The inevitable happened.
We woke up this morning to the first snow of the season.
True, it wasn’t much more than a light dusting, bits of white clustered onto the outdoor furniture and holding stubbornly onto the shady places in the still-green grass.
But it was snow.
Just a little bit.
Though enough to signal the end of something, and the start of something else.
Something a lot chillier.
Most everyone I know in the running community knows that in addition to Canadian thanksgiving, this weekend is also the Virtual Boston Marathon.
At least five people I know signed up for the race, which thanks to the pandemic was a once in a lifetime opportunity to run through your own streets, track it on the Boston Marathon app, and call it an official run.
I did not sign up.
… but I did go out on the dawn trails with a trio of friends who had signed up to run the pandemic version of the famous race.
When three of us tag-alongs met up with them early on Saturday morning near a local park, the sun was just peaking over the horizon and they had been at it for almost ten kilometers already.
We trotted into step with their route, followed it as it wend its way along the river, up in the neighbourhood, down into a local recreation area, and around the back side of a golf course. After about eight kilometers of support running, we turned back to where we’d left our cars … and ultimately logged just over thirteen klicks total even as we zoomed past a half dozen other virtual Boston’ers with their race bibs or support cyclists or multi-coloured tutus plodding along with fierce determination through the morning trails.
Our thirteen was not quite a marathon. Obviously. Not even quite a half marathon. I later calculated that my logged distance of 13.43 km as per my GPS watch, worked out to almost exactly one pi of a marathon. Weird. After all, forty two point two kilometers divided by thirteen point four-three kilometers equals three point one-four, or pretty much as close to one pi of a marathon as my technology can measure.
Mathematics and adventure collide on a Saturday morning in a curious way, it seems.
And then the event ended, and we cheered in the actual racers across the finish line via text message, as they completed their virtual distance … and won their real medals.
My starter is a little over two and a half years old and as I alluded to in my previous post I’ve baked about two hundred and fifty-ish loaves of bread with it, pre- and during pandemic.
You would almost think I would understand it better.
About an hour ago I pulled my Thanksgiving loaf from the oven and it turned out great.
All around, I followed my basic twenty-four hour prep-and-proof plan, the process I’ve been fine tuning for years even before this starter, and which works for me fairly consistently.
Only it sometimes doesn’t.
Like this summer.
This summer we had a heat wave for a solid month where the temperatures outside rarely dropped below twenty-five degrees at night and routinely stuck in the mid-to-high thirties during the day. Also, it rarely dropped below twenty-five degrees in our house (including the kitchen) which was a nightmare, the waking kind, because I could hardly sleep in those conditions.
All the bread I baked during this month flopped.
Poor rise. Dense crumb. Edible … but not enjoyable.
And at the time I got it into my head that the heat was putting my yeast into some runaway proof and I was missing the window to bake it and get a good loaf.
However.
I’ve had a few months to think about this, and my nineteen degree kitchen (where I proofed today’s loaf to within one standard deviation of perfection) only added another layer of evidence to my theory.
“You’d think the yeast would have liked the heat.” Went the conversation with my wife. “But I think my yeast aren’t loving it.”
Not all yeast are created equally, after all. In fact, there are fifteen hundred known varieties of yeast, and the yeast that come in the little envelope from the grocery store may have very little lineage in common with the yeast I caught in my kitchen two and a half years ago.
The yeast from the store are bred to grow consistently, quickly and thrive at warm temperatures.
I’d be willing to bet that whatever yeast I found thriving in my kitchen air and trapped in my starter probably prefer, say, a dry central Canadian climate and do quite well in my nineteen degree kitchen. Wouldn’t it make sense, after all, that the most common yeast floating around my house were probably plentiful enough to be caught because they actually favoured … preferred … had maybe even adapted to … the conditions of my house?
So, back in June when my house was eight or nine degrees warmer than normal, those nineteen-degree-loving yeast … well, they made some garbage bread.
And today, when my thermostat is regulating the house to optimal conditions for both me and my yeast … well logically they made a loaf of awesome bread.
In Canada, we celebrate our Thanksgiving in October.
The right way.
And as we prepare a large meal for Sunday evening, my wife is out shopping for a fresh turkey and I’ve spent Friday evening getting my sourdough started.
While making sourdough has become fairly routine around our house, I find myself usually making sandwich loaves. In fact, over the duration of the pandemic I’ve baked about two hundred and twenty sandwich loaves … but only four classic dome loaves.
So, Thanksgiving is a lot of things, but it’s a thankful opportunity to bake up a beautiful classic loaf of sourdough to enjoy with our Sunday dinner. I settled on a basic white flour loaf with about twenty percent organic spelt mixed in. Nothing beats sopping up some turkey gravy than a thick slice of buttered sourdough, after all.
And of course, the work starts on Friday.
