During the Pandemic a few years ago (you remember that, right?) I did what many of us did and I found novel ways to fill the time that the novel virus had suddenly afforded us. Now, some of you may be thinking that I used that time to write a novel, which would have been wise. I started three – one of them has finally started to take a real shape but more on that later – but the one thing I did that surprised me was I learned to make sourdough.

While the virus itself was weird on multiple levels, the situation we found ourselves in was equally unique. Yes, people have been ordered to shelter-in-place and/or quarantine in previous pandemics, but never before were there so many ways to communicate and “stay together” even while we stayed apart. I loved hearing and reading and seeing the stories of how people have filled their days — the new things they learned, or the ones they tried that were monster failures (honestly, some of those were the best).

I read and heard many stories over the months at home about people learning to make sourdough. Given that the process is rather time-intensive, a shelter-in-place situation is certainly a good time to tackle it. My sister, having retired a few years prior, decided to tackle the sourdough beast even before the pandemic set in. She was given a starter that was over 100 years old and, being the little research hound that she is, went about diligently finding out how to care for the starter (actually, first she had to find out how to resuscitate it since its courier had left it out on a counter for about a week and it was close to coding) and experimenting with recipes. This particular starter made its way from eastern Montana, where it was discovered in someone’s deceased relative’s safe deposit box (in dehydrated form), to my sister in western Montana, where it found new life and began its new journey. Or at least, our segment of its journey.

She sent some to her brother-in-law in Hawaii, shared some with her neighbors and sent some home with me. I then shared it with a couple of my friends and I can’t help but be a little fascinated by this bizarre form of connective tissue binding us all; my friends have never met my sister’s brother in law, and none of us has met the man that found the starter in that blessed box. Yet there is only one degree of separation between any of us thanks to this lovely, bubbling glob of goo that makes such delicious sustenance. Something that, if we care for it, can feed us for decades, if not generations.

While I was visiting Montana during the lighter part of the lockdown, René taught me how to make the bread. I should note here that my sister is something of a master baker whereas my talents don’t extend much beyond the Nestlé Tollhouse recipe. So I was pleased to find that sourdough, while it seems daunting at first, is actually remarkably simple to make. It just takes time — but it’s so worth it. I love things that bubble, and there’s no end to the bubbling with sourdough. From the starter to the first rise to the sticky strands that try to cling to your fingers as you stretch and fold the dough, you can actually see the fermenting happening at every step. By far the best, though, is when you finally take it out of the oven and set it to rest for a torturously taunting 60 minutes; if you put your ear to it, you can hear it crackle. My father was also visiting at the time I was learning this new craft, and he is a fiend for good sourdough. The first day of his visit that René put on her baking apron, he was like a two year old asking “how much longer.” And he was not happy when it came out of the oven and she informed him that he had to wait another hour. He went outside and proceeded to pull nails out of a floorboard to pass the time. When she went out exactly one hour later to tell him it was time, he literally threw the hammer and the board onto the driveway and beelined for the kitchen, butter already laid at the table in anticipation. It was the fastest I’ve ever seen a nanogenarian move.

When I left Montana, I packed up a small cooler with coffee, some La Croix, and my very own little jar of starter. Thus began its journey to California, via eastern Idaho and the Nevada desert. I was a little nervous to try it on my own, owing to my aforementioned lack of baking skill, my tiny kitchen and my crappy, unreliable oven. But I gave it a whirl and the end result was nothing short of awesome (if I do say so myself). Although, thus far, my efforts at making it more sour have come up short, but that gives me an ongoing project that I can share with not just my sister, but the friends who will be next to receive the bread in a jar.

It’s interesting the places we find community. I know nothing of the woman who left the dehydrated starter in a safe deposit box in Montana. I’d like to think she was some crusty, old, frontierswoman, who could bake a loaf of sourdough as well as she could pull a calf. Yet I am connected to her, albeit in a minute way, as are all of us who keep her little starter bubbling. I can’t help but wonder if the world could be healed through sourdough; it teaches patience, it inspires creativity, and, through that lovely starter, it forms connections. I realize this is a utopian pipe-dream but hey, in my world, we’d all have really good bread.