(The Saga of Baking a Sourdough in Mumbai)
Some months ago, folks, I posted a picture of a sourdough loaf I baked in Mumbai. It was perfectly brown from the outside. But I had gotten deceived by its outward appearance. You might choose to judge a book by its cover, but never judge a loaf of bread by its skin. My sourdough was not just sour; it was so tart that the lemons in the kitchen began to demand that the food industry be regulated and nationalized.
That first failure started a two-month-long journey of experimentation. I bought all the food thermometers, litmus papers, and baking pans that money could buy in Mumbai and those that Flipkart could deliver. I bought yeasts and distilled waters of all kinds. I read so many recipes from so many countries that I could convert C’s to F’s and back faster than the late Shakuntla Devi could do her mental math. I calculated that if bacteria grew at a specific rate at 70 degrees, how fast would they grow at 30.11 degrees (I just told you that C to F conversion was a breeze). I even learned the relevant parts of the good-old logarithmic tables by heart. WhatsApp became my lab notebook.
Of course, I did not want to waste one pao-kilo of wheat flour every few days, so I had to eat all the bread I made. After the first few courtesy-driven attempts, no one volunteered to taste my creations. In our modern folklore, wheat is unhealthy, so I joined a nearby gym. The manager proudly told me that, as crowded as Mumbai was, the gym had an outdoor jogging track. I also bought about 25 meters worth of resistance bands to burn all the calories I had to consume. One of the resistance bands even snapped, collapsed, and died in my arms. Eating lentils and eggplant, with dry and tart sourdough, three times a week does not make much of a meal, but that became my destiny. Mom tried to discourage me several times, but at 93, ignoring her advice was not difficult. A few times, she even said, “तुम मत खाओ चिड़िया को खिला दो” (“You should not eat it; feed it to the birds.”) I have never met a better mixture of sympathy and insult. She probably never saw the point of anyone accepting the challenge of making a San Francisco sourdough after spending an uncountable number of years studying and practicing engineering.
They say that मेहनत का फल मीठा होता है (the fruit of hard labor is sweet). Forget meetha (sweet); I would have settled if the fruit of my labor was only slightly less khatta (tart)!
The saga continued for three months. Gradually, things got better. Some of the little pieces of bread I would leave in the fridge unattended started disappearing without my knowledge (Mom is too old to travel to the fridge by herself; someone else had started to enjoy them). Thanks to the 5G networks spread worldwide, the news and photos of my early successes started to travel far and wide. One man’s stay in Mumbai for a few months allowed a culture to travel from San Francisco to Satara in real time. The holes in the crumb got fluffier. The pH values kept increasing until they plateaued below 7. Softness came under control. As the monsoon in Mumbai faded, so did the slush inside the crumb.
So, yesterday, I officially decided to release it to my beta testers (or tasters!). They received it well. I was getting a bit proud of myself. I am supposed to learn one new thing every year, or dementia will strike. The sourdough experiment had salvaged my 2024.
But was I successful? Did I do well enough? My wife and children at home in SF are always kind, courteous, or indifferent. But what about Mom in Mumbai? She never studied pop psychology, and emotional intelligence is a luxury we don’t care much about at home. Mom often tells you what ails the food brewing on the stove many doors away.
I sliced the bread nicely with a sharp, serrated knife and picked the softest slice from the lot. I decorated the slice with a finely cut and gently spread “utterly butterly delicious” chunk of Amul. I made sure that everything was warm and nothing was too hot. I made sure that the butter was soft but not watery.
Mom said, “तुमने फिर से डबल-रोटी(*) बना ली? (you made a double-bread again!)” as if I were a stubborn kid who won’t ever listen. She took a tiny bite and passed the rest to someone else. The San Francisco culture jumped the space boundaries over oceans and continents. But the age boundaries are not so easy to cross.
(*) Double-roti can be the most arcane term to describe sliced bread.