“FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, I’VE BEEN AN EARLY-RISER IN THE MORNINGS, BUT HERE LATELY, SOMETHING ELSE RISING IN THE KITCHEN HAS ME EXCITED TO GET OUT OF BED, LONG BEFORE THE SUN COMES UP.”
I set my alarm for 5am this morning, and though it was still pitch-black outside, about ten minutes before it rang, I woke up and turned it off so it wouldn’t wake Indy. I made my way downstairs excited to start the day. I was mostly excited to start making bread early, so it will be ready to come out of the oven right around 5pm for dinner.
I’m not normally a homemade bread maker, or even that much of a bread lover. But in the last few months, my whole relationship with bread has been changing. I’ve come to cherish not only the bread we’ve been eating but also the process of making it.
I grew up thinking Wonder Bread was about as good as you could get, and I don’t really remember anyone in my direct family ever making or even talking about making bread. The loaf slices we covered with peanut butter and jelly were just one of the many things in the pantry that you buy rather than make. My wife Joey dabbled with some bread making through the years. Mostly she baked for our family restaurant. For special occasions, she might make banana-nut bread and she even tried croissants once, but that was about it—unless you count the amazing angel biscuits she often made from a recipe passed down from her mama.
And so, the last half-dozen years that Joey has been gone, most of the bread we eat at our farm has come from Kroger. Over time, my personal tastes have moved from white to wheat to multigrain in search of healthier options. But in the last few months—as I’ve begun walking more deliberately down the path of simplicity that leads to better food and a better life—I’ve been rethinking where our bread comes from. This has led me to make bread from raw ingredients here at home.
It really started this past spring when I had dinner at Marlin Miller’s house in Ohio's Amish country; his wife Lisa set homemade spelt bread out on the table for dinner. She told me that she’d just made it and how it was pretty much her kiddos’ favorite thing she makes. After a bite or two, I could see why. After dinner, she showed me the bread-making machine she was using and explained how simple it was to do. She said, “You just put in the ingredients, push start, and voila, about three hours later, a loaf of warm bread is ready for slicing.” I made note of the machine she had, and when I got back to Tennessee, I ordered one. Within a week or two, most of the meals at our table began to have a side of warm bread too.
But it didn’t take long for the white bread I was making to lead to sourdough. On our drive to Montana in June, Indy and I stopped by Jill and Christian Winger’s prairie homestead. I told her about the bread machine I’d been using and that I wanted to make homemade sourdough bread but wasn’t sure how to begin. That evening, so I could try making it in Montana, Jill sent me off with a jar of sourdough starter; a few instructions accompanied it on how to "feed it" and keep it alive, in and out of the refrigerator. Unfortunately, the starter made its way to the fridge at the lodge in Livingston... but not much farther than that. A month later, as we cleaned the fridge for our trip home, I found the starter she had given me. It had a strange gray-brown color, and I was sure I’d "killed" it by not feeding it. So, I threw the jar away and vowed to make a better run at it when we got back home in August.
Back home, I tried again with some dried starter we’d ordered from Ballerina Farm. Although it seemed like it would be much more work than the bread- maker I’d been using, I followed the instructions on how to revive it and fed it the recommended amounts of water and flour for the next five days until the starter was ready to start making bread.
Honestly, I still wasn’t sure I knew what I was doing, but I did my best to prepare and bake the loaf. Just twelve short hours later, I pulled my first loaf of homemade sourdough out of the oven.
Now, I’ve tasted some pretty good bread in my lifetime, but nothing — I mean nothing — like that first loaf of homemade sourdough, slathered in butter, just after we pulled it out of the oven. It was as if I’d never had bread before. It was the same and yet completely different than any bread I’d ever eaten. Partly because there was no store involved and no machine — just some flour, water, salt, and a little starter to bring it to life, a warm oven, and my own two hands. But I think it’s also more than that. It’s about connecting with something that has been around and sustaining people the world over for thousands of years. It was magical for me.
I think it is this way with everything when you attach yourself to where it comes from.
When you stop thinking about what’s the fastest, easiest, or cheapest way to do something and instead start asking “What’s the best way?” then you really spend time thinking about what "best" even means. Not to everyone else—but to you. To your family.
That’s been a few weeks and a half-dozen or so loaves of homemade sourdough ago, and in time I’m sure I’ll want to move on and try some more new bread recipes, but right now, I’m still savoring the bread I’m making and the fun I’m having with this one. As I write this, it’s Saturday, almost noon here at the farm, and I’m not sure yet what we’ll make for dinner this evening. But I know one thing — we’re gonna have some homemade sourdough bread with it! //
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Rory Feek is a world-class storyteller, songwriter, filmmaker, and New York Times best-selling author. As a musical artist, Rory is one-half of the Grammy-award-winning duo, Joey+Rory. He and his wife, Joey, toured the world and sold nearly a million records, before her untimely passing in March 2016.