The Holy Grail

     Today I made bread.

     That's simple enough. Bread's a pretty common beginner's recipe to skin your teeth on, and I didn't know how to make it, so I decided to be normal (*gasp*) and try my luck.

     This could have been a simple story, were I not the arrogant cad I am. I decided I wanted to really push my limits. To go higher. To go farther. To go where plenty of people but comparatively few college students had gone before. I decided to make sourdough.

     There's a bit of backstory behind all this. Sourdough's difficult, and I wouldn't go after it if I didn't have a good reason. Simply put, my aunt gave me a romance novel about bread and it piqued my curiosity.(It's called Bread Alone, would totes recommend if you're into bread romance novels.) It went into great detail about levain, French artisan sourdough. Actually, I mostly ended up skipping past the romance parts and reading about the bread.(It has recipes, too. Best romance novel EVER.) Ever after reading, I knew I'd have to try to make it. First off, the descriptions of it were absolutely mouthwatering. Second, it was described as hellishly complicated and difficult. And I do so love a challenge.

     There was a problem, though. I'm gluten intolerant, and not because I think it's better for me. I stay away from gluten because I know if I'm not careful, I bleed from unfortunate places(My stomach. Get your brain out of the gutter.) and develop a completely irrational temper, of the throwing things and hurting people variety. And I'm huge. I knew I'd have to be careful on this one.

     So, I started by growing my own sourdough starter. I wasn't metal enough to pull yeast out of the air(Sourdough's pure witchery sometimes.) but I did feed yeasts until they grew old and disillusioned with the world, turning flour and water into something else entirely.

     I say there's a hint of magic in food. Sourdough's a perfect example of this. You throw a pinch of a living organism into a bowl, and then feed it every twelve hours, and are left with a completely unique acidic ingredient with properties found nowhere else. I know the alchemists of old never turned lead into gold, but maybe they were looking in the wrong place, because sourdough converting mundane ingredients into something other reminds me of nothing less than alchemy.

     It took more than the starter, of course. I had to acquire half a dozen pieces of cooking tech to be able to pull this off, and that took a while. My parents were instrumental in making this happen, because they're awesome people and could probably wrestle trolls with their bare hands if they wanted to. But this was a quest, a trial by fire, and I wasn't going to let a murderous recipe, complicated ingredients, dietary restrictions, lack of basic cooking implements and homework stand in my way.

     In the end, it took about seven hours, after I had what I needed. Most of this was watching the dough rise, I'm not gonna lie.

     It only got interesting after about six hours, when the recipe I was following called me to slide the fledgling dough into an oven turned to five hundred degrees. I've never turned an oven that high, and I'm fairly certain that's about as hot as the oven can get. The worrying only really started when I slid the dough into that inferno.

     Had I used too much millet flour? Would the water I added be enough to compensate for altitude? Was it really a good idea to follow a sourdough recipe from a freakin' fertility blog?

     It only got worse when I smelled the bread. A roommate later said it smelled like the back end of a wallaby. The worst thing was, I agreed. I'd put hours of work into this bread, and while it was cooking, a process supposed to fill the air with childhood memories and the nasal equivalent of a purring kitten, I'd gotten the back end of a wallaby instead. Suffice to say I wasn't enthused.

     And then I tried the bread. It was more than edible(A friend who can eat wheat liked it. That means a lot to those who can't.) it still wasn't what I was looking for. It, like its starter, was something other- a new kind of bread that I hadn't known existed, but I immediately decided I thoroughly liked. It carried and expanded on the warm, inviting taste of bread fresh from the oven, the added richness lending depth and character. Sourdough's kinda my baby, and I was a very proud parent.

     All that being said, it wasn't what I was looking for. As a bread it was phenomenal, but it didn't quite have what I was looking for from a sourdough, and I'm not willing to give up the chase just yet. I've got my equipment. I've grown a starter. And I'm not going to stop until the Holy Grail of gluten-free baking is within my grasp.