You can see why I don’t have an Instagram account. This heavy, pale sourdough loaf looks more like the underbelly of a bloated fish than something that Instagram followers would envy. So why expose my failing? To remind us all that it’s ok to close a door. As Paul Coelho says, “Close some doors. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because they no longer lead somewhere.”
Well, today I closed the door on my sourdough bread baking enterprise. Rather than messing with “Starter”, I embraced, “Finished.” There were so many reasons this didn’t work for me. The demands of the starter, the mess on the kitchen counter, the finished product that makes a loaf of store-bought bunny bread look ok… I bet I could have gotten a lot better if I were willing to stick with it. But every time I looked at the slurry in the jar or the pathetic loaf, I was saying to myself, “Why don’t you just make the easy, never fails, no- knead bread from Mark Bittman? It makes one large, delicious loaf with 4 ingredients in 24 hrs- almost entirely unattended. The recipe is simple. The technique is simple. And the fruit of minimal labor is simply delicious so I’m keeping this door open!
Maybe especially now, in Age of Corona, give yourself permission to close a door that no longer leads somewhere you want to go.