Klingberg, Cindy
Cooking with Venus Zine
Issue #31
A loaf of your own
By Conan Putnam
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
When Bay Area artist Sarah Klein was in art school studying ceramics in 1998, all she could think about was bread. Taking her lead from the unpredictable natural yeast that put San Francisco on the bread map, she noticed how fooling around with sourdough grounded her.
“Feeding the starter, mixing the dough, and shaping a loaf [felt] like working with clay,” Klein said. Combining her love for performance art with her newfound love of bread making, in 1999, she found a way to share her discovery. She created the Bread Project, an interactive performance-art project that forces participants to look at and question their busy lifestyles and expectations of place by bringing the process of making bread to unexpected everyday settings. In short, Klein has embraced the idea that art should be as basic to life as bread. At her all-day bread bakes in Bay Area office lobbies, schools, and art galleries, passersby are encouraged to come in, roll up their sleeves, and shape a loaf.
While the loaves bake, Klein gives tips on the care and feeding of starters (the bit of dough that is held over from batch to batch and gives sourdough its distinctive, tart flavor). When the loaves emerge, participants greet their golden-brown creations with delight, savoring good bread and good talk amid the lingering scents of wild yeast, butter, and jam. “Everybody has a story [about] their first taste of homemade bread,” Klein said.
Visit sarahklein.com for more info.
SARAH’S SOURDOUGH
2 cups organic whole wheat flour
3 1/2 to 4 cups organic white flour
2 2/3 cups lukewarm, filtered water
1 1/2 cups starter
1 Tbsp sea salt
MAKING A STARTER
1. In a small bowl, stir together 1 cup whole wheat flour and 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups filtered water; it will look like thick Cream of Wheat. Leave the bowl, uncovered, in a warm place.
2. When it gets bubbly and smells sour (usually after about 48 hours), discard all but one generous tablespoon. To this, add 1/2 cup water and 1 cup flour.
3. Repeat this process of discarding and feeding every day for about a week. This process refreshes the mixed culture of wild yeast and bacteria that make bread rise.
4. The night before you are ready to bake, do not discard any of it. Instead, mix the starter with 1 cup unfiltered water and 2 cups flour. Let it sit overnight. Don’t forget to save a tablespoon of starter for the next loaf and feed it with 1/2 cup water and 1 cup flour before storing it in the fridge!
MAKING SOURDOUGH
1. In a large bowl, mix flour and water. Let mixture rest for 30 minutes. Add starter and mix for 10 minutes by hand. Dough will be sticky, but it will firm up, and most of the stickiness will go away as you knead. Add salt and mix for ten more minutes. Let dough rest for 20 minutes in a warm place, covered in a linen towel.
2. Sprinkle a handful of flour over dough, then dig along the side of the bowl to the bottom, and knead dough by folding it over on itself. Give the bowl a quarter turn, repeat. Do this 20 times. Let dough rest again for 20 minutes. Repeat this cycle of flouring, kneading, and resting five times.
3. Now it’s time to shape your loaf. Place dough on a floured surface. Loosely form it into a circle, and gently pull the sides out. Fold the sides into the center, one over the other, like a little package. Give dough a quarter turn; repeat the stretching and folding. Now turn it over. Gather dough into a large-ish ball, tucking dough under to create a round loaf. Return dough to the bowl, smooth side up. Cover and let it rest for an hour.
4. Gently turn dough out onto the flour-covered surface, and shape as before, but gather it more firmly into a round loaf. If loaf sprawls when you take your hands away, shape more, going so far as to pinch dough edges together on the bottom to make it hold shape. Place loaf, smooth side up, on a parchment-covered sheet pan. Cover with linen towel. Let rise for two hours.
5. At least 30 minutes before baking, preheat over to 400 degrees. When loaf is ready to bake, use a spray bottle full of fresh water to lightly mist all over. Put into oven. Bake 45 minutes to one hour, or until loaf is a deep, golden brown and sounds hollow in the center when tapped. Cool your loaf on a wire rack for at least an hour before slicing.
At turns informational, entertaining, and visually appealing, Victoria Woodcock’s Making Stuff: An Alternative Craft Book is a whimsical catch-all collection of more than 50 crafting projects contributed by established members of the craft scene. Geared toward the beginner to semi-experienced crafter, the book will appeal to those with a short attention span and an insatiable curiosity about the infinite possibilities in crafting.
Making Stuff kicks off with an introduction by Woodcock. Fortunately, she moves quickly from the requisite “this-is-not-your-nana’s-knitting” declaration (we’ve heard it before) to an interesting historical summary of crafting since the early 1900s, and then gets into the offbeat projects.
The book truly shines in its succinct explanations of a bevy of basic techniques, with the help of handy diagrams. The first chapter, “How To,” teaches everything from knitting and crocheting to sewing and appliqué. The remainder is divided into categories such as home decor, clothing, and jewelry. With the exception of a few misses — would you wear earrings made with Barbie accessories? — the projects are stylish and innovative: a passport-holder constructed from paint swatches, a knitted bath mat made of T-shirt strips, and origami paper light shades.
Despite a few steps and terms that could use more beginner-friendly explanation — pin-tuck, what? — the book offers a bundle of appealing, accessible projects for crafters at any level.
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