I was waiting until I got my hands on whole wheat flour before I actually used my ripened sourdough starter for the first time, so I had to put the sourdough starter in the fridge. Once it’s in the fridge and no longer in a friendly, warm environment, sourdough starter begins to “sleep,” meaning it becomes dormant in the cold and needs to be reawakened for use by taking it out of the fridge, re-feeding it, and getting it to the ripe, mature stage again. Unfortunately for me, I had no idea what I was doing, and instead of re-feeding it with all-purpose flour, which is what I originally began this starter with, I thought no harm would be done if I added my new whole wheat flour. Apparently I violated a rule that says you are supposed to keep with the same flour, and the starter became far less happy and bubbly. And as a result of this, it’s been less gurgly and excited since coming out of the fridge.

This means I have more discard starter to use… even when I do not want to bake or make anything. Whole wheat sourdough crumpets are what I tried…. and what I did not realize is that the texture would be completely different than with all-purpose. As Chris said, “these are more doughy.” In other words, these are far more dense and not airy and “hole-y” the way the white flour ones are. Test and learn, I suppose?

In addition to video editing, cooking, and reading, I’ve been spending a good amount of my free time now studying sourdough and understanding how different recipes work. A few fun facts I’ve learned about making bread from a starter: it tends to be a bit more forgiving than dry active/fresh yeast, it doesn’t “rise” doubly the way commercial yeast does, and it also seems to develop more of a… “personality.” That last part can be a good or a bad thing depending on who you ask, but the die-hard bread makers will say it’s definitely a good thing. This is when cooking truly is a science, when everyone starts taking out their scales, instant read thermometers, and setting timers down to the last minute to keep track of proper, exact proofing and hydration. I’m not completely into that level of exact science (I’m also at a disadvantage now, in this very moment, because even if I wanted to be, I am not currently in possession of a scale), but this whole process is so fascinating. It’s also been interesting to see this domestic science side via our Breadheads Slack channel of a number of my fellow colleagues, who are engineers, data scientists, and statisticians by profession.

Sourdough is an art and a science. I’ve already appreciated the art, but I am still navigating the science, especially reading recipes written by these maniacally exact chefs (where everything has a gram measurement and a temperature, even the flour you use!).

I held my breath a little this evening as my alarm went off to remind me to check and feed my sourdough starter. I wasn’t sure how well it would do in our apartment given that our apartment, without the heat on, is not usually 70-75 F, but a friendly colleague let me know a hack: turn the oven light on and place the starter in there. The small space with the heat of the light would be able to do the trick. So I did that, and wow, what a difference that little light made! As soon as I opened the oven, my hands felt warm, so I knew the starter baby would be quite comfortable and cozy in there.

I stirred the starter with chopsticks and noticed that the top had crusted over, but the inside was sticky, a little sweet smelling: that’s the exact description my guide said it would ideally be today! So I fed it and placed it back into the oven. The crusty part could be avoided by making sure the towel placed on top is wet, so I wet the towel, too.

I’m on my way to becoming a sourdough starter queen!

Well, tonight is the night when I finally face one of my biggest kitchen challenges and fears: making my own sourdough starter. I’d read about this from Michael Pollan during college, that I could actually make my own starter just from filtered water and all-purpose flour given that there are all kinds of wild yeasts in everything from flour to our hands, but the thought of it kind of scared me. This would actually be a living thing, in my apartment, that would require daily and/or weekly feedings. It seemed like too much maintenance, so I pushed it off “to another time,” I thought then.

Well, “another time” has come, and I’ve started the process tonight. I didn’t have a scale like my bread-making colleagues advised me to get (I mean, Amazon isn’t really prioritizing scale orders now, right, nor is Sur La Table three blocks away considered an “essential business”), but I decided to wing it with my cup measures. If all goes well, I may be giving birth tonight to a new member of our family that will require a weekly feeding and a permanent spot in our refrigerator.

What I really want to make, though, is whole wheat sourdough, and I don’t actually have whole wheat flour. Buying flour online seems to be difficult since most places have seen a surge of demand and many are low in stock. I guess that challenge will need to wait until at least another week once this starter has (fingers crossed) ripened, and I won’t have to wait a ridiculous amount of time at Whole Foods to get whole wheat flour (the other markets around us do not seem to carry it!).

After visiting Vancouver for the second time in August 2018 for a friend’s wedding, I was inspired by the plant-based food scene that Vancouver offers and was particularly impressed with a place near my hotel called the Juice Truck. It was a little cafe, and without even realizing it when I walked it, was 100 percent plant-based. I ordered a toasted chickpea Caesar salad (which I still think about to this day because it was that well put together and delicious) and a slice of their vegan lemon coconut loaf, made by a vegan food company owned by Erin Ireland, a vegan chef in the area. With one bite of that loaf, I was completely in love and shocked that there were zero eggs and no butter in it. It was packed with flavor, super moist, and just delicious all around.

Erin Ireland doesn’t make her recipes publicly known, so based on the ingredients list on the packet, I took a photo of it to remember what she used and was determined to recreate a version of this at home. Well, a year and a half later, I finally tried this out today, and I’m proud to say that I’ve come quite close to replicating it. The crumb is not as firm as I’d like, but I hope it will firm up overnight, but the flavor is almost what I remember it to be. Plant-based cooking and baking definitely requires a bit more thought, but it has lots of promise when you have fresh, vibrant ingredients like fresh lemons, coconut milk, coconut oil, millet, and poppy seeds.

Given our entire company is working from home, we’ve started some new “work from home water cooler” Slack channels to keep ourselves amused and still social with each other. One of the ones I’ve recently joined is on recipes, where we share recipes of things we’re cooking given our sudden extra time at home. At least four of my colleagues have used this opportunity to make their own sourdough starter. I’ve always thought about doing this, but never actually did it. And reading through the guides they have shared, it’s actually much easier than I thought (or so it sounds!).

So while making vegan banana bread today (with a new twist I’ve never done: using all purpose flour, semolina flour, and buckwheat flour, with a few tablespoons of millet!), I bookmarked a link to teach myself how to do this. Who could say no to 100 percent homemade bread, with not even commercial yeast used?!

I’ve never really been into St. Patrick’s Day. It just seems like an annual excuse to drink more alcohol and particularly consume more Guinness beer. While I appreciate dishes like corned beef and cabbage, I found out that they actually are more Irish American and not actually Irish, so there goes that. And Irish soda bread — well, that’s actually Native American, so all the foods we typically associate with St. Patrick’s Day are not actually Irish!

Nevertheless, a few years ago, a colleague had brought his mother’s Irish soda bread in, and I was really blown away by the texture and the taste, especially knowing that no yeast is used, and the only leavener is baking soda. So, I attempted to make it myself today. It uses only four ingredients: buttermilk, flour, salt, and baking soda. It was really simple, likely the easiest bread I’ve ever made. The crumb was dense as it usually is, and oddly enough, mine came out more moist than the different versions I’ve eaten. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, but to me, it tasted good. It also came out with a really crackly, crunchy crust that I loved.

More jam, butter, and avocado toasts will be made with this for the remainder of this week at home!

After discovering the glory and and authentic flavor that dried methi leaves can give to saag, I decided to make it again today. I got a bit too blender-happy, though, and ended up blending all of the spinach and mustard greens that I pressure cooked in the Instant Pot instead of half of it. When I put all the blended greens into a glass dish with the chicken on top, Chris remarked, “That looks like chicken in a spinach bath. That’s what I would say that is if you didn’t tell me it was supposed to be chicken saag!”

Well, maybe it is chicken in a spinach bath…. I’ll tweak my method next time so that we don’t have to rename the recipe. That’s what this is all about… testing recipes and iterating on them.

This past Christmas, Chris gifted me a cheesemaking cooking class at Home Cooking NY on Grand Street in lower Manhattan that took place yesterday. It was the second time I’ve taken a class here, as the first one was on Vietnamese cooking that I did last year after returning from Vietnam. I didn’t really love the Vietnamese cooking class last year, as I felt that the main instructor kept talking over and interrupting her Vietnamese guest instructor too much to the point that it seemed condescending. But during this cheesemaking course, the instructor seemed far more in her own element, going through facts on the cheese industry both in the U.S. and abroad while also making wise cracks and sarcastic comments about the U.S. federal and state level government regulations on raw milk and cheese (“Here in New York state, it’s illegal to sell raw milk, so you have to go to the border of Pennsylvania to buy it … the state is trying to protect you from absolutely nothing, so…” and also about the poor state of education here in the U.S. (“when I used to teach real culinary school, you wouldn’t believe how dumb my students were… they didn’t know what terms like ‘opaque’ or ‘translucent’ meant. I said to them, ‘do you know what ‘see-through’ means? Well, that is what ‘translucent’ means. And the opposite of that — what you CANNOT see through, that is ‘opaque’! Got it?!” It was a bit hilarious and unexpected, and at times could be tiring to see how jaded she was, but it definitely was entertaining at times.

We made mozzarella, paneer, ricotta, cashew “ricotta,” saag paneer, and caprese sandwiches during class. I enjoyed it and learned a good amount, and I’m now feeling more interested in prioritizing making ricotta and paneer myself sometime soon, as both had already been on my to-make list for a while (isn’t everything?). But, I will say that the instructor’s saag paneer was not to my liking; everyone else raved about it (some of these people claimed to eat Indian food regularly but had never heard of saag paneer or palak paneer — how can you claim to eat Indian food in this country and never have eaten or even seen this at a restaurant?!), but I found it too heavy on the tomatoes and a bit westernized. I realize that dried methi leaves are not easily sourced, but if you really want to make authentic tasting saag paneer, you absolutely need to have these, and all it takes is one or two tiny pinches of it to make a world’s difference. They can be bought at any Indian grocery store or on Amazon. I wasn’t going to be the smart ass in class to say it to the instructor or any other white person raving about this dish in class (even though my instructor was a self-professed “smart ass” and likely could have handled it), so I said nothing instead, preferring to keep the peace with 10 people I’d likely never see again.