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By now it should make perfect sense. It should not surprise me, but it always does, and quite pleasantly, too: I get a big idea about which to write; I carry it around at the office for hours; I come home, all set to write it out; I end up decompressing in front a computer screen for three or four hours; I finally give up, post a photograph, chide myself for not saying anything, and go to bed. At lunchtime the next day, I fire up the link: good heavens! such interesting and funny and warm reactions from you, just on one little photo! One really does meet the nicest people on the internets.

As it turns out, I do have something to say, plenty to say, about those lovely flaxseeds, but first, a bit of Q&A. (To 'mouse, Tvindy and orionoir, that's Q&A. With a Q. Behave yourselves.) As I mentioned the other day, Housse (a/k/a BF, the Big Fella of Dear Witho) asked just what sourdough bread is, anyway. What follows here is the most cursory explanation of sourdough, utterly without nuance. If you want nuance, you'd better go to the store and lay in some serious provisions, because to really give sourdough its full due can take me a while. And that's just me. I used to trawl around the various Usenet food boards; rec.food.cooking was great fun, but I ended up leaving during a protracted "American Food vs. British Food: Which Sucks More?" flame war. rec.food.sourdough, now, that one used to scare me a bit. You might not think that the finest technical points on the best way to bring out the development of certain flavor notes would inspire so much fervor and rage, but there you are. The Baking Circle at King Arthur Flour (members only, but it's a free membership, and well worth the time it takes to set up an account) is much kindler and gentler, but the discussions still get pretty intensive, and intense.

None of this answers Housse's question, though. The most basic answer is that sourdough bread is bread leavened without the use of any commercial yeast; it is leavened instead with the wild yeasts that are captured in a sourdough starter. Depending on where you live -- climates vary, as does the amount of wild yeast in the atmosphere, it takes about five days to culture a starter, although if you can wait for ten days, your bread will have a more nuanced flavor, and the starter will be hardier. To make a starter, you combine flour and water, let it sit, add more flour and water the next day, let it sit again, pour some of it off, add more flour and water, and continue in this manner until you have a bubbly, active dough that smells intensely fruity, acidic and redolent of good, sweet grain. You can facilitate the capture of wild yeasts by adding fruit or vegetables to your dough; this is when you really want to use organic or IPM produce if you can get it. That powdery stuff you see on the outside of grapes, apples, even cabbage, is wild yeast, and you don't want to have to wash it all off first. I will confess, though, that I have never bothered with the fruit business: just flour and water does the trick with mine. I will also confess to a bit of smugness: there are theories floating about that it is impossible to culture a starter in an urban environment, that those little wild yeasts can't survive the onslaught of pollutants in cities, and that you need to live in bosky rural conditions to get the strongest starters. Don't you believe it for a second. I live in the most populous borough of the most populous city in the U.S.; I live in a tiny dust factory of an apartment in a house situated under an elevated railroad track; and yet, the gorgeous flavor and vigor I've been able to coax out of my starters never fails to make me smile. The white starter (a/k/a chef, or mother) tastes strongly of cider even though it's never seen a slice of apple, and the rye starter is a symphony of amazing flavors, whole notes I have yet to identify.

So again, sourdough bread is, at heart, bread leavened without commercial yeast. Scratch that surface, though, and you'll find thousands of varieties of bread, and thousands of techniques for leavening it. Pain au levain is the ancient and noble sourdough bread of France; it is beautiful bread, made of nothing but flour, water and salt, tasting intensely of the wheat from which it was made. If you have grown up eating German sour rye breads, or the bread we in the U.S. identify as sourdough, the intensely tangy and sour San Francisco (or San Francisco-style) sourdough bread, pain au levain might seem a bit underwhelming, because it is not sour. Most French bakers consider sour-tasting bread to be flawed; the goal with pain au levain is to create a balanced flavor, with enough acidity to show the grain off to its best advantage, but not enough to draw attention to the acids themselves. The acids in a naturally-leavened bread are of two types: the milder lactic acid and the sharper acetic acid. Jeffrey Steingarten, in his essay "Primal Bread" (originally written for Vogue and reprinted in his collection The Man Who Ate Everything), says that to illustrate the difference between the acids, it helps to consider lactic acid analogous to yogurt, and acetic acid analagous to vinegar. Handled carefully, those acids can be baked into a smooth, mellow bread. Handled with care but in a way that encourages the development of those acids, they can be turned into something stronger, where you can feel the sour bite. Each type of bread has its fans: pain au levain fans tend to see the love of sour bread as a sign of a jaded palate, while sour bread fans find pain au levain to be lacking in pizazz. As always seems to be the case, I am a fence sitter on this issue.  I love pain au levain, earthy and sweet, but I also love those breads that are so sour that your mouth waters the split second before you bite into them.

I used to bake two loaves of pain au levain every weekend; then I got the urge to branch out into other types of bread,with other types of leaveners. Lately I've been in a bit of a sandwich bread phase, so it's nice to get back into the rhythm of feeding the starters, turning a portion of the starters into the sponge, a/k/a levain that will build the final dough. On Thursday night I realized that in order to have finished bread ready for eating this afternoon, I would have to mix the dough as soon as I got home from work (I'm making that famous San Francisco-style bread, and it requires an overnight fermentation in the refrigerator). This meant that I'd have to mix the levain at 2 p.m., which meant bringing a few things to work with me, namely the white starter, the rye starter, my digital scale, some prescaled white flour; some more white flour to feed the white starter, which was showing signs of being so vigorous that I was afraid the yeast would be exhausted by 2 p.m., and various plastic containers, wooden spoons, plastic bench scrapers, etc. My co-workers, who have been subjected to my various cooking eccentricities from time to time (yes, Michelle, I once marinated a flank steak in my purse -- why is this so amusing to you? , shook their heads as I brought out the starter containers, and suggested that I bring the starters in for Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Thus was the creation of Funky Little Company (a division of LuthorCorp)'s first annual Take Our Starters to Work Day.

It has just occurred to me that this discussion of sourdough has been a bit Francocentric, and I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of German sour rye breads. German bakers have a tradition of baking that appears diametrically opposed to that of French bakers, but the emotions are the same: these are the techniques that have made the bread that has fed the nation for hundreds of years, and the bakers are fiercely loyal to that bread. I could write a CD-ROM's worth of odes to rye bread, thanks largely in part to the author of this book, who was my chef-instructor at Bread Camp in 2002. A momentary digression: it is impossible to overstate what an influence on my baking life Chef Hamelman had, and continues to have. As one of my similarly-influenced classmates once said, "It's not that Jeffrey actually walks on water. He walks on flour, water, salt and yeast." She's right. He, along with my mother and the woman who gave me my first professional breadbaking break, are the triumverate who made me a bakerina -- and it was Chef who actually put the word bakerina into my consciousness. (Oh, Chef, look at what you have wrought!)

But again I digress. (Again with the digressions!) As a kid, I hated rye bread, and I carried that particular bias into adult life with me. I have since realized that what I thought was dislike of the taste of rye was actually dislike of the taste of caraway. I'm sorry to say, dear friends, that even though I have outgrown most of my silly, irritating childhood food quirks, I have never learned to like the taste of caraway. I will accept it as part of the seasoning for a kummelweck roll, which is a necessary part of Buffalo's own Beef with Weck sandwich, but I draw the line there. After I moved to New York, I discovered seedless rye, and found that without that 1-2 punch of caraway, rye bread was okay, but that was pretty much it, just okay. It was not until I got to Bread Camp that I learned what rye bread could be: we made 40% rye loaves, 60% rye, 90% rye, and the 800-pound gorilla of rye breads, vollkornbrot, 100% rye, packed with rye berries, dense and strong and meant to be served in thin, thin slices with smoked meats. It was also where I learned that German bakers take rye bread so seriously that by law, anything labeled "rye bread" has to have a minimum of 90% rye. Anything under 90% has to be labeled as "mixed bread." It is also where I learned that rye flour, on its own, has something of a weird and grassy taste, and that there are two ways to turn that taste into something better: You can mask the taste by throwing quantities of caraway seed into the dough. (Yes, yes, yes, I have a bad attitude about caraway.) Or you can transform it by building a rye starter, then building a dough from that starter, and let the dance of yeast and acid production turn that dough into something completely new, something that will make you slice a piece of finished rye bread, take a bite, blink in silent wonder, and take another bite, then another, then another.

Dear BF, I hope this helps clarify things a bit.