Hit 500 sourdough loaves baked this morning and it kind of blew my mind

I was just pulling a loaf out of the oven and counted back through my notebook. Started keeping track in March of 2020 when I first tried it. 500 loaves. That's like... way more than I ever thought I'd make. Most of them went to neighbors or the freezer. But seeing that number in my own handwriting felt different than I expected. Has anyone else ever counted up and surprised themselves?

3 comments

3 Comments

king.stella18d ago

Read an article recently about how baking sourdough during lockdown became almost like a meditation for people. 500 loaves is seriously impressive, you basically kept a whole neighborhood fed through some weird times. Must be cool to flip back through that notebook and see all the tiny mistakes and wins along the way.

caleb_stone18d ago

That notebook reads like a bread murder mystery sometimes. I'll flip to a page from loaf number 12 and it's just "too sticky? added more flour. still sticky? added ALL the flour." Real scientific approach there. But yeah the whole lockdown thing was weirdly perfect timing for sourdough. You could just sort of zone out and focus on the rhythm of folding and waiting and not think about the world falling apart outside. My neighbors probably thought I was running some sort of underground bread operation with how many bags of flour I was hauling in.

ben20616d ago

@caleb_stone nailed it with the murder mystery comparison, lol. My early notes are basically like "loaf 47: still a brick. loaf 48: maybe less brick? loaf 49: ate the evidence." But that number 500 is wild, man. Makes me wonder though - how much flour have you actually gone through to hit that many loaves? Like did you ever actually run out during lockdown and have to get creative with substitutions or just panic buy from weird places?