If you couldn’t tell, our country’s leaders aren’t great at keeping New Year’s resolutions.
Take President Donald Trump for example, who, on New Year’s Eve, said his resolution was “peace on Earth.” Within days of this announcement, Trump started “running” Venezuela, threatened military intervention in Iran, threatened to take over Greenland, threatened Colombia, threatened Cuba, and decried the need for international law.
But I can’t blame the top brass too harshly for their Auld-Lang-shortcomings, seeing as only 9% of U.S. adults actually stick to their New Year’s resolutions. Sometimes, when you want to jog, you simply don’t feel like jogging. Sometimes, when you want peace, you send a squadron of trigger-happy immigration officers into your country’s major cities and look the other way.
Yet let me tell you, Emersonian: I always stick to my resolutions, partially because I’m stubborn, and partially because I have a need to do new things. Living in the middle of Nowhere, Massachusetts — sandwiched between dead leaves and an equally dead Domino’s — I get antsy during school vacations. What can I say? Something about the cold and the slush and the staggering distance between my house and the nearest highway makes winter break especially bitter.
Back in the summer, when we at least had sun, my ennui led me to take up running, and eventually train for my first half marathon. This January, because the sidewalk de-icer must have slipped and died, it led me to start baking sourdough bread. Yup, just like the U.S. government feared, TikTok took my mind hostage. But instead of being force-fed Chinese propaganda, I started falling asleep to videos of people losing their sourdough-baking virginity and triumphantly slicing into their maiden loaves.
Half of the videos resulted in raw middles, and the other half showcased a perfect Connect 4 board of air pockets cascading toward a crusty, leather-tan bottom. To my surprise, some of the sourdoughs were wild-looking, or exotically flavored, or not bread at all.
“The cookies are sourdough and naturally fermented, so they’re gut healthy,” said TikToker @jeshastevens, who had the genius (and evil) idea to bake a sugar cookie ice cream sandwich.
Little did I know that the only “sourdough” thing about sourdough bread was the starter — a fermented concoction of flour and water that, upon daily “feedings,” grows from a pale goop to a much larger pale goop. That was when my fascination took on a brow-furrowing tingle; soon, I fell into a TikTok rabbit hole of people showing off their starters with captions such as “she’s hungry” or “she’s alive,” before sticking a spoon inside the mixture and letting it bubble over like a white water rapid. @littleranchfamily’s “Getting ready to feed my super angry 118 year old sourdough starter” taught me that starters can live for hundreds of years, and a cursory Google search listed a 4,500-year-old Egyptian concoction as the world’s oldest.
“The aroma of this yeast is unlike anything I’ve experienced,” wrote Seamus Blackley, the scientist and video game designer behind the Egyptian sourdough discovery, on X.
Yessiree Bob: I decided, right there in bed at 11 p.m., to get my hand on some of this sourdough starter — only to find out that a homemade recipe required weeks of patience that I didn’t have. Thus, I drove to Arlington one Sunday morning and received a ketchup cup of the stuff from the friendly lady at Breadboard Bakery, along with a gorgeous seeded loaf and a sourdough bran muffin.
Driving home, I felt as if I’d become an adoptive father, and my little boy — christened Salazar, after the family in Jennifer Egan’s “Goon Squad” novels — was sloshing with the lethargic majesty of a yeast ocean, taking in outside life for the first time.
I rushed him inside immediately, lest he spoil or enter teenagehood and decide to hate me.
Salazar made his home in an old Mason jar, and a few days later, after I plied him with enough all-purpose flour to alert a DEA agent, my little monster had actually doubled in size and begun spilling out. Contrary to popular belief, this parenting thing is laughably easy: playing along with my kid’s games in exchange for some daggum peace. Granted, like a true stinker, he tends to elicit a sharp stench every eight hours: He can’t urinate, but when he’s hungry, he’ll leak a thin layer of clear, vinegar-tinged liquid from his upper bubbles and wait patiently for the aroma to hit an unsuspecting kitchengoer.
And granted, even when it came time to make my dough, and I needed additional bread and rice flours, special “flour-sack towels” to allow for proofing in the fridge, and parchment paper (because of course I was all out of parchment paper, and of course I had to trek down to Pepperell Quality Market wearing my last pair of clean sweatpants — the ugly poo-brown ones — to buy some, and of course parchment paper is suddenly $6), our collective happiness made all the strife worth it.
Okay… and granted, I may have accidentally baked that first sourdough loaf upside down, and I may have sliced into it with the wrong type of knife (I do everything for you children, and you pounce on my smallest faults). But this was purely a sin of the father, and I hope to repent for it on future go-arounds.
Most importantly, the taste is there: as of writing this, less than a quarter of the bread remains, the rest having gone toward toast. Salazar’s upbringing has been a resounding success. After I fatten him up for the next 18 years, I’ll move upstate to buy a smaller house and give a third of my life’s savings toward his expensive liberal arts education, just to be stuck in a home someday. Hopefully, once I croak, he’ll pick my gravesite near my wife’s, who hopefully also enjoys baking, and the two of us will watch on as he grows into his 500s and continues to make hungry people happy with his penchant for a tender crumb.
In a year that’s already gone to hell ten times over, that’s the type of simple, glutenous resolution I’ll be savoring. On a separate note, dear Emersonian: if you have a starter and a dream, I hear Colo kitchens have beautiful ovens.
