Six years and counting for a jar of fermented flour and water. I had questions, and she had answers, and honestly, real emotional investment.
My downstairs neighbour mentioned in passing recently that her sourdough starter is now six years old, considerably older than several of my own past relationships, and I found myself genuinely, sincerely curious enough about the whole thing to ask if I could actually sit down and hear the full story properly rather than just nodding politely.
She described the starter with the kind of specific, genuine affection usually reserved for a pet, complete with a name I’m not going to reveal here purely out of respect for her privacy, and a detailed, faintly moving account of the one terrifying week during a house move when she genuinely feared it hadn’t survived the disruption to its usual feeding schedule.
What struck me most was the sheer continuity of the whole practice, six years of regular feeding, careful temperature management, and what amounts to a small daily ritual that has, in her own words, outlasted two flat moves, one significant career change, and several considerably shorter-lived enthusiasms she’s picked up and dropped in that same span of time.
She let me try a slice of the resulting bread, and I want to report, with complete honesty, that it was genuinely excellent, a specific tang and texture that she attributes directly to the starter’s particular age and the specific bacterial culture it’s built up over its unusually long life, something she insists simply cannot be replicated by anything younger.
I left with a small jar of her starter, a portion generously offered so I could begin my own attempt at this same long-term commitment, and a genuine, if slightly daunted, appreciation for exactly the kind of patient, sustained domestic ritual that apparently thrives quietly in flats up and down this street, entirely unremarked upon until someone finally bothers to ask.
For a proper guide to maintaining your own sourdough starter, should you also be tempted, there’s a solid resource at The Onion UK.
More from this author at Harper-Thames, prat.uk.