Stoletzky - Life Lessons from a Homemade Sourdough Starter: Teachings in Happiness With the One & Only Sourdough Recipe

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Copyright 2018 by Becker Joest Volk Verlag GmbH & Co. KG

Text and visual concept by Judith Stoletzky

Idea and recipes by Lutz Geiler

Photography by Hubertus Schler

Translated by Judith Stoletzky

Graphic design by Judith Stoletzky & Inga Detlow

Originally published in Germany in 2018 by Becker Joest Volk Verlag GmbH & Co. KG as Ca. 750 g Glck: Das kleine Buch von der groen Lust sein, eigenes Sauerteigbrot zu backen

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First Tiller Press hardcover edition February 2021

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Cover photography by Hubertus Schler

Cover design by Patrick Sullivan

Canvas texture by Shutterstock

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stoletzky, Judith, author.

Title: Life lessons from a homemade sourdough starter / by Judith Stoletzky.

Description: New York : Tiller Press, 2020.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020034580 (print) | LCCN 2020034581 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982169824 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982169862 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cooking (Sourdough) | Sourdough bread. | Fermentation. | LCGFT: Cookbooks.

Classification: LCC TX770.S66 S76 2020 (print) | LCC TX770.S66 (ebook) | DDC 641.81/5dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034580

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034581

ISBN 978-1-9821-6982-4

ISBN 978-1-9821-6986-2 (ebook)

If you want to be happy, bake a loaf of bread.

Lutz Geiler

Do you remember your favorite teacher? Do you remember what this teacher did differently? You probably cant recall his or her actually teaching you lessons. What you learned you likely absorbed through your pores because the teacher sparked a flame that ignited your interest and catapulted you right into the subject by awakening your senses, making you feel, and giving you the bliss of grasping the topic through experience rather than rote drills.

The word interest comes from the Latin inter and esse Inter, for in the center of or in between, and esse, for the verb to be Interest means someone is in it, in the middle of the matter. Interest means becoming one with what you do. Being a part of it. And thats a hell of a happy feeling! This tiny book describes how a vague interest in baking bread turned into an exciting journey into mindfulness and the creation of an easy, everyday recipe for happinessnot through osmosis but through sticky sourdough.

Happiness is a term as soft and amorphous as sourdough. It raises questions. Different people have very different concepts of happiness, and our fantasies often come in the shape of kitschy clichs involving mansions, unicorns, eternal youth, yachts, designer handbags, and a fancy car (or twenty fancy cars!). Happiness is often interpreted as more, more, more. But true happiness can be a relaxation into less, less, less. It can even be less than less. The mere absence of things may be abundance.

The guru this book is inviting you to follow is not really a teacher. He doesnt have a degree, he doesnt speak Latin, he doesnt know a single thing. Hes a heavy, lazy, greedy, and sometimes grumpy lump with a slightly sour smell (we all had a teacher like that in high school!). His gray eminence made it very clear from lesson one that we already have all we need to create happiness.

This book is a serious matter. I created it in response to an impulse from a serious German geoscientist named Lutz Geiler, whose life was turned upside down after he started baking bread. Now he is no longer a geologist but a professional baker. He teaches baking and writes bestselling cookbook after bestselling cookbook. He counsels industrial bakeries and artisan bakers; he teaches gourmet chefs around the globe. Being a scientist, he strives for perfection, and hobbyist bakers can count on his recipes being repeatedly reviewed and verified in serious experimental setups and precisely replicable at homesuccessfully, deliciously, and beautifully. We learn up to the third decimal place how many grams of which natural ingredient are to be put into what, exactly when, and why. We learn precisely what a dough has to look like, smell like, and feel like.

Even though Lutz is a man of unequivocal facts, while baking, he began to believe in forces whose existence is not easy to prove scientifically. Dough does not always stick to the numbers Lutz first wrote down, and this made him believe in the powers of pure chance. He even believes that dough has a soul and its own will, and that its personality must be respected if we want to transform it into beautiful bread. These are the objective reasons for learning to trust our subjective perception and our senses, as it seems that these instruments offer greater precision. Or is it higher art?

Once baking had, to his own amazement, turned his life and his views around completely, Lutz woke up one day to the insight that the world needed to know, too! We should know how wonderful it is to bake bread, and how little is needed to transform ones self and create a more contented, mindful life. He dreamed of a baking book, but not the type were used tosmall in size but big in meaning, and about something so inexact as happiness. He even mentioned a four-letter word starting with L. There was just one problem: he had no idea what the recipe for a book about feelings instead of facts should be. What were the ingredients, the measurements, the chapters, the images, the words? What to write about, precisely? Which form and shape and taste should it have? So he asked me to create a recipe for a sourdough bread book that would contain just one single recipe. A book that would get people hooked and happy. And he also asked me to bake the thing!

There was only one way to go: I had to experience it all myself. So I took to the unscientific experiment, switching on all my senses and discovering all kinds of amazing feelings. Hopefully you will find the description so tasty that youll want to try it out yourself. Creating your own sourdough starter. Cuddling it and caring for it. Feeding it. Naming it. Watching it breathe and grow. Trying to understand what it wants to tell you, what it can teach you. When your starter bursts out of the jar with zest for life, burst with joy yourself. And when you pull your very first loaf from the oven, burst with happinesslet the feeling be contagious!