Робин Слоун - Sourdough

But the starter had not gone boof or plop . It had murmured Mmm-mmm-mmm in a clear, coherent voice. You needed lips to make Mmm , you needed a brain to find a note. That was complicated equipment.

I looked down at the Clement Street starter. It was not complicated.

I set the crock’s lid in place and padded back to bed. Sleep came slowly.

* * *

IT’S A MESS when strange events smack into the windscreen of a resolutely rational mind. It would have been tidy to believe that it was a ghost speaking to me through the malleable medium of goopy dough. There’s a whole story there: I could have organized a séance, hired a specialized kitchen exorcist, et cetera. But, of course, I do not believe in kitchen ghosts, or sourdough angels, or 500-degree devils, and so the event I had witnessed had to be explained by actually existing physical and/or mental phenomena. I simply could not come up with any.

The next day was Saturday, and I spent most of it trying to devise a way in which the starter’s song might have been a bit of dream shifted into waking—the mental equivalent of an off-by-one error. But the sound was sharp in my memory.

I ejected Chaiman’s CD and turned it over in my hands. Its title was handwritten. There was no label, no publisher, no bar code. There were no clues.

I opened my laptop and searched in vain for information on world writing systems. I found a comparative table of scripts, but at the top of the page it warned that there were thousands of written languages on Earth, some of them with just a handful of writers, and it would be impossible to list them all. Nothing in the table matched the script on the CD, the script on Beoreg’s menu.

I’d received no reply to my email.

The starter did not sing that day. It did not evince any special glossiness. It did not respond to questioning. I didn’t try to bake. Instead, I watched it closely, stirred it with a spoon, stuck my nose into the crock. It was mute, though fragrant.

Bananas.

CHEF KATE

ON MONDAY, I rose early and baked two loaves that emerged from the oven with faces happy-cheeked, cherubic. I wrapped them in paper towels and stuffed them into my backpack.

I also carried the crock with its fragile passenger along to the office and set it on my desk next to Kubrick the cactus. I threaded a pair of earbuds between my laptop and the crock, dangled them inside, and played Chaiman’s CD at minimum volume.

The cafeteria was nearly empty, with only a few early risers (or never-slepters), who sat quietly with code and yogurt. In the kitchen, Chef Kate and her small staff were subdividing a pile of potatoes, collecting tater-tot-sized pieces in plastic tubs. Reggae played on a whoomphy Bluetooth speaker.

Chef Kate had come to oversee the feeding of the Dextrous by way of a cool restaurant on Valencia Street, wooed away from fine dining by lavish stock options and normal work hours. For Andrei, she was a trophy. His chowhound ways were well-known, as was his dream of seeing his robot arms working smoothly alongside sous chefs in all the open kitchens of the city.

I lifted my swaddled loaves in greeting. Chef Kate cleared a space among the potatoes.

She brought a loaf to her nose, then thunked its backside with her finger and listened to the report. “Very nice.” She produced a serrated blade and commanded me to cut while she stepped away in search of something else.

Once every quarter, Andrei insisted that Chef Kate employ the robot arms in her kitchen, and once every quarter, the robot arms failed her horribly. The latest tryout sat in the corner, powered down with a broom leaned up against it, waiting to be wheeled back across the street to the Task Acquisition Center. We would solve everything else before we solved the egg problem.

I followed Kate’s instructions and sawed off two rough slices. She returned with butter and salt and generously dressed both of them. “There.” The bread was now blanketed with bright yellow butter. It glittered with a crust of flaky salt. It seemed excessive.

Kate hoisted her slice in a salute and said, “You’d be better off eating this every day than that Slurry shit.” She took a bite. “Dude.” Chewed. Took another bite. Said again: “Dude.” Swallowed. “You could sell this.”

I told her Arjun said the same thing.

“Arjun doesn’t know anything. I do. This is a solid product. Dude. Sell me some.”

She fixed me with a challenging gaze. This was not the empty jollity of a friend’s “You could sell this”; this was the hard-eyed appraisal of someone who spent a lot of time thinking about what was and wasn’t commercially viable.

This was, in other words, a real offer.

I told her okay. I would sell her some.

“What’s your capacity?”

“Not much? I can bake two loaves in my oven. So I can do four, I guess, in a couple of hours.”

“I need at least eight. You kids eat a lot.”

I told her I would find a way to do eight. I had no idea how, but that’s what I told her.

“Bring them next week,” Chef Kate said. “Trial run, Monday through Friday. Cool?”

Cool, I agreed, and I could not account fully for the thrill of the prospect. Maybe it was the miracle of baking, still alive for me; maybe it was the fact that I’d never produced anything that earned such a visceral reaction before. Visceral was nice. Visceral was fun.

“I pay Everett Broom five dollars a unit, which is absurd, but I’ll pay you the same, on the strength of this loaf. Thirty days net. Bring me an invoice.”

Units! Net! Invoices! I was drunk with it.

“See you next Monday,” Chef Kate said. “Early!”

Back at my desk, I sat smiling—grinning goofily, in fact—and wondered if it was the first time I had ever done so sitting at that desk. The Clement Street starter was happy, too—burbling merrily—and my workspace was permeated by the faint smell of bananas and the croon, even fainter, of the choirs of the Mazg, whoever they were.

HELLO, NUMBER ONE EATER! Your sourdough looks splendid. I’m very happy to see it. Does it smell like bananas—just a tiny bit?

Chaiman and I are back in Edinburgh, crowded into Shehrieh’s small apartment here. (That’s my mother. Mazg don’t say “Mom” and “Dad.” I don’t really know why not.) I’m cooking for everyone. After a year of practice in San Francisco, I think it’s happened: I’m finally a better cook than my mother. She won’t admit it, of course, but I can tell she’s nervous. I have a batch of spicy soup going now, with an ingredient that is, wickedly, new to her: FRESNO CHILI! I discovered it on Clement Street. Yes, I think this is going to be the night she concedes. Please picture me rubbing my hands together like a villain.

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THE JAY STEVE VALUE OVEN

THE CHALLENGE from Chef Kate smoldered in my brain. It was a familiar burn. I broke down the tolerances, the timings. To produce bread in the quantity she required, I would either have to start at three in the morning and bake loaves two at a time for four hours … or I would have to acquire a bigger oven.

Midway through The Soul of Sourdough , in a sidebar, Everett Broom alluded to the deep satisfaction of building a brick oven of one’s own. “A full exploration of the design considerations is beyond the scope of this book,” he wrote, “but you’ll find a helpful community online at Global Gluten.”

Global Gluten turned out to be a collection of forums populated by a kind of person I hadn’t known existed: the carbohydrate nerd. They talked about hydration ratios, pH levels, dough temperatures. They traded recipes and swapped starters.

And, as Broom had promised, they gathered in a subforum devoted to the design and construction of elaborate wood-fired brick ovens. Here, the carb nerds shared blueprints. The ovens they built were beautiful, architectural, like miniature Byzantine churches. For each design, there was a corresponding “heat curve” that swelled to 800 degrees or more, then eased down slowly for hours. The carb nerds got very, very excited about the shapes of these curves.