There are two kinds of people in this world: those who maintain a consistent sourdough starter feeding schedule, and those of us who have a six-week-old reminder notification that just says feed Oso.
I am the second kind.
When I get into a new bake, I don't wade in. I cannonball. Research mode looks like: seventeen browser tabs, a YouTube spiral, three forums I've never visited before, and a call to my mother that opens with okay so I want to try a high-extraction wheat. She knows the tone. She's heard it before.
The issue with going all in on a new flour is that going all in on a new flour can produce a loaf so dense it functions as a not so edible paper weight. I have made that loaf. I went full wheat. Not mostly wheat — full wheat. My mother, gracious as ever, said: that's how you learn. She was right. (For the curious: whole wheat flour has its own entry in the compendium now. The short version is that it wants to be blended.)
What I keep running into — and what I keep calling her about — is that the information out there doesn't always speak plainly. There's plenty of it. Flour bag labels alone could send you down a two-hour rabbit hole. Protein percentages matter, but they're not always printed. "Strong flour" means something different in the UK than it does in the US. The Flour Compendium exists partly because I got tired of looking that up every single time.
At some point the hyperfocus pivoted from reading about bread to actually making it, which is the better direction for the project to go in. The first several loaves were instructive in the way that failure tends to be. I got familiar with what over-proofed dough feels like, what a properly developed windowpane looks like, what it sounds like when the crust is actually done. You can read about those things for hours. You will understand them much faster with your hands in the bowl.
Bread was my entire world — reading about it, talking about it, checking on the dough constantly, sending my mother updates she did not ask for. Live and breathing everything bread.
Now it's different. When bulk is running, I try to get other things done. Keep a close eye on the timer. Redirect.
Here's the thing about redirecting: it is not the same as being patient. I am not patient. I am redirecting. Patience is stillness. Redirecting is having seventeen other things in motion while you periodically sprint back to check that the dough has risen forty percent and not fifty. It works. And the reward at the end — the feel of the dough when bulk is right, the sound of the crust, the moment you cut it open — is satisfying in a way a lot of things aren't. Not instant. But real. You can taste it.
Every bake is different. I've tried to replicate early loaves and haven't quite gotten there. I'm in a new kitchen now, which changes everything — temperature, humidity, how the oven behaves. New environment, new variables, new things to figure out.
Honestly? That helps.
The focus has lasted longer than I expected — longer than most things have. In younger years, everything ran on a shorter lease. Something would catch my attention, I'd go deep, and then it would release and the next thing would be waiting. Bread hasn't released. I think it's because it keeps changing. There's always a new flour to understand, a new technique to fail at, a new call to make to my mother. It keeps being new. And for a brain that needs new to stay interested, that turns out to matter a lot.
Oso helps too. Having something alive in the refrigerator that occasionally requires your attention is a surprisingly effective anchor. You don't have to be perfectly consistent to be a good starter keeper. You just have to come back.
Which, as it turns out, is the whole job with most things worth doing.