Sourdough or Sour-doh! Are you using enough of your loaf?
When it comes to bread, there aren’t many loaves that are more delicious than sourdough. But baking great sourdough needs to be well conceived.
When it comes down to what you produce every day, your own approach to things will also reflect how successful you are. Get your approach right and you will have a great product. Get it wrong and you may end up back at the drawing board more often than you would like.
However, work and life can feel far more enjoyable when you produce something good, rather than all of your hard work being consigned to the dustbin. So what can sourdough making teach you about how to improve the consistency and quality of what you produce?
Don’t rush into something new
Making sourdough bread is different to making other types of bread. It requires knowledge of how to make a starter, how to maintain and store it, how to turn it into a loaf and how to bake it. All of that requires an upfront investment of time and learning.
If you’re producing something new in your line of work, be it a product, a report, or a presentation, an upfront investment of your time is needed in order for that product or thing to become something that people are ultimately willing to use or pay for.
As with different types of sourdough (white, rye, spelt, barley, etc.), each thing that you produce every day will need a different approach for the individual product to be successful. Get the recipe right and your product will be in demand. Get it wrong and you may have to throw all of your hard work (and your investment of time into it) into the bin.
The upshot of this is that if you rush into something new without sufficient thought, you may end up spending more time than necessary trying to work out your mistakes. Invest in sufficient thinking time upfront and the quality of your product will follow.
Have a plan
To produce great sourdough requires a plan. To start with, you need a sourdough starter which needs to be fed and nurtured for it to grow into something that you can turn into a loaf. You then need to incorporate the starter with other ingredients in the right proportions, allow it to ferment and then let the magic happen in the oven.
If you’re making a product or producing something (be it an e-mail or any kind of presentation), then for that product to be of use and worthwhile, you need a plan. Without a plan, you could end up making things up as you go along and risk your production line turning into a destruction line.
A well conceived plan will demonstrate how and when, you and others need to input into your production process. Great artisan bakers create fantastic bread time after time through planning and executing that plan. If you don’t plan for what you’re producing, you won’t know where you’re going with your product and neither you, nor your product, will reach its intended destination, nor will it have the desired impact on its audience or customer base.
Give it time
Sourdough bread has a unique and delicious taste, because of the 7-14 days invested in creating the sourdough starter and then the extra time needed to allow the dough mixture to slowly ferment and develop texture and flavour before baking,
Great products also need a carefully judged investment of time in them. Too little time and your product will be ill conceived. Too much time and your product will be at risk of becoming overbaked and unpalatable.
There is a huge difference between the texture and flavour of a sourdough loaf and a supermarket industrially produced white sliced loaf for a reason – the time invested in creating the final product. Of course a white loaf can be ok if you’re in a rush and you want convenience, but in terms of texture, flavour and overall nutritional value, a sourdough loaf beats a white sliced loaf hands down every time. When it comes to the difference between an average and quality product, just that little bit of extra time in conceiving an idea can make all of the difference.
Trust the process even if it feels strange
Making sourdough for the first time is a new and exciting experience. Watching the sourdough starter develop, mixing the first loaf and waiting expectantly for the first golden loaf to come out of the oven. However, it can also be nerve wracking. Is the starter ready to use, have you folded the dough properly, what happens if it sticks to your proving bowl when you turn the dough out to bake?
If you’re producing something new for the first time or venturing into uncharted territory, you may also get similar feelings. A sense of excitement, mixed with fear and trepidation!
A key to success in producing anything, is to train and trust your sense of what feels right and wrong. If a sourdough starter gets too liquid-like, it will probably look strange to you and will be crying out to be fed some flour. If what you’re producing at work feels difficult or is going off the rails, then it’s probably crying out for some help too (be it you asking for someone’s help or input, or you stepping back from the situation to assess what might be going wrong).
In an age dominated by 24/7 connectivity, news and social media, your senses can be numbed by a constant barrage of information. Stepping away from these sorts of stimuli regularly is important if what you’re going to produce is going to be well conceived. Training and maintaining your senses ultimately dictates how well what you produce is received by others. As such, keeping an eye on your recipe and trusting your gut instinct is critical to success.
Don’t be heavy handed
Unlike conventional bread, sourdough doesn’t require lots of heavy kneading. Instead, in order to create a nice bubbly texture, a little bit of care is needed not to over fold the dough before it slowly ferments. Any form of heavy handedness will result in the air being knocked out of the dough which will result in a denser and less palatable loaf.
If you’re producing something at work and are too heavy handed in your production methods or don’t carefully nurture your production process, then your end products may not have the desired quality. Handling sourdough in a clumsy fashion ultimately means a baker can’t sell that loaf. But working out how to handle each part of the production process of whatever you produce, will mean better conceived products and more chance of selling them to others.
Don’t tinker!
Sourdough making is simple and easy. You just have to know the process and then trust in it. Making any other product or producing anything else is exactly the same.
Sourdough goes wrong when you start to tinker with the process. Not letting the sourdough starter develop for long enough, changing the recipe without testing it first, or baking at a different temperature. If you start to tinker with a well conceived recipe, the chances are that you will create unnecessary problems for yourself that weren’t there in the first place.
Similarly with any job or profession, creating things means understanding the process involved and not playing around with it. Knowing when to prepare, how to prepare, when to nurture, when to check and when to leave things alone are crucial to producing good products.
Ultimately, producing something that will be useful is about trusting and supporting the creative process, rather than constantly interfering with it and creating unintended consequences for yourself and others.
What’s your recipe?
Think about what you produce on a daily basis and how much you trust your recipe for producing it. Great products are simple, easy to create and easy to use. If any of those ingredients are missing in what you produce, it’s worth thinking about whether you have the right recipe.
Making wonderful sourdough bread is a process of learning, trusting and allowing just a few ingredients of flour, water, salt and heat to work together and do their amazing thing.
If you’re finding that producing what you want is difficult, it’s worth stepping back and examining the process you’re using again. Whilst producing things effortlessly can look difficult, if you use your loaf in the right way and trust in the process, you can make simplicity your friend and have a life that is productive for you, productive for others and which provides lasting value.
