Eater has a longer article on how sourdough, and bread in general, is back in fashion and the changes being inflicted on the millenias-old staple by tech bros.
“I spent a lot of time — I don’t want to say ‘debugging,’ because that sounds really technical — but just working on recipes and trying to teach myself and there really weren’t a lot of materials out there at the time to do that,” he told me by phone this spring. “With bread baking, you kind of follow an algorithm to produce a result and that result isn’t always what you think it’s going to be, so you kind of have to step back and debug and diagnose the steps along the way. How did I go wrong here? That’s because technically the temperature might not be right or the dough strength might not be right. That iterative procedure and working through those algorithms kind of appeals to engineer. There’s the precision part of it, but also, when it comes down to it, technical people like to work with their hands. You want to construct something and I think bread is a good way to do that.”
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday November 21 2018, @08:36PM
Thanks for the quality post.
I felt sure someone with more knowledge about this would pop up. I mentioned the "bad socks" smell in my comment because I was assuming that's the period before the good stuff starts happening.
The last time I made a starter, it took about 3 weeks to get something pleasant smelling. I may have used standard white flour to kick it off. I will go with rye next time.