Morris
Morris is gone. I threw him out on Saturday morning.
Nothing dramatic happened. All winter he sat on his shelf by the kettle in a kitchen that rarely got above 15 °C, and I fed him once a week, or a bit less, which I knew was not enough. I wrote about it in the cold kitchen note at the end of January and then did nothing about it. He rose less and less after each feed. The smell went from pleasantly sour to sharp, then to something like nail polish remover. There was a layer of grey liquid on top most weeks, which I poured off and ignored.
Last week I finally did what I should have done in December: three days of feeding twice a day, at the warm end of the kitchen, with fresh rye. On the first day he gave a few bubbles. On the second, fewer. On the third he did nothing at all, and there was a faint pink tinge at one edge of the jar. Pink is the point at which you stop. A starter that smells of acetone is usually just hungry, and Morris had come back from that more than once; one that is growing something coloured on the side is no longer a starter.
I could probably have saved him a month earlier. The fridge and a weekly feed, the routine that got him through the summer, would have been fine. A jar on a cold shelf, fed when I remembered, was a slow way of starving it. So that is the lesson, and I am writing it down here so that the next one has a better chance.
It is a strange thing to feel sad about. He was flour and water. But I had kept him going for a long time, he had made most of the bread on this site, and the empty space on the counter is noticeable every morning.
Bread without a starter
On Sunday I made flatbread instead: flour, water, salt, a pinch of yeast, rolled thin and cooked in the dry cast-iron pot. It took an hour. And because I was in that frame of mind, I spent part of the afternoon watching this short film from Wikimedia Commons, uploaded by AsuhsWorld. I did not film it and was not there.
A group of friends at a desert camp in Balochistan make a big round of dough, lay it straight onto the embers of a fire, and cover it. Around the one-minute mark it comes out, gets knocked and brushed clean of ash, and is torn up and shared. No jar, no feeding schedule, no rubber band. Just a fire, a bit of patience and people waiting to eat.
I will start a new starter in a few weeks, when the kitchen warms up a little. Until then, flatbreads and the occasional yeasted tin loaf, and no more neglected jars.