A Little Leaven

My sourdough starter, Xeno, turns ten this year. Short for xenophilius or, roughly, ‘the one who loves the stranger,’ he has helped us to create food both sweet and savory to host anyone who comes to our house, to provide a gift for friends and family in seasons both festive and mournful. Xeno has sired many starters over the years, and the last I checked is now officially a grand-starter with his composition of yeast and lacto-bacilii replicating as we speak in mason jars all over Southern California. 

With Xeno’s arrival came a calendar of caring for this little organism as it began to munch its way through flour and water both day and night. After a decade of caring for him, I can note several changes he has brought to my life. First, I am much more attentive to the atmosphere. Little fluctuations of temperature and humidity can alter the fermentation process, sending Xeno into a frenzy that produces an unsustainable and unpredictable maturity or else an inertia that cannot leaven a dough before it loses all of its energy. Second, I wonder much more at the microscopic world of my kitchen. Xeno was created, like most starters, by mixing water and flour and leaving it in the open air for a few days. While there is some debate about whether the critical yeasts can come in through the air or whether they hitch a ride through the processing of the flour, once all of these elements combine a yeast is sure to start growing and producing the gas bubbles that make for the open crumb of artisan sourdough. So too, though, a starter can get sick if left exposed. Mold and bacteria, an errant soap bubble from the sink, or even the fluoridated water from the tap can slow a starter or kill it outright. It’s no wonder that the famous San Francisco sourdough starters are kept in atmospherically-controlled vaults; two-hundred year old strains can be finicky. 

There is something daunting and yet stabilizing in taking up a craft that people have practiced for millenia. Flour, water, air, and yeast (plus a bit of kosher salt if you’re like me): you’d be pressed for a simpler recipe and yet it is all in the tradition of introducing them to one another and guiding them along. So much of it depends on smell, texture, and appearance to determine when it’s time to do the next step. The liturgy of bread-making, like any good liturgy, is revelatory. It has uncovered my attempt to control life–I try to eliminate variables by filtering the water, sifting the flour, gauging the temperature of the water to a precise degree, using timers to keep my schedule. The mothers of bread-making mastery had no such tools, but instead became attentive and patient to how dough behaves in different seasons, down to the minutest conditions. Bread is a tradition. You have to be taught by someone who knows. If you don’t believe me, try following written instructions on kneading, shaping, and proofing. There’s no substitute for getting your hands messy and becoming incompetent until you learn signs you don’t look for in anything else. Making bread has also drawn out how I like to make things work on my timeline. Cheap bread is accessible to such a person; great bread is not. During the winter months, even in as tepid a winter as California, the rate at which the bread proofs is meandering and indifferent. Even when everything is going ‘according to plan’ I am still at least a day away from eating from the moment I start the process. Flavor and structure take the time they take, whether I like it or not.

Baking bread and working with starters and leaveners has, over time, alerted me to their presence in the Scriptures. One of the more famous instances, of course, is the abandonment of leaven in the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. Often, this is explained through the modern lens of practical convenience. The Israelites needed to be able to leave at any time and so they didn’t have time to let the dough rise. There is a certain sense to this. Once you mix your leaven (a ‘fed’ and ‘mature’ starter plus some fresh flour and water to boost its potency) with your autolyse (a mixture of flour, water, and salt left for a bit to hydrate and prepare for the arrival of the rising agent), you are committed to that lump of leavened dough until it is ready to bake, with all the stretching and kneading required for it to develop a strong gluten-structure. Yet this explanation also smacks of a too-modern sensibility with its obsession with schedule and time-orientation. For one, both the ancient Israelites and ancient Egyptians were probably more event-oriented cultures. For another, it is possible even to bake the loaves before they’ve fully risen–they will not be ideal, but they will not be as severe in taste and texture as the truly unleavened. 

There’s another reason, though, why the Israelites might need to leave out the leaven. Leaven, and the starter that gives it life, is a product of the place in which it grows. Unlike Xeno, which likely has yeast in it not from California but rather from the farm where the wheat was grown a few states away, leavens in older, agrarian cultures are united with the soil, air, and water of the place in which they are born. The leavens used by the ancient Israelites after four-hundred years in Egypt would have been Egyptian leavens, which would ferment the autolyse to make Egyptian breads. It was this that they were told to leave behind: they took what seems to be an autolysed lump that would not rise but could still feed you if baked, and left the leaven out and presumably behind. To leave the starter behind in order to eat unleavened bread for a few days’ journey would mean the death of your starter back home (especially without temperature-control) and thus the need to make a new one in the new place. You would then be eating the bread of a new place. Unlike the jewels and fabrics, the LORD did not allow the Israelites to continue eating Egypt’s bread. Instead, they would eat the bread from heaven for a time, and then begin again in the Promised Land. 

It is this sense of leaven as an edible incarnation of the place and its people and culture that clarifies its use as a metaphor in the New Testament. The most noticeable leaven-metaphors arise amid warnings to keep oneself unsullied by something unrighteous. In St. Matthew’s Gospel, our Lord cautions his disciples against the teachings of the religious rulers, saying “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” Then, of course, St. Paul makes clear reference to Exodus when he writes to the Corinthians: “Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” From these passages, leaven serves as an image of influence that insinuates itself and then replicates, consumes, and (to use another phrase from St. Paul) puffeth up. 

For all of these warnings, however, the image of leaven is not uniformly negative. In our Lord’s parable from St. Matthew’s Gospel, it is likened in a parable to the Kingdom of Heaven: “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till it was all leavened.” Three measures of flour is a staggering quantity for a home baker like myself, being something like two gallons. It could make bread enough for dozens of people to eat well. The image of leaven here, of course, expresses how something small can transform and alter the course of what is much larger than itself. The bread of affliction, with its influence, can become a toothsome meal and delights and satisfies. In light of the parable, we can see the deeper pattern when it comes to the image of leaven: it depends greatly on which leaven is leavening the dough. The lesson of the leaven reminds us that the development of our character begins quietly, proceeds hiddenly, and then produces its effect. That should make us watchful for the little signs of something that does not belong in our life, but it should also make us patient, attentive, and hopeful that when we see even pathetic little bubbles, it means there is a powerful work happening from within. Eventually, the whole lump will be leavened, even if for a lot of the process it looks pretty shaggy and proves difficult to work with. As someone who can relate to that at times, I am relieved.

We are about to start Lent, and typically I will give Xeno a good feeding and then let him start to hibernate in my fridge for the season. I will bring him out again in time to bake during Eastertide and get him some good flour to wake him up properly. As we prepare for the fasting season ahead, we do well to become mindful of the influences of our life. A little leaven leavens the whole lump, and we eat the bread of the leaven we permit into the dough. But even with good leaven, we are subject to the time and tradition of coaxing it along and allowing it to proof on the bench for structure, and then again as it is hidden in a cool and dark place to develop its deep flavor. Then, in the early morning when we are warmed as we keep watch by the oven, the aroma starts to emanate–that unmistakable scent of fresh bread. And if we have kept to the disciplines of those careful bakers who have gone before us, we will open the loaf to reveal the delicate pattern that had been quietly at work within all that time, so that, finally, we can sit down–hopefully with those we love–and share in the fruits of that collaboration of time, our hands, and the Lord’s good world. And does not that little joy begin to work itself through our hearts to prepare them for the life of the world to come?