He’s going to ask for a glass of milk. And then a straw. And then a napkin to wipe his milk mustache… And that’s only the beginning of the proverbial slippery slope.
If you buy a bike, it will need a wicker basket. And the wicker basket will beg to be filled with baguettes or bouquets- or both. I picked baguettes. Having no flowers handy gave the baguettes an edge, and lots of discard from the sourdough starter sealed the deal. This sourdough starter has been more of a commitment than I’d bargained for. It’s sort of like a needly houseguest- asking to be fed twice a day. Feeding involves lots of fiddling with a scale and measuring utensils and metric conversions. But when you’ve got time on your hands, why not. My hands were itching not to be idle so I busied myself with baguettes.
This experiment was a mixture, literally and figuratively. San Francisco meets Paris. (A quick search shows that SF is a sourdough johnny- come-lately, by many centuries; the baguette is really Austrian, but why mess up the story with facts.)
It’s a strange process. About half of the sourdough starter has to be discarded before you feed the remainder. After several days of dutifully but reluctantly throwing it away, it occurred to me that what I’d been tossing would be poolish if I added a single gram of dry yeast. And what is this poolish? It’s the wet, messy stuff the Parisian bread baking school uses to start a baguette.
My finished product doesn’t like the ones from the boulangerie. It would fail on all the metrics by which French law defines a baguette- length, width, height and weight. My baguettes are bien blanche, less cooked, whiter. That apparently isn’t a flaw- just a fact. And the croûton- the very tips of the baguette, like the heel of a loaf of homemade bread- delicious. Or in the land of boulangeries, délicieux.
Happy bike. Happy basket. Happy belly. All thanks to the baguettes. Bon appétit in the Age of Cororna.