Continuum
Happy Easter! Holy Week is hard, and after Lent, it's like a one two punch of contemplation and dark before the dawn. Then there's Easter. Hallelujah indeed.
To celebrate resurrection, spring and new life, I'm awakening my sourdough starter. It's the first starter I made, when Kali was a baby in NYC. I fed it all the way down here, and have used it for years. People who claim starter must be eternally used and/or fed do not know starter well. We have often left ours dormant for a year or more at a time.
I opened it after church today, and smelled. Lovely. The dark liquor on the top looked almost black, and deep, and swirly. I poured it off into my bread bowl, and dug a spoon into the starter itself. It was the color of rich, fresh flour, but better. More honey colored. It smelled like the best apple cider you've ever come across. Delicious. I just want to go breathe it some more.
Into this I stirred a cup each of whole wheat flour (red) and filtered water. I feed starter with what ever I have on hand. White, white whole wheat, red whole wheat or rye. They all work beautifully. I started it with rye originally. It's beginning to bubble. That's a piece of heaven, truly. I wish I could blog the good, clean, sweet smell of it.
I love the metaphor, the peering into the fridge to look for the starter. It wasn't where I remembered it being. I wondered if it was viable, but even the black liquor smelled good, and underneath it was quite alive. Maybe I'll make it a Spring tradition. I like the idea that it was more of a dormant state between active life and new life.
This is all really a digression, though. What has me really excited is an idea that occurred to me as I stirred the fed starter.
Florida houses are by definition moldy houses. I don't care how much you spend, there's so much mold in the outside air, it gets in, and everyone's got at least a little. We battle it, we hold it at bay, and sometimes it wins. Hence the tear-down house phenomenon.
There really can't be any happily old architecture in Southern Florida. At the very least the interior contents have to be replaced fairly frequently, and even gut renovations are often required. Nasty chemicals are involved, and there's no option. The mold is quite toxic.
But what if, like populating the intestines with beneficial flora to keep unfriendly yeast and bacteria, we could populate the house with beneficial, or at least neutral yeasts, molds and mycological life?
It makes sense. Here's another example.
In Florida, you can make it so you have no medium sized creatures in your yard (possums, racoons, skunks, for instance,), and no reptile hideouts, but then you may suffer an abundance of palm rats (which to my NYC eyes are like pretty little squirrels without the fluffy tails, but rats nevertheless), which then require another heroic solution.
But if you make something of an undisturbed habitat, then likely a possum will move in and eat the rats (better a possum than the other two options!). And king snakes move into the hedges and tree banks and eat both rats and other more aggressive snakes.
This happy little system works at our house. No furry beasts steal my fruit or veggies. The dog and cats keep them out of the house. Everyone's happy. At night sometimes we hear the possum, possuming around in the leaf litter (which I also don't rake, but relocate as mulch around the yard). It's actually rather pleasant. An occasional basking snake on a hedge top, or zipping through the yard is kind of cool.
So why not? Why not innoculate the house with some happy blend of colonizing fungi and flora, and do what it takes to keep it happy? Then only an unhappy house would get dangerous mold and nasty mildew. What about that?
Any mycologists and bacteriologists want to chime in here? Any air conditioning radicals? Is it possible that some combination of the wild yeasts in sourdough starter, the flora in lactofermented foods, and a shiitake log could pleasantly populate the house and keep the nasties at bay? I'm only slightly joking about those specific examples. You get the point.
I can't be the first person to think of this.
The kids are jacked up on Easter candy superaction, Tim is napping on the couch, and we have a p90x yoga date later today. A walk on the beach, then crab legs and filet mignon for dinner. Insert contented sigh.
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5 comments:
Glad to hear your starter is still alive. I use mine far too regularly - twice a week at least, usually - to have experienced that. But I'm also too new to sourdough - around a year.
Mold in houses - I find this interesting and it has me curious. What are houses built from in Florida that the tear-down phenomenon is so common? Sri Lanka is at least in the neighborhood of the same heat and humidity, yet we don't have that here. All houses are made of brick/cement/concrete/some combination thereof. The only wood is used in window frames, stair railings, doors & door frames, and furniture. No drywall. No insulation. Okay, I'm kinda geeking out a bit on construction-type stuff - I grew up in a construction family and spent more time on a construction site than anyone would find normal...
Unless the time frame for tear-down houses is much longer than I'm thinking of.
I dunno. It just has me very very curious now.
As for the starter, you could make two batches and alternate use so one has a chance to rest and develop more flavor. Next time you make bread, feed the remaining starter double the amount you usually do. Leave it out for 8-12 hourse, then divide in two. You can add more at each feeding until your amount seems right. Just an idea. I'm so impressed you bake twice a week!
Hey, I'm right there with you on the construction geek-out.
That's the thing, the houses are built here like they are in Ohio. They're generally wood or CBS with interior drywall, insulation, the whole nine. Wood roofing under tile or tar paper. Wood door and window framing and baseboards. Sometimes the second floor is wood structure when the first is CBS, both with drywall and insulation. Then add air conditioning and dehumidifiers to make it feel like Ohio indoors. Mold city.
Anything left outside molds like crazy, especially in the summer.
It must be a swamp thing. The whole point of the place is to break down contents and filter nutrients before they hit the Gulf and the Atlantic.
The nutrient filter is so efficient in fact, there is little or no nutrition in the sandy soil south of the Caloosahatchee River. Cattle and horses would die on the local forage if not supplemented, and all of the farming is practically hydroponic in the sand.
Occasionally a house has a faulty a/c and goes totally moldy within six months. Usually a well maintained house can last about 20 years. Most of the Deco stuff in Miami is close to the beach, therefore not as wet, and they are gut-restoring all of it now that it's been used again since the '80s. Or they smell nasty and require constant de-molding chemicals and new contents.
A few very old buildings (for Florida) are still around, like the Edison estate. I don't know how they deal with these issues.
Our house is oldish for the area 1955. Concrete block shell (9") and interior walls. Wood roof, no insulation to speak of until fairly recently. Jalousie windows, terrazzo floors. Nothing moldy but the old a/c and ducts (not bad, but worth nipping in the bud), both of which we just replaced.
I wish there was a preventive inoculation for the a/c and house. It would be so cool.
About two batches of sourdough - not for me. I don't like hassle, which that would be, and our fridge is too small. Plus I like the way my starter behaves just fine. It's not at all sour, which is great since we don't like sour at all, and it doubles or triples in a couple of hours, so plenty active.
Using wood, drywall, and so on for building houses there makes no sense in a hot and humid environment. The concrete/cement/brick houses here do not mold and do not present health risks.
Of course we get mold growth elsewhere, just not involving the house itself.
Even if not for mold, the heat and humidity would rot wood in a matter of a couple of years. Add in termites, ants, and other pests, and it goes even faster. Add in the monsoon rains and jungle plant growth rate (very very very fast), and a house would disappear in a few years. That's why no one uses wood framing here. No one here has even heard of it.
Why do people in Florida not use concrete/cement/brick? I guess I'm just really puzzled. It doesn't make sense.
I love the sourdough/rebirth meditation. There is big magic in both. Happy Spring!
I'm not a baker, so I barely understand your sourdough starter, but I would like some of the bread please. =)
As for the inoculation idea, it seems so simply brilliant. With all the talk of probiotics and beneficial bacteria, you would think someone must have thought about this.
I actually giggled over the "regular folks" statement.
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