Let's keep sourdough starters as pets

Help us, dough. You are my only solace.

Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate (and welcome, new readers from A Thing or Two with Claire and Erica!). This week, we report to you from social isolation and with Yet Another Mysterious Ear Infection! Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.

Sourdough starter at home

You know where to find me: Indoors.

Day 14 of staying inside. I have grown so desperately thirsty for pets that I made a sourdough starter. I set it on the table next to my laptop as I work and pretend that it is a cat, and every so often my partner walks through the apartment and yells “no pets on the table!” and I move it to the chair next to me. My pretend cat which is actually a raw blob of dough also enjoys the heat coming from my laptop and that gives my lonely little heart solace. Every hour or so I stir it and wonder if the bubbles I see are a sign of life, or just merely my overparenting, and send photos to all my friends. Oh, I also took all the chia seeds from the pantry and started watering them. Send help.

Sourdough crumpets at home

Recipe from King Arthur Flour

On day three of feeding my sourdough starter, I scoop out half a cup of the bubbly, yeasty stuff to griddle as crumpets (or rather, proto-English muffins) to teach my Sourdough Son* a lesson: That life is cruel and that the body is nothing but another object to be consumed. Anyways, he is delicious so I will be consuming more of him (afterwards, I stir in another ounce each of flour and water into him, to repay that ounce of flesh I took). The crumpets are very simple to make: Stir in about ½ tsp of sugar, a pinch of salt, ¼ tsp of baking soda into your starter. Preheat a griddle to 300F, add a good scoop of bacon grease (or butter) and grease the shit out of two mason jar rings. Pour the batter into the rings and griddle for about five minutes, or until the top is set and the bottom is browned, then flip (peel the rings carefully off with tongs), and griddle five minutes more. It will take a bit of time for the center to be less doughy even if the outside is browned. Split in half and eat with a runny egg inside.

*By day three, he has been elevated from a pet to a baby.

Orange cake at home

Recipe from NYT Cooking, similar recipe from Nigella Lawson fo’ free

I don’t know about you, but there’s a flour shortage at all the grocery stores around me, because people all around the lonely isolated nation are turning to the kitchen as a coping mechanism. While I approve of this coping mechanism, I am also very annoyed because now I am short on carbs to drown my own sorrows in. Thankfully, we do have a giant bag of almond flour in the pantry and one of my very favorite cakes happens to be made with it. This cake is extraordinarily simple — it has only five ingredients — and delicious. It has a lovely moist texture, almost like it was soaked in syrup, and it has a beautiful orange color and fragrant perfume from whole oranges. The only downside is that you have to boil oranges for twohours, which is an unheard of luxury during non-pandemic times, but guess what: It’s perfect for now! Oh, you also need a blender to puree those citruses, but I couldn’t find one and am not to be fucked with, so I forced those bad boys through a sieve using my bare hands. 

Lemon blueberry pancakes with a hint of allspice at home

Recipe from NYT Cooking

This is the darkest timeline. But these pancakes brought a smile to my face, and made me lose a minute (or two) to the pure bliss of appreciating the taste of food, and these days I would call that simply magic. Everytime I make pancakes from scratch I wonder why I don’t do it more often. It’s incredibly easy, but the results are so wonderfully fluffy. The recipe I used is from Mark Bittman, and it’s called Everyday Pancakes. They’re so simple to put together, I suggest we all make them daily. Because I am “bad at making things vanilla,” I added: A pinch of allspice (nutmeg will also do), a dash of vanilla, a cup of frozen wild blueberries from pre-apocalypse days, and most importantly, the zest of one lemon. Oh, I also swapped out about two tablespoons of regular flour for almond flour, because see: Above.

Dalgona coffee at my apartment

You can find Dalgona all over the internet.

Dalgona coffee is basically a Nescafé frappé gone viral, thanks to the fact that we’re all so stir-crazy we want to whip coffee by hand. You whisk a ratio of 1:1:1 of instant coffee, sugar, and hot water until it turns caramel-colored and foamy, then top a steaming mug of milk with the fluffy stuff. It’s extremely photogenic, which is why it’s especially popular on Instagram. People are whipping it by hand because there’s frankly nothing better to do, but the secret is that you can just use a cheap electric frother, and also that instant coffee froths up fairly easily with just hot water (decaf works fine, too). But the addition of sugar makes this extra decadent and gives it a syrupy texture. It’s delicious and an easy magic trick. For detailed instructions and some primo silent cooking ASMR content, check out my favorite YouTube channel, Nino’s Home (you can either ignore or enjoy the hordes of hand-thirsty commenters, but know that you’ve been warned).

Santé,

Soph