Sourdough

by Robin Sloan

  I lifted my swaddled loaves in greeting. Chef Kate cleared a space among the potatoes.

  She brought a loaf to her nose, then thunked its backside with her finger and listened to the report. “Very nice.” She produced a serrated blade and commanded me to cut while she stepped away in search of something else.

  Once every quarter, Andrei insisted that Chef Kate employ the robot arms in her kitchen, and once every quarter, the robot arms failed her horribly. The latest tryout sat in the corner, powered down with a broom leaned up against it, waiting to be wheeled back across the street to the Task Acquisition Center. We would solve everything else before we solved the egg problem.

  I followed Kate’s instructions and sawed off two rough slices. She returned with butter and salt and generously dressed both of them. “There.” The bread was now blanketed with bright yellow butter. It glittered with a crust of flaky salt. It seemed excessive.

  Kate hoisted her slice in a salute and said, “You’d be better off eating this every day than that Slurry shit.” She took a bite. “Dude.” Chewed. Took another bite. Said again: “Dude.” Swallowed. “You could sell this.”

  I told her Arjun said the same thing.

  “Arjun doesn’t know anything. I do. This is a solid product. Dude. Sell me some.”

  She fixed me with a challenging gaze. This was not the empty jollity of a friend’s “You could sell this”; this was the hard-eyed appraisal of someone who spent a lot of time thinking about what was and wasn’t commercially viable.

  This was, in other words, a real offer.

  I told her okay. I would sell her some.

  “What’s your capacity?”

  “Not much? I can bake two loaves in my oven. So I can do four, I guess, in a couple of hours.”

  “I need at least eight. You kids eat a lot.”

  I told her I would find a way to do eight. I had no idea how, but that’s what I told her.

  “Bring them next week,” Chef Kate said. “Trial run, Monday through Friday. Cool?”

  Cool, I agreed, and I could not account fully for the thrill of the prospect. Maybe it was the miracle of baking, still alive for me; maybe it was the fact that I’d never produced anything that earned such a visceral reaction before. Visceral was nice. Visceral was fun.

  “I pay Everett Broom five dollars a unit, which is absurd, but I’ll pay you the same, on the strength of this loaf. Thirty days net. Bring me an invoice.”

  Units! Net! Invoices! I was drunk with it.

  “See you next Monday,” Chef Kate said. “Early!”

  Back at my desk, I sat smiling—grinning goofily, in fact—and wondered if it was the first time I had ever done so sitting at that desk. The Clement Street starter was happy, too—burbling merrily—and my workspace was permeated by the faint smell of bananas and the croon, even fainter, of the choirs of the Mazg, whoever they were.

 

  HELLO, NUMBER ONE EATER! Your sourdough looks splendid. I’m very happy to see it. Does it smell like bananas—just a tiny bit?

  Chaiman and I are back in Edinburgh, crowded into Shehrieh’s small apartment here. (That’s my mother. Mazg don’t say “Mom” and “Dad.” I don’t really know why not.) I’m cooking for everyone. After a year of practice in San Francisco, I think it’s happened: I’m finally a better cook than my mother. She won’t admit it, of course, but I can tell she’s nervous. I have a batch of spicy soup going now, with an ingredient that is, wickedly, new to her: FRESNO CHILI! I discovered it on Clement Street. Yes, I think this is going to be the night she concedes. Please picture me rubbing my hands together like a villain.

  Send more messages!

  THE JAY STEVE VALUE OVEN

  THE CHALLENGE from Chef Kate smoldered in my brain. It was a familiar burn. I broke down the tolerances, the timings. To produce bread in the quantity she required, I would either have to start at three in the morning and bake loaves two at a time for four hours … or I would have to acquire a bigger oven.

  Midway through The Soul of Sourdough, in a sidebar, Everett Broom alluded to the deep satisfaction of building a brick oven of one’s own. “A full exploration of the design considerations is beyond the scope of this book,” he wrote, “but you’ll find a helpful community online at Global Gluten.”

  Global Gluten turned out to be a collection of forums populated by a kind of person I hadn’t known existed: the carbohydrate nerd. They talked about hydration ratios, pH levels, dough temperatures. They traded recipes and swapped starters.

  And, as Broom had promised, they gathered in a subforum devoted to the design and construction of elaborate wood-fired brick ovens. Here, the carb nerds shared blueprints. The ovens they built were beautiful, architectural, like miniature Byzantine churches. For each design, there was a corresponding “heat curve” that swelled to 800 degrees or more, then eased down slowly for hours. The carb nerds got very, very excited about the shapes of these curves.

  There were a few message threads pinned to the top of the forum—perennial references. One of them had been created six years ago and boasted seventy-nine pages of commentary. Its title was: THE JAY STEVE $200 VALUE OVEN (VERSION SIX).

  I investigated. There were pictures, captured in a backyard that presumably belonged to Jay Steve. The grass was brown and patchy. There was a chain-link fence and a plastic dog dish.

  And there was an oven, neither Byzantine nor beautiful. Instead, it was fully Mad Max: a squarish jumble of brick and metal. If I’d stumbled across the picture in a different context I would have assumed I was looking at the remains of a very small shanty following a great conflagration. The lines were askew; the metal was rusted; the bricks around the door were stained black with char.

  Following Jay Steve’s initial post (his profile picture was the affable snout of a golden retriever) were the seventy-nine pages of comments in which the carb nerds proposed tweaks of all kinds—different dimensions, different materials—but at some point all conceded: this was a badass little oven.

  I could acquire all the materials at the expedient big-box home-supply store. Unfortunately, my car was minuscule and its tiny engine moaned even when it was carrying just me and zero home supplies over San Francisco’s hills. I knocked on my upstairs neighbor’s door, and when Cornelia appeared, I asked her if I could borrow her car.

  “Nobody drives it but me,” she said. “You need to go somewhere? I’ll drive you. What day is it? Yeah. I should get out.”

  Cornelia’s car was her defining feature. I saw it approximately a hundred times more often than I saw her: a battered green Honda CR-V that was always parked directly in front of the house, except for when Cornelia was working, when she replaced it with four traffic cones. As I watched, she removed them from the trunk and plunked them down.

  The car’s windshield was bordered with the badges and shields of every extant on-demand delivery service, along with several that were now defunct. While she navigated us to the expedient big-box home-supply store just south of the city, she swiped through a long carousel of apps with one hand and, I sensed, ninety percent of her attention. “Nah,” she murmured. “Nah. Nah. Nah.”

  Cornelia was a highly strategic pawn in the on-demand delivery marketplace. Most hours of most days, she lounged at home in her sweatpants. But she was at all times monitoring the apps, and at the moments when demand burned blue-hot—Friday nights, often, but also random Tuesdays when the fog was at its thickest, suggesting to people that they ought to stay home and ponder their lives over delivered Burmese food—Cornelia would spring into action and earn a thousand dollars in a tire-screeching rally worthy of Bullitt. When it rained, she paid her rent in a day.

  At the expedient big-box home-supply store, I wound my way through the towering aisles, following the shopping list provided by Jay Steve. I amassed thirty-six cinder blocks; two hundred and twenty-six plain red bricks (not firebricks, which Jay Steve claimed were for “luxury ovens only”); one bag each of clay and sand; one two-by-four cut to
measure; and a supply of kindling, which the store sold in neat boxes.

  When I returned to the car with three polo-shirted helpers pushing three different carts laden with materials, the trunk of Cornelia’s CR-V was already open and she was perched on the bumper, swiping through her phone, wearing a satisfied, catlike look. While I had shopped, she had completed two delivery missions, earning fifty dollars.

  She ferried me and my materials back to Cabrillo Street, the CR-V riding noticeably lower to the ground, and there we hauled my acquisitions one by one around the side of the building into a heap in the backyard.

  “What are you doing out here?” Cornelia huffed at last.

  I told her, with as much confidence as I could muster, that I was constructing a wood-fired brick oven in our backyard.

  “How … crafty.”

  She retreated to the front of our building. I considered its bulk. It was charmless, a blank expanse of stubbly pseudo-stucco broken by just two windows: mine at eye level, Cornelia’s above. The appropriate next step in this project would have been to contact the property management company, explain what I wanted to do, perhaps offer to increase my security deposit by some as-yet-unknown amount, and hope for official assent.

  It was early evening.

  The sky was a low ceiling of fog.

  I shooed away the Cabrillo Street cats.

  I beat back the weeds.

  I built the oven.

  It was shockingly easy because the instructions had been refined by Global Gluten’s collective cleverness into something approaching IKEA-grade ease, and also because it was just a box. A box for fire.

  I stacked the cinder blocks to mid-thigh, forming the oven’s base. Then I assembled its floor and walls and ceiling, three bricks thick all around, leaving a gap a few bricks wide for the door. Finally, I mixed the clay and sand with water to make a mortar that I slathered into the cracks between bricks. I did this with my bare hands, as Jay Steve recommended. Whatever mortar remained I painted onto the oven’s top and sides.

  The bricks were the crux of it, Jay Steve explained. Prior to this just-in-time education, I had assumed that in a wood-fired brick oven, the flames of the fire baked the bread. I mean, of course, right? Wrong. Baking in this oven would be a two-step process, and the first was for the fire to charge those thick walls with heat. The thicker the walls, the more heat they could absorb and then return. In an oven like this, it was the bricks, not the fire, that baked the bread.

  My oven looked like a gloppy cube, without even the crudest approximation of the graceful heat-reflecting domes that topped the fancier designs. But Jay Steve was insistent: Ugly ovens bake great bread.

  The crowning touch was the door, a plug of thick wood built from the two-by-four cut to measure.

  The sun had set. Fog was rolling into the yard, cold and dense. The oven was done. I stepped back to appraise it. It looked like a pile of junk. It was a success.

  I wanted badly to try it out, but here, Jay Steve cautioned, impatience spelled doom. Before I could bake with it, I had to cure the oven by building a very small fire, then growing it larger, and larger still, all over the course of several hours, until I had reached peak flameage (about 800 degrees), and, in the process, coaxed the latent moisture out of the bricks. If I rushed the process and baked at full strength right away, the oven would crack. It would become even uglier, and, worse, it would never bake in fully badass fashion.

  I pushed a few logs inside, arranged them in a loose triangle, tucked some kindling into place, and lit my first fire. It smoked and fumed. A lick of flame appeared, inspected its nest, proclaimed it satisfactory, and began to crackle.

  There were four ancient lawn chairs lying in a tangle behind the recycling bin, evidence of long-departed residents, with vines growing through their seats. I ripped away the vines, carried one of the chairs to the oven, plopped it down, and sat.

  I waited.

  It was cold, maybe forty degrees. I dashed inside to retrieve a blanket, my jacket, and an additional sweater, and when I returned to the lawn chair, I piled them all on top of myself. I slithered one hand through the heap to grasp and manipulate my poker (a long straight stick gleaned from the back of the yard) while keeping the skin–air interface to a minimum.

  I had another thought, and with reluctance I dismantled my insulating heap to go back inside and retrieve the Clement Street starter in its crock. Wary of the cold, I wedged it into the lawn chair next to me, then built the heap on top of it. I figured the starter ought to be present for the beginning of this important next phase in our work together.

  On the back of the building, the upper window flickered with the movement of blinds. They snapped up and the window slid open with a sharp squeak. A Cornelia-shaped silhouette appeared. I heard a curious “Hmm” and the silhouette retreated. A few minutes later, Cornelia emerged around the side of the building. She extricated another lawn chair, dragged it over, and plopped herself down.

  “Be a shame if the management company heard about this,” she said.

  It would be a shame, indeed.

  “You could keep your neighbor quiet pretty easy, though. Bribe her. I bet she just wants more of that bread.”

  Did she now.

  “Mm-hmm.” She leaned toward the oven, opened her palms to the heat. “Why bake it out here? Does it make a difference?”

  I began to list the virtues of the Jay Steve Value Oven as I had learned them on the message board, not least of which was its capacity: for $200 of raw materials and a few hours of labor—not including these hours of fire-watching, which were decidedly unlaborious—I had doubled my baking capacity. I could fit four loaves inside this oven. Four! And they would come out better. This was a wood-fired brick oven, the kind used by Everett Broom, and also by the artisan bakers of ancient days …

  I stopped talking, and we were quiet, watching the fire burn.

  After a while, Cornelia hoisted herself up with a little grunt, said good night, and padded into the building. I saw her silhouette in the window. She waved, then disappeared, and the light went out, but the window was still open to the cold night air and the smell of the fire.

  I fell asleep; for how long, I wasn’t sure. When I woke up, the oven was still going strong. The bricks weren’t steaming and crackling anymore. The curing process was well under way.

  The crock wedged next to me was vibrating with the starter’s tremors of growth, even though I hadn’t fed it. Was it responding to the warmth? I peeled back a sweater and the blanket and heard its quiet musing leaking out into the night.

  The air was heavy and cold, and when I looked up, I saw a surprise. The oven’s heat, rising in a steady plume, had bored through the fog and cleared a channel to the sky.

  I saw stars.

 

  YOU ASKED what makes the Mazg the Mazg. I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve come up with three things.

  First is our food. Most Mazg would say the culture—the starter—is the crucial thing, and of course the sourdough. Honestly … it’s not my favorite. I like the spicy better. But I think you already knew that.

  Second is our singing! Easy one.

  Third is our reticence. There are Mazg neighborhoods in cities all over Europe, but you would never know it, because we never have signs or storefronts. You will never, ever see our beautiful script on the street.

  It’s a shame.

  THE PROBLEM WAS ONGOING

  I ROSE BEFORE DAWN, carried the loaves into the backyard, started a fire in the Jay Steve, let it roar. When I reached in to push the coals to the back, the intensity of the heat made it suddenly clear the oven in my kitchen was no oven at all. The tiny hairs on my arms all vaporized. Four loaves went in and I jammed the wooden plug into place. Then I did a little jig.

  Forty minutes later, my hands shielded by thick mitts, I yanked the plug.

  The loaves were bigger than before, colored a deeper gold. Clearly visible in the cracks and crevices of the crust were the w
ide smiles they wore.

  Everybody was happy.

  The simple math of it was astonishing, and I felt the giddy leverage of technology—more palpably, I should add, than at any moment during my General Dexterity orientation. This was simple and direct: Before the machine, I could make two loaves. After the machine, I could make four. For the first time in my life, I realized why a person might be interested in capital. This was capital!

  I slammed through one batch of four loaves, then another. It took every ounce of restraint not to cut into the sourdough myself.

  It wasn’t even six a.m. and I had a set of loaves, rough octuplets, all smiling. I had stopped worrying about the faces. I wrapped the loaves in paper towels, resolved to buy more appropriate swaddling—what was the appropriate swaddling?—and hustled out the door.

  It was still dark outside. To the east, downtown San Francisco was obscured by hills, but the lights glowed splotchy purple on the underbelly of the marine layer.

  The General Dexterity office was quiet but not deserted. Chef Kate was in her kitchen, bent over a notebook, building a tall, skinny to-do list. Her two sous chefs stood at their stations, rapping their knives through thick heads of cabbage and long green onions. This morning, it was slow-rolling hip-hop on the Bluetooth speaker.

  “Here’s your first shipment,” I said, presenting the loaves.

  Chef Kate inspected them one by one. “These look pretty good,” she said. “Consistent. But this—the crust.” She indicated the whorls of the faces. “How the hell do you do that?”

  I told her it had been an accident the first time, and I’d repeated the steps every time since, which was technically the truth, if not entirely forthright.

  “It’s weird, dude. But I think I like it. You got an invoice for me, or what?”

  Later that day, I carried it to her, warm from the office printer. Forty dollars. I made more than that in fifteen minutes of programming, but this money felt special.