The staff of life.  I’ll leave the other phrases and synonyms for you to seek.  Here they’ll only be fillers, and we don’t need any of those.  We’re concentrating on the most basic here: bread.

Here in Tortola we’re not blessed with good bread (you can find another post about my home-baking efforts here:  ).  Forgive me, but American bread is awful, at least the mass-produced rubbish we get here is.  It is sweet and sticks to the roof of your mouth like a sticking plaster. So a couple of years ago I decided to learn how to make bread myself.  Graham (god bless him) gamely consumed many a lead weight before I got the knack of it, and it still doesn’t work all of the time, but most of the time it does.

We’ve been back from France for 3 weeks now (good grief, is it really that long??). I enjoy baguettes (though we mostly eat pain, as it lasts longer), but I miss a good nutty multi-grain loaf, so I was very happy to get kneading again the first weekend after we returned to the BVI.  But I’ve been musing about sourdough (having just bought a huge packet of baker’s yeast), so today I’ve done my research on the web – how did we ever live without it? – and made a sourdough starter.  Hopefully it will be ready to be the mother for a loaf in about 3 days time.  It had better be as the bread that’s in the freezer will have been eaten by then!

I’ve been thinking that when we return to Les Terraces in March I’ll start trying to bake there.  I know it will be different as we won’t have the same heat for proving and so on, but we can get a good mixture of grains to make a good multi-grain bread.  Perhaps I’ll make a sourdough “Mother” (or, shhhh, bring it with me from Tortola) and entrust it to Trudi for safe-keeping.

So, here’s the recipe I’m trying:

2.5 tsp yeast
2 cups warm water
2 cups (multi-grain) flour

I’ve mixed it all up in a glass dish and covered it with a lid to furkle in the warmth.

We’ll see.