An unhurried practice of making sourdough with Tarn Rodgers Johns.
a lyric essay
on practice
When I started this publication back in 2021, I fantasized about living by candlelight, traveling by horse and buggy, and altogether moving more slowly and living a quieter (though, of course, horses and buggies are actually quite loud) life. I yearned for it.
I’d just finished a master’s degree at the UI Center for the Book, where I developed skills in book binding, box making, and letterpress printing and spent a lot of time learning about and looking at v v v old books. Like, think Gutenberg and pre-printing, scribed manuscripts.
I edited poetry while setting each letter individually in metal type on the printer’s stick. I sewed folded signatures of paper together with needle and thread. I frequently had to wait for glue to dry. Despite the demands of being in a graduate program, there was no hurrying these practices.
Below
Rodgers Johns, of taken out of context, beautifully captures the essence of the slow, rhythmic practice of baking sourdough bread daily in the weeks leading up to the birth of her son, which of course launched her into a whole different set of practices and presence.I love the flow of Tarn’s writing, and of course, baking sourdough is a much more accessible and useful historic practice than turning to horse-drawn buggies, living by candlelight, and letterpress printing.
I hope you savor her words as much as I do,
Tarn Rodgers Johns is a Berlin-based writer, creative and crack dweller, currently moving through the season of mothering a new human. She publishes to her own Substack, taken out of context.
In early February last year, on the brink of motherhood, I invited friends over to participate in a bread-braiding ritual for Imbolc, the halfway point between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, and the welcoming back of the light.
The end of my pregnancy was characterised by a frenzy of baking. The process of mixing and kneading, waiting, waiting, waiting was comforting and familiar. In those liminal days, baking sourdough bread was the perfect practice to channel my impatience.
Already on maternity leave, it structured the day: mix at 3 pm, let sit until 4, fold at 6, shape and put into the fridge before bed, bake the next day, and repeat. After a while, I didn't need to watch the clock, the process became intuitive. By the time my due date rolled around, my freezer was well stocked with loaves. In those early, messy days of postpartum, I found comfort in eating slices of rye, spelt, and cinnamon and raisin toast in stolen moments, to keep me going in the early hours of the morning.
A reminder of a different, more spacious time.
My partner will attest to the countless flat, rock-hard loaves that I produced in the years (yes, plural) that I was figuring out how to make good bread. Unusually for me, as a notorious (to myself) quitter, I stuck at it. The results got better as I picked up techniques and tips from people on Instagram and videos on YouTube. I experimented with different types of flour, proofing times, and methods of baking in the oven until my bread started to emerge in a way I was satisfied with.
Unlike commercial yeast, sourdough doesn’t behave predictably. Sourdough starter is an ecosystem in miniature, a buzzing microbial community that emerges from the most simple of ingredients: flour and water. The microbes themselves come from the flour, the kitchen, the sourdough is fermenting in the baker’s hands. I imagine in times gone by, sourdough starters would have travelled down the generations, a unique microbial footprint of a family or a village.
Over the past year, while my baby thrived, I couldn’t say the same for my sourdough starter. It languished in the fridge, developing a thick layer of grey watery ‘hooch’. Sourdough only really stays healthy through a continuity of practice; the microbes need to be regularly turned over and fed, and all of my caregiving capacity was occupied elsewhere. I told myself I’d make bread again when I had more time.
My son turned one recently, just as spring started to show her colours, and he loves bread. A few weeks ago, I collected some new sourdough starter from someone on a community forum and baked my first loaf since he was born. The new starter was made with rye, and it was very enthusiastic; the dough puffed up surprisingly quickly, and the first result came out a bit too flat and overproved.
The next loaf was better, and eventually, this unfamiliar sourdough starter and I settled into a new rhythm. For a while, I baked every day. Then my son got a cold and developed a new tooth. The new sourdough starter looked at me forlornly every time I opened the fridge. Less forgiving than its predecessor, the next time I had the itch to bake, it was past the point of revival.
One day, I will return to the delicious effervescence of sourdough once again, but this season of my life calls for something with a bit more predictability. A few days ago in the run-up to Easter weekend, I fished out a sachet of dried yeast from the cupboard to prepare some Hot Cross Buns, or Osterbrötchen, as my German family calls them.
They were delicious.
—Tarn Rodgers Johns
invitation to collaborate
What art, writerly, mind-body, or life practice are you leaning into? What does your creative life look like? What were the inspirations for your favorite works? Have you recently published a book of poetry? If you’d like to share about your creative, poetic, spiritual, well-being, or otherwise living life practices, please get in touch. unraveling, unmoored seeks collaborators. More info can be found on the About Page. Please message or email with questions.
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This was quietly luminous. I found myself reading slower just to match the pace of the practice described. The idea of sourdough as both a ritual and a relationship—subject to rhythms, to neglect, to seasonal shifts in our own capacity—hit me right in the gut.
There’s something deeply comforting in the honesty here: not just about baking, but about attention—where it goes, where it gets stretched, and how sometimes, the most sacred thing is to choose ease without guilt.
Thank you for this. I’ll be thinking about microbial lineage and the texture of patience all day.