Winning With Sourdough
Learning From Failure: A Lesson From Sourdough
Moving to the farm has changed quite a few things. One of the more unexpected changes is that we now live on bread made here, which I am very pleased about, and perhaps slightly too pleased about.
This is particularly funny because, for four years before moving here, I tried repeatedly to make a sourdough starter. Every one of them died.
The mistake I kept repeating
I had the recipe. I added the flour and water, waited for the starter to bubble, and followed the instructions as carefully as I could.
When the recipe told me to take out a spoonful and feed the starter, I took out the spoonful and threw it away. Then I fed what remained in the jar.
Anyone who makes sourdough will already know what I had wrong, but I did not. The spoonful I kept discarding was the very part I needed to feed.
For years, I thought I was following the recipe correctly. In reality, I kept throwing away the thing I was trying to grow.
The moment it finally made sense
A few months ago, I went to Orange to visit a beautiful woman who had just survived cancer. When I walked into her kitchen, I saw two amazing loaves of sourdough bread.
That was enough for me to tell her that I needed to learn how she had done it.
She took a spoonful of the starter and fed it.
In that one small movement, I finally understood what the recipe meant. I could see what I had done wrong and why none of my previous attempts had worked.
I could hardly believe that the answer had been sitting inside one misunderstood instruction for four years.
Since then, I have followed the recipe very carefully, although careful means something different once the recipe actually makes sense. We now make our own bread on the farm.
It did not happen because I suddenly became more patient or more capable. It happened because someone showed me the step I had misunderstood.
When effort is not the problem
There is something both funny and humbling about discovering that effort was never the problem.
I had kept trying. I had done the waiting and feeding, and I had started again each time the starter died. But persistence could not correct an error I did not know I was making.
We can be very quick to turn that kind of failure into a judgement about ourselves. We decide that we are hopeless at something, that everyone else understands it, or that we simply lack whatever mysterious quality the task requires.
Sometimes the explanation is much smaller and far less personal.
Perhaps we have misunderstood one instruction. Perhaps we have never questioned an assumption. Or perhaps part of the process seems obvious to people who already know how to do it, while remaining almost invisible to the person trying to learn.
Repeating the same misunderstood step will not produce a different result, regardless of how determined we are.
Learning from failure
That does not mean every difficulty has an easy answer. It also does not mean that wanting something badly enough guarantees that it will work.
But repeated failure is not always a reason to give up, nor does it prove that we are incapable. Sometimes it invites us to stop, look more closely and ask someone who can see what we cannot.
The lesson I took from those two loaves in Orange was not simply to follow the recipe, because I thought I had been doing that all along.
The lesson was to notice when the recipe was not producing what it should. Ask the question that feels too obvious to ask. Do the research, and allow someone else’s knowledge to change how you understand the next step.
If there is something you genuinely want to do and it keeps going wrong, take your time before deciding that you cannot do it.
The part you have been throwing away may be the very part that needs feeding, and one small question may be enough to help you begin again.