About THE BAKER
Two decades ago, a friend turned me on to La Brea Bakery bread in Los Angeles. The master baker Nancy Silverton wrote her book (not available in kindle, if you can believe it) and I read it cover to cover, several times over.
My desire to make a decent piece of toast, started with buying a bread machine. Oh man, what a blessing and a curse. First, it took up so much room in my kitchen that I wanted to charge it rent and second, if all you wanted was pale sad bread with a weird hole up it's butt (ya'll bread machine users know what I'm talking about) then fine.
But the up side was that it pushed me to hunger for the ability to make a "real" loaf of bread...like Nancy.
I bought her book, and proceeded to embark upon what seemed like a mad scientist's experiment.
First I had to make my STARTER. A two week process, that when it works will give you the building block to making truly great bread.
My first try was disgusting. After 10 days, my starter was pink and smelled like dead monster meat. I ran to my dog-eared bible (The La Brea Bakery Bread Book) and wildly looked for "why is my starter pink?" Apparently bacteria of some sort infected my baby starter.
Starting over, my next attempt was successful. Made from a bunch of our homegrown concord grapes, bread flour and our well water up in Ridgefield, CT.
The wild yeast upstate must be pretty strong because 18 years later, it is still making delicious bread.
You may wonder where the name came from...once I posted I was going on a trip and would not be baking or posting for a while.
However, I ended up not being able to stop myself from making one more batch of dough. So I posted the next day pictures of the finished loaves.
One of my daughter’s friends, Jacob Porter, commented “you said you weren’t baking for a while, you’re the lying bread baker!”
My obsession with sourdough was well upon me and it wouldn’t be the first time I would lie to myself and think “today I’m going to not make bread and then invariably, I do. Hence the name.
You bread bakers out there, all know what I’m talking about. But what a beautiful obsession!
