Now that I look back on it, sourdough success is a metaphor for life. It takes great care, patience, reading of the situation, practice and grit. Also, don’t believe everything you read on the internet…
1. Fundamentals matter
The perfect loaf of sourdough requires a digital scale rather than a slap dash recipe based on love and light. This is not a carrot cake or an ANZAC bickie. This sourdough bizzo is a chemistry degree, I tell ya, a living beast that can flourish or flop.
Get the weight or timing wrong and the whole science experiment will fail. You’ll be scraping expensive high-protein flour and filtered water straight into the bin. Note: If you wash discarded starter down the sink it’ll result in a call to your plumber. No joke. This whole escapade is punishing.
The level of care required reminds me that fundamentals really do matter. Get the basics of life and business right, like policy and safety. Don’t reinvent the wheel or go rogue on something that requires delicate handling. Like the time I switched to Sydney tap water and the chlorine murdered my starter overnight. Or the time I consulted to the board of a charity and discovered the CEO was the only signatory on all bank accounts. Fundamentals are your solid ground.
2. Read the situation
Life is one long reading of the vibe to interpret people and situations, don’t you think? Interpreting people, scanning for signals, knowing when to lean in or run a mile. Sourdough works the same way.
The key to a successful loaf is to learn to read the dough, not the clock. Bubbly and puffy for a starter that is ready, shaggy when you first mix the dough, light and bouncy when it’s ready to cold proof. It’s all about tuning in to notice the cues that tell you whether to move forward or wait.
Just like life. You can’t force relationships, bulldoze through decisions or address opportunities according to a universal plan. You have to read the room, read the person, read the dough.
3. Practice practice practice
This is the unsexy truth nobody wants to hear. You can’t shortcut your way to mastery. Sourdough baking or speaking on stage are the same: the only way to get really flipping good is to practice.
I have done a tonne of reps. Since 2003, I’ve given thousands of live speeches. Nothing puts you on your toes like 400 sets of eyes looking back at you. Practicing for your family or a pot plant just doesn’t cut it. Every one of those real, live gigs has made me better.
I baked a loaf a day to get the feel for the dough at each stage of the process and now I can do it with my eyes shut. I have more than six hours of keynote speech content which I know off by heart and I can stitch a speech together on stage, feeding off the audience response. Practice really does make perfect and you keep perfecting as things change. Practice, reflect, perfect, repeat.
4. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet
Boy, did I cop some serious bum-steers from internet experts who give advice from their homestead kitchens with their kids homeschoolin’ in the background. Don’t trust everything you see online even if it comes from a chick who pumps out supposed perfection. I wasted at least three kilos of top notch flour following a recipe which missed a step and was based on timing not temperature. *Shakes fist at the internet*. The warmer the climate, the faster your chemical reactions will develop. Then, lucky me, I discovered a friend in South Australia is a sourdough qweeeeeeen and she coached me through one loaf and hey presto. Here I am considering my next step which is to mill my own flour.
5. Tomorrow is another day
I can still hear the bang, crush, tumble as I tossed the most tragic batch of sourdough hot cross buns into the bin last Easter. They were hard as rocks and could have killed a cat if thrown at full pelt. All that dried fruit! All that fancy flour. Goooorn. But tomorrow is always another day. My past is not my present or my future. Failure is part of the process. Like the time I was fired from a beloved job. At the time, it felt catastrophic. Ten years later? Barely a blip on my radar. Because tomorrow always brings another chance, another loaf, another opportunity to do better, another career move. And tomorrow gives you a chance to leave behind the biggest dickheads you have ever worked for…
6. Persistence pays off
Someone said to me at the start of this baking process: you will never go back to store-bought bread again and they were right. Persistence turned daily failures into daily joy. What felt impossible and confusing in week one (why does my starter smell like nail polish?) became natural in week twelve. I now pull golden, blistered loaves out of the oven with the type of joy only sourdough bakers know. In sourdough and in life, persistence is the secret. You don’t get the good stuff without grit. Stick with it. Keep trying.
The final slice
Learning the art and science of sourdough taught me more than how to bake a perfect loaf. It reminded me how to live: don’t mess with the fundamentals, read the situation, practice relentlessly, be skeptical of online experts, keep moving after failure, and persist until you taste success. Also, everything is better with butter. TRA LAAAA!
