By JOE MURCHISON
Courtesy of Joe Murchison
Bread has a bad reputation in some circles these days. Too many carbs. Makes you fat. Makes people with gluten allergies sick.
This reputation saddens South Laurel resident Tracy Bowman, who has become obsessed with making good homemade bread over the past five years. Bread’s bad rap “is a shame, because it’s kept people alive for millennia,” she said, standing in her kitchen as she prepared a cranberry, sage and pecan loaf.
Bowman agreed that a lot of commercial bread is insipid, with taste, texture and a good deal of nutrition engineered out to prevent spoilage. But a simple mixture of 5-year-old sourdough starter, wheat special-ordered from Oregon, water and salt can result in “a miracle,” she said. “You take things that are indigestible, mix them together and make them digestible.”
Bowman, a retired information-technology specialist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, had extra time on her hands when the pandemic lockdown started in March 2020. She had occasionally tried her hand at making bread using commercial yeast but decided to see if she could create a sourdough starter. This starter is a mixture of flour and water that draws yeast (a fungus) and bacteria out of the air and begins to ferment, creating carbon dioxide that causes the mixture to expand.
Even though she majored in microbiology in college, Bowman was skeptical. “‘It probably won’t work,’ “ she remembered thinking. “I was wrong; it worked.” After letting the starter ferment for a few days, she scooped out part of the pancake-batter-looking mixture, which she calls her microbial community. She mixed it with flour, water and salt and made her first loaf. “It was delicious!” she said.
Thus began five years of steady breadmaking. Bowman feeds her starter more flour and water once or twice a week and scoops out part of the resulting mixture as the base for new loaves.
Each loaf takes two days of fermenting, with periodic “folding and stretching,” Bowman said. She works the dough for about 10 minutes at a time, repeatedly pulling apart the sticky dough ball and folding it over on itself. She said this has a Zen-like effect on her, especially if she’s stressed: “It’s not in your head; it’s in your hands. … It keeps you in the present.”
About a year into this new hobby, Bowman thought; “This is okay, but maybe I can up my game.” She found a series of online courses taught by Teresa Greenway, an amateur-turned-expert sourdough baker in the Pacific Northwest. Ten courses later, she had learned to bake many types of bread — “baguettes are hard!” — and learned such intricacies as how to avoid over-proofing her loaves and how to score the tops of her unbaked loaves to produce the marks many people are familiar with in baked loaves.
Since then she has joined two breadmaking Facebook groups and acquired all kinds of tools: scorers, scrapers, an electric proofer to keep fermenting dough at a precise temperature, another proofer for her precious starter, French proofing baskets, a 25-lb. Dutch oven for baking and a freezer for her 12 kinds of flour. And she is working her way through “The Perfect Loaf,” a weighty bread cookbook by Mauricio Leo. Leo is a bread influencer on social media; Bowman convinced her daughter to buy the book for her for Christmas.
Despite her passion for breadmaking, Bowman says she bakes bread only twice a month or so. For one thing, she had developed some arthritis in her hands, which makes the folding and stretching a bit painful. She recently bought an electric dough mixer to help with that.
“People say, ‘You should open a store.’ Heck, no!” she says. She notes that commercial artisan bakers have a hard life — the toll on their bodies from working large quantities of dough, the early rise, long before dawn, to feed their starter and prepare loaves for the oven.
Boman plans to remain a highly skilled amateur, enjoying the fact that “what I am doing is making bread the way people have done for millennia.”
