Why am I making sourdough again?
On stretching, folding, tradwives and viral grilled cheese sandwiches.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter, presented in partnership with Eat It! - K Road's restaurant month.
Today I am making bread. Not just any bread but sourdough, something I haven’t done since the dark yeasty days of lockdown when everyone was doing it. As I write this, my dough is having its first rest and somehow my shirt, wrists and the screen of my phone are already encrusted with dried dough.
I decided to adopt another starter a few months back after reading artist and baker Lexie Smith’s essay What Sourdough Taught Me, in the Pandemic and Beyond. When I saw that Australia was the furthest place she had sent sachets of her dried sourdough starter – an offer she made to strangers via Instagram in the early days of the pandemic – I wished I had requested one back then (too impatient for international mail, my lockdown starter was obtained from Amano), but 2024 seemed better late than never and on a grumpy day in March I received a clear pouch of flakes in the mail, which I stuck to my fridge door and ignored.
My phone alarm just sounded – naptime is over and I need to exercise my dough. I wet my hands and begin a series of stretch-and-folds, pulling the damp dough as far as it can stand without tearing before folding it gently back into its bowl, like putting a child to bed. Because it’s been so long, I keep rereading the recipe to check I’m performing the right actions at the right time, but my hands remember it all so well. Around now is when you’ll realise that the dough mostly benefits from your absence, my recipe reminds me. This process is about time, not really about you. I cover the bowl again and return to my laptop.
When I tell my sister I’m thinking of writing about sourdough this week, she responds that it’s “very 2020” of me. She’s not wrong – who doesn’t remember the panic as flour disappeared from supermarket shelves, of entrepreneurial dairies dividing kilos into smaller baggies, of social media feeds filled with bubbling jars and burnished loaves? And yet bread is still trending – just look at the rise and rise of Daily Bread, no longer side hustle to a busy restaurant (now closed) but an urban conglomerate with 10 locations and a multitude of other ventures. Look at every restaurant menu boasting its own take on bread and butter. Earlier this season on Masterchef Australia, Snezana served bread with three types of butter, impressing even Jamie Oliver. On social media, the controversial rise of tradwife and homesteading content continues, with videos of bread making among the most popular content – especially this viral video in which influencer Nara Smith makes each element from scratch in response to her kids asking for grilled cheese sandwiches; we’re talking baking the bread, churning butter, making fresh mozzarella, all while wearing a chic dress and an expression of transcendent calm.
I think of Nara Smith as I dump my dough onto the countertop – a freestanding flatpack bench I had to buy because the kitchen in my rental is so poorly designed that there is barely any counter space. I’m wearing loose black pants and a brown hoodie covered in flour, but no one is filming me as I shape my loaves. Why am I making sourdough from scratch, when no one is watching? Why, when I have plenty of work to be getting on with? When there are at least three shops within walking distance where I could pick up a loaf right now? French semiotician Roland Barthes argued that food could be “read” just like a written text – perhaps I am hoping to share my bread with people around me, tangibly or via Instagram or even this newsletter, using the language of sourdough to create a narrative of some kind, about myself, my values, the times (perhaps I am doing so right now). Or perhaps it’s because I have work I should be doing and baking bread is both a form of procrastination and a balm for my overworked mind, stretching and folding a return to simplicity and a reminder that I am in my body.
It is also not lost on me that it takes around one kilogram of flour to make two decent-sized loaves of sourdough, and a kilogram of flour costs less than $2 (although admittedly I do use more expensive flour to feed my starter). Which is not to say sourdough from a bakery is not worth the cost – it takes a great deal of time, skill and care to bake a good loaf. But my sourdough addiction is one of the things I’ve had to curb in a bid to cut down grocery costs, and the return of this hobby does mean I can make two loaves of nutrient-dense, delicious bread for less than the price of a takeaway coffee.
Last licks: K Road restaurant month
EAT IT is wrapping up. In this final week you'll find pink pussycat style cocktails at Bar Celeste and Carmen Jones. Glazed and massaged lamb shoulder at Gemmayze. Chicken cordon bleu on a stick at Atelier. And raw, raw fish at Madame George. So go on, eat it. Then send your receipts in to win K Road vouchers for future fun. Check out the T&Cs and full schedule, here. (sponsored)
Weekly bites
While we’re on bread, last week Bryer Oden aka @healthsensation wrote an excellent round up of the best sandwiches in Pōneke with prices ranging from a humble $4.40 sanger from Cozy Cake Shop to the most expensive, an $18 halloumi focaccia from Romeo’s (yikes, but having sampled the food at Romeo’s in the past, I imagine it’s pretty damn good). Read the full article to see who won the top spot (you’ll never guess), and if you’re about to comment an indignant what about bánh mì, well, Nick Iles has you covered with a tasting tour of the capital’s best.
Good news for those who like to wake and caffeinate: Despite influencer claims that having a coffee too soon after waking will ruin your life (or at least your day, or something), scientists say there’s little evidence to back this up – in fact, for people who don’t get enough sleep and need to be alert in the morning (surgeons, truck drivers, etcetera), not drinking coffee straight away can actually be a recipe for disaster.
Lastly, I highly recommend this eye-opening essay about how dietary surveillance in India prevents Muslim citizens from finding homes, forcing them to live in segregated areas and even resulting in the razing of houses under the pretext of cracking down on illegal beef trading.
Snack Review
Bánh đậu xanh Hải Dương / Vietnamese Mung Bean Cake, gifted from a friend, purchased in Vietnam (thanks Dilo!) but you can find something similar here
Recently, while dining in the home of a friend who had recently returned from a trip to Vietnam, I was told that I must try the mung bean sweets they’d brought home and review them here. We forgot all about the sweet handover that night, but a few days later I noticed some hooligan had shoved rubbish in my letterbox – rude, I thought, but it turned out to be a handful of mung bean sweets thoughtfully packaged in an old Vogels bag, labelled with sharpie on blue painters tape (“MUNG BEAN SWEETS”) and tied with a satin bow. Adorable, sustainable, a blessing.
The sweets themselves are housed in little boxes reminding me of the sultana snack packs my dad used to get for my school lunchboxes – also adorable. Inside each box is a tiny plastic package, and inside that is a foil-wrapped rectangle. At the centre of this pass-the-parcel are tiny golden cubes of what looks like plasticine, or perhaps stock cubes, but drier and crumbly, with a faintly sweet, nutty aroma. I pop one in my mouth and am immediately reminded of something, but it’s hard to put my finger on what it is. The cake melts on contact with my teeth and tongue, sticking to the roof of my mouth like peanut butter, and it’s smooth but slightly gritty like peanut butter, too. I want to say it tastes like peanut butter, but it is much softer and sweeter and lacks the oiliness of peanuts. Is the thing I am reminded of a Picnic bar? That seems so wrong, but there is a caramel note (probably from the careful roasting of the mung beans) that might be the root of this, alongside the dryness of those Picnic peanuts. My friend comments that they’re kind of like barfi, the kind made with milk powder, and she’s not wrong, they do have that same soothing, nursery quality.
I’m eating little cubes of cake as I write this and suddenly realise I’ve eaten them all without quite deciding how I feel about them. While I’m not raring to rip open another box right away, they have definitely piqued my mung bean curiosity and I am already searching for more mung bean desserts to try. I find this recent New York Times article and wonder if mung beans are poised to become as ubiquitous in the West as they are across Asia, heading the way of matcha, black sesame, pandan and ube. I can only hope! 8/10
Mā te wā,
Lucinda
