February Full Moon: Sourdough Bread

Awakening, collaboration, revolution.

This full moon in Virgo, we are being called forth to an awakening, and our work is to align our values to the ways we show up in the world. The value of hard work and organization comes into the spotlight. How do we organize our time in a productive way while still having space to act in service to the collective? I often bristle at the wellness space when it says to shut out the news and just focus on yourself. Caring for our communities and fellow beings is also taking care of ourselves. There is space for both, and ignoring the cries of the collective to focus on oneself is never something you’ll see me advocating for, as we are all connected, and any work I do toward liberating others also liberates me.

We are being called to release the trappings of identity politics and virtue signaling, and rather than policing others about how they show up online, we’re being called to do the work on ourselves and in our communities to organize and act from a place of grounding. It’s so easy to criticize others for not speaking out and it’s much harder to learn to use our own voice, introspect, and identify the tools and strengths we have so we can do the work we were meant to do while in this short lifetime on the planet. This way we can lead by example and inspire people to find their own place in the resistance. There is great power in the collective, and it’s not time to fall into individualistic limiting beliefs. 

Let’s talk about food writing for a moment. It doesn’t feel good to me to write about the pleasures of food preparation while Palestinian people, after all of the horrors they’ve endured, are now being starved out, a horrific, slow, death after bearing witness to gruesome murders of all or most of their family members. What’s more, all sorts of cruel ways that withholding or destroying food is being weaponized by their oppressors against a starving population. 

Indigenous people being intentionally severed from their land to make way for extractivist industry is nothing new, of course. But right now, we’re in a part of history where people, by a large margin, are waking up to it en masse across the globe as we watch it happen in real time. To me, cooking, food justice, and collective liberation are inextricably entwined. Let’s talk about sourdough bread.

Bread. A staple. To feed a people. Made from flour, water, and leavener. Although commercial yeast is more often used in bread baking these days due to convenience, standardization, and shorter proofing time, sourdough bread is made with a natural leaven known as sourdough starter, a thriving colony of wild yeasts and microbes fed with only flour and water. 

Making bread with a natural leaven is an ancient practice that harnesses the work of these beneficial bacteria and yeasts to pre-digest and convert the carbohydrates in the flour into ethanol, carbon dioxide, and acids. The carbon dioxide makes the bread rise, and is responsible for those gorgeous large, almost pearlescent holes, enzymes in the bacteria pre-digest the flour, making the tender, springy, interior crumb easier on our gut, and the acids give the bread its characteristic flavor, which can vary in intensity depending on a few factors. Each element has a purpose and influences the character of the bread.

The sourdough culture microbiome, like our individual gut microbiome, is unique to each household or bakery in which it grows, and is influenced by such factors as location elevation, humidity, temperature, and other factors of terroir. My thriving little colony has attributes unique to my high-elevation mountainside, and also to my warm kitchen countertop which sees a lot of action in the way of food prep. All sorts of wild yeasts and microbes undoubtedly make their way over from fresh vegetables and fruits to the thriving culture in a glass Weck jar. 

With care and attentive feeding, the beneficial bacteria and yeasts crowd out the bad ones that turn it into a moldy swamp. As long as we feed it each day, mix it up and tend to it, the good outweighs the bad. And in a world where it can feel like bad stuff can be found everywhere, it’s a reminder to us that the good people who just want peace and prosperity outweigh the oppressors. We just need to keep feeding the good, lest the destructive ones take over. 

In this collective awakening, we’re being called to bear witness, and decide how to use our unique gifts in service to the resistance. I wrote about my own grappling with figuring out what my gifts are in the last new moon newsletter. But no matter how small, any action in service of good is not a wasted effort. It also helps our own psyches to transmute the grief and pain we’ve taken in with actions, no matter how small they may seem in the grand scheme. We never know which small action or collective effort will set off a chain reaction.

Both babies are asleep for the night. After I clean the kitchen, it’s time to feed the starter and mix my bread dough. I start with my large glass bowl and weigh out my starter, flours, water, and salt. As I work with my hands, my mind is constantly turning over the daily horrors I’ve ingested, searching my reserves for a solution, something I can do about it. I quickly combine the ingredients, let them sit together for twenty minutes and those wild yeasts and beneficial bacteria get to work. I send out an email to my local list-serv with the letter-writing event I’ve co-organized. A drop in the bucket, really. When the twenty minutes are up, the dough already has an elastic quality to it and I do the first set of stretch-and-fold. I cover it with a damp tea towel, since my house is very dry. I go to bed for the night.

Meditating on the sourdough culture, I draw some parallels to what I see as a sort of cultural shift happening as more and more people speak truth to power and buck various oppressive regimes. For the first eight to ten hours in my bowl sitting on the countertop overnight, much of the growth that’s happening is under the radar, but then in the final couple of hours, the dough seems to have more-than-doubled in volume. The hard work of all those microscopic critters really takes off and you can see the growth bloom. 

When the dough is roiling and bouncy and shiny with large bubbles, it’s ready to be shaped and placed in the brotform. I tenderly scrape the dough out of the big glass bowl, careful not to deflate it, and work swiftly but gingerly to shape it into a ball. I place the ball into my brotform for its final proof. I cover it with the damp tea towel. I join a zoom call “listening session on the Gaza issue” with a local NY state representative. He says the ordinary platitudes that politicians are so skilled at - so very careful not to commit to anything. Sanitized language crafted in a lab to not overtly offend everyone but also not really truly support anyone, just to give the feeling that he’s a supportive ally. How many ways can you creatively allude to ceasefire without saying the words “cease” or “fire”? He hops off after 50 minutes, taking up half of the listening session talking in his enigmas, but the rest of us stay on, for almost three hours, telling our stories and expressing poignant, justified, warranted frustrations at a so-called representative democracy that turns a blind eye and time-after-time votes lock-step with the money and not the constituents.

The dough ball continues to grow, like the movement. The brave ones speak out at first, even at the risk of losing everything, of getting killed or imprisoned or subjugated. But then as more people join in, the strength in numbers makes the movement stronger and stronger. And it also protects those who have risked everything. It’s easier to kill or suppress a movement when it’s first taking off, but much harder to publicly kill something when it becomes so visible that you can’t ignore it.

I preheat the oven to 450, and place the heavy, smooth, cool, cast iron dutch oven and its lid, side-by-side in the cold oven to allow it to heat up as the oven does. Once the oven dings, I flip the brotform over to dump out the dough into the cast iron dutch oven and whoops, it sticks… I mustn’t have dusted it with enough flour. But I decide to bake it off anyway and see how it turns out. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, right? As I read from Jim Lahey, a veritable pioneer in the world of no-knead bread baking, may as well bake it off. If it turns out to be a disaster, the loaf is easier to get rid of than the mass of living dough. I score it, cover it, and set the timer for 35 minutes.

In the book, “The Mountain is You” by Brianna Wiest, the author discusses the concept of micro-shifts that bring us closer to developing better habits. Rather than expecting wide-reaching change to come naturally with some sort of epiphany, changes need to be trained into our lives with slow, incremental shifts. The skills that come with bread making-- slow and steady mastery, under the radar sustained growth, patience in waiting for the dough to rise, and learning the nuance of how the dough should look, feel and behave, all make a good bread baker. And the skills that come with longer-term community organizing are much the same. It’s not about quick flash-in-the-pan success, but about the grassroots growth and success over the longer term. The timer goes off and I remove the lid, set another timer for 15 minutes.

There is a beauty and strength in the repetition it takes to achieve something great. Whereas my initial reaction has always been to beat myself up for any perceived mistakes or failures, I’m learning to extend grace to myself the same way I show up with patience and love and awe for my children who are naturally working through their mistakes and learning new things every day. Choosing something new to learn that is a stretch beyond our comfort zone is a humbling and rewarding process.

The bread is ready, what a beauty. A deep caramel hued thick crust with ridges and cracks and texture from the explosion that happens in the first part of the baking process. The surface texture of this one looks like it could be the moon. The irresistible aroma of fresh bread has filled our little house on the mountainside. You’re really supposed to wait for it to cool completely, but sometimes we crack into the loaf while it’s still hot and steam just billows out. The interior crumb is springy and pillowy soft.

I think of the families and people gathered together in Rafah in makeshift tents, still baking fresh bread in hand made outdoor ovens, burning whatever they can for fuel, at this point even using animal feed and grasses to make their bread, and the love that goes into caring for a community, deeply loving each other and hoping against all odds to get through this together. Even among unspeakable horrors enacted on them. The sheer resilience of a people who keep going. And for them, for all of us, we must keep going. 

This full moon I urge you to find or create your local, resilient, culture of resistance, however you can. To co-create a better world and to remember that with just a little care and feeding, the good always outnumber the bad. In my neck of the woods, ours is just starting to bubble. Who knows where it will be by autumn.

---

Sourdough Bread

You will need a kitchen scale and a cast iron dutch oven with a tight fitting lid.

Recipe

• 170g sourdough starter (if you don’t have any or can’t get some from a friend, you can make your own)

• 120g whole wheat flour

• 300g bread flour

• 340-350g water

• 8g salt

1. In a large bowl, combine all ingredients. Mix them all quickly together, either by hand, or with a dough whisk, spoon, or silicone spatula.

2. Cover the bowl with a damp tea towel and wait 20 minutes. 

3. After 20 minutes, remove the tea towel and stretch and fold the dough over itself four to five times. If you’re not sure exactly how to do that, search for “sourdough stretch and fold technique” and you will find videos. Cover with the tea towel.

4. Leave the dough to sit for 10-18 hours. When the dough is roiling and bouncy and shiny with large bubbles, it’s ready to be shaped and placed in the brotform.

5. Very gently, remove the dough from the bowl and shape it like an orb, pulling it into itself and pressing the seam together. Place it seam-side up into a generously flour-dusted brotform, or seam-side down onto a generously flour-dusted piece of parchment paper on a baking sheet. Cover with the damp tea towel for the second proof, 2-3 hours.

6. Place a cast iron dutch oven with a tight fitting lid, into the center rack of your oven, with the lid off and side by side with the pot. Preheat the oven to 450F.

7. Invert the brotform or place the entire parchment into the dutch oven and score the dough. Place the very hot lid on top of the very hot pot and place in the oven. Set a timer for 35 minutes.

8. Remove the lid and bake for another 15-20 minutes, until desired color is reached.

9. Allow bread to cool before cutting into it.

---

Spell: Microshifting

Since feeding your sourdough starter is a daily ritual, imbue a little magic into it by speaking one goal lovingly into fruition, and then following it up with a small action toward the goal.

1. Set an intention. Maybe you want to take better care of your body and want to stretch more regularly. Maybe you want to keep a more organized space, maybe you want to write creatively, maybe you want to learn to paint watercolor, or play a new instrument. Find one that you’d like to really pursue this year.

2. For just 5 minutes a day, after lovingly speaking your intention while feeding and mixing your sourdough starter, take an action toward your goal.The idea here is microshifts, so set a timer if you need to! Write in a journal for 5 minutes, or roll out your yoga mat and do 5 minutes of stretching, or work on decluttering a space in your home for just 5 minutes. Each of these daily actions, when practiced regularly over time, will lead to big change in your life and will become your new routine.