Heart Eyes, Vol. 7: Elena Ferrante, Best Things, and Sourdough
Happy Friday, and happy late September—also known as The Beginning of My Favorite Time of Year. As I sit here, the sky outside is blue, the light is golden, and my backyard plum trees are starting to turn orange around the edges. I bought peaches and heirloom tomatoes at the grocery store today, but only by reaching past the apples and tiny pumpkins—which I think will be for next week. I hope things are just as beautiful and seasonally present where you are! Here are some things you might enjoy as the seasons change:
What To Read: Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels
(Or: 2015 called, and it wants its book recommendation back.) When the fourth and last of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels came out in English two years ago, I was so confused: why was everyone talking about these books I'd never heard of? It seemed like everybody had read the first three; how had I missed them? They were everywhere. I still have no idea what happened, but I've now finished two of the four books (My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name), and I haven't had a fiction experience like this in a long time. Taken all together, the series tells the story of friendship between Lila and Lenú, two girls born into poverty in postwar Naples; we meet them at age six and follow them into the present day. It sounds sweet and uplifting; it mostly isn't. These books are intense. Ferrante zooms in close on Lila and Lenú and the cluster of fraught families in their neighborhood, so that every tiny slight and everyday tragedy becomes epically important; I've now gasped in horror at the perfectly normal-seeming (but actually terrible) events of the last sentence of both books. I suspect it will take me at least a year to finish all four novels—I'm taking breaks in between, for sanity—but I'm really enjoying them as an absorbing, psychological-yet-page-turning epic. You might, too.
What To Listen To and Cry, In a Good Way: Best Things on It's Been a Minute
I know we already talked about Sam Sanders and his semiweekly podcast, It's Been a Minute, but when I made that recommendation, I had not yet discovered my very favorite thing about the show: each week, people send in recordings of themselves talking about the best thing that happened to them that week, and Sanders plays a selection of them at the end of every Friday show. It's maybe three minutes of strangers telling you about their new baby or their engagement or their late mother's long-lost recipes that they found in a canister in the closet, and I have yet to make it through an installment without happy tears. It feels nice to be so overcome with other people's joys. I recommend it! (The rest of the show is good, too.)
What To Bake: Sourdough Bread at The Kitchn
Almost two years ago, my friend Stacy flew down from Spokane and brought me a new pet. It's not snuggly or fuzzy (and if it is, things have gone horribly wrong), but it does pull its weight around the house, unlike my cat, Sherlock. My sourdough starter must love me, because it provides me with fresh, soft, crackle-crusted bread every week or two.
When I got my starter, I immediately ventured onto the Internet to read about all things sourdough—and discovered that all things sourdough was way too much for me. I wasn't sure I wanted to jump into sourdough at all! The Internet, you may have heard, is full of people who truly believe that any bread-baking method but their own is a travesty against the very idea of wild yeast. And I bet their bread is delicious! But they're still wrong—the sheer number of people strictly adhering to wildly different bread regimens speaks to the glorious number of ways to go about nurturing and baking from this gloppy, yeasty critter. This is mine: I eventually found Emma Christensen's extremely detailed recipe and tutorial from The Kitchn, decided it looked like the right balance of beautiful bread and accessible process for me, and gave it a shot—and it's been my Friday work-at-home routine ever since.
Basically, what I learned from my recipe search is that every sourdough recipe has tradeoffs; this one, a hybrid of kneaded and no-knead techniques, is no exception. The main thing is that it takes a while. It won't need much of your attention during that time, but I tend to bake on days when I plan to be more or less around (though I've also been known to start a loaf after work, let it rise overnight, and bake while I get ready in the morning). That said, it's really forgiving. Sometimes life gets in the way of your precise schedule of mixing/folding/shaping/rising, and I've skipped steps, ignored inconvenient rise times, and panicked and thrown the whole thing in the fridge, and it's come out consistently well (which is not to say exactly the same). I also like this recipe because it uses just a half-tablespoon of starter per loaf. It's not uncommon for a sourdough recipe to call for as much as a cup, but every flour-and-water feeding involves discarding half the volume of the starter, and I just couldn't sign up for that kind of flour waste. To me, the low-volume starter is worth the time it takes to permeate the rest of the dough.
(Also: I don't bother with the proofing baskets or the floured dishtowels. I line a mixing bowl with baking parchment, put the shaped dough in seam side down, and cover it with plastic wrap. When the time comes to bake, I uncover it and put both the dough and the parchment into the hot Dutch oven, using the parchment as a sling. The parchment also keeps my Dutch oven from staining, though I bleach it a couple of times a year anyway.)
All this to say: I've enjoyed making and eating sourdough; you might, too! If you want to make your own starter from scratch, The Kitchn also has a tutorial for that; you can also order premade ones online. Or, if you're local, hit me up. My starter is happy to share.