condiments: Unrefined sea salt; raw vinegar; spices in moderation; fresh herbs; naturally fermented soy sauce and fish sauce.

WES’S SIMPLE SOURDOUGH STARTER & BREAD STARTER Making a sourdough starter is the first step in opening the door to all kinds of delicious, nutritious, and traditionally baked breads and pastries. PREP: 5 minutes PROCESS: 3–5 days COOL: none 1-quart Mason jar with lid 1 five-pound bag of your favorite flour (non-white is recommended and an organic sprouted whole wheat flour gives a rustic sourdough loaf flavor) lukewarm water CREATING THE STARTER 1.​Mix ¼ cup flour and ¼ cup warm water in a Mason jar until it looks like a pancake mix. Based on your climate and altitude, you may need to add in a splash more water or flour. 2.​Cover the container loosely and allow mixture to stand overnight at room temperature. 3.​Repeat these steps and continue adding to the starter for the next four days. Between days two and three, your starter will begin to bubble. You should be able to see air pockets on the side of your Mason jar and “rivulets” or fine air bubbles on the top of your mixture by day five. If not, remove ½ cup of starter and continue the same steps for two more days. The starter should have a tangy aroma that’s not overpowering. The bubbling mixture is now ready to use for baking. MAINTAINING THE STARTER 1.​Store the starter in the refrigerator with lid. Once or twice a week remove ½ cup of starter and add ¼