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Tedium and Sourdough Bread

I was working at home today, drafting a motion to strike the other side's expert. It's a thing we do whenever we think the other side's expert is a whore, which we do this guy because he actually didn't analyze any data, he just took the plaintiff's projections and channeled him through his expert report, clothing the plaintiff's wishful thinking with his expert's aura.

A motion to strike, however. is very, very tedious to draft because you have to go back and forth between the cases that set out what is and is not admissible, and the parts of the deposition that show what the expert did that did not comport with what the law requires. Cite, cite, cite, back and forth. Not much creative about it. In fact, there's not much that's creative about legal writing generally, at least mine, and for a very good reason: judges get innured to emotive writing. It's the facts, the facts, ma'am, not the colorful language. So legal writing has pretty much ruined the style I used to think I had.

But the great thing about working at home is not just that I get to stay in my sweats, but that whenever I needed to stretch and move and release the tension in my neck and shoulders, not to mention in my head, I could work on my sourdough bread.

I mixed up the starter over the weekend, but it turns out making sourdough bread is a lot more involved process than you'd expect. With yeast bread, you mix the yeast, flour, water, and a little salt, let it expand for a couple of hours, then knead it, shape it into a loaf, and let it rise again, then bake it.

Sourdough is much, much more involved. First you have to feed the starter by stirring it, discarding about half, and adding 1/2 cup of water and 1 cup flour to the remainder, mix it in, and let it sit for at least 4 hours. This sounds simple, and it is, but it isn't easy, because the starter has the consistency of a huge, huge wad of really sticky chewing gum. Imagine mixing flour and water into a huge was of sticky chewing gum and you'll have some idea of what it's like.

Then you kind of repeat the process, putting a cup of the fed starter (which, according to the King Arthur recipe, for some inexplicable reason is supposed to be 9 ounces, not 8), in a bowl, adding more flour and water, mixing it in, and letting it sit 2 or 4 hours more. .Again you deal with the chewing gum issue and the cement issue, because the dough that sticks to the wooden spoon and the mixing bowl rapidly turns to cement and, even if you soak it, it's maddening to try to wash off.

Then you add some more flour and water, along with a little salt and a little sugar, then and only then you get to knead it. I like kneading dough. You push it, turn it a quarter circle, push it down, turn it a quarter, and keep going. For variety, you turn it over and repeat. You keep doing that until you can take a walnut-sized piece of dough and ease it apart, very, very, very slowly, until what looks like tiny rubbery strands appear that stretch out until the pieces break apart.

I didn't learn this trick in a bread baking class; I learned it at a weekend Southwestern cooking class in Albuquerque, N.M. and the marvelous thing is, it works. It tells you when the gluten has developed sufficiently to make a fine-textured bread. I don't know how this will work with sourdough, though, because sourdough is not supposed to be fine-textured. But I'm about to find out.

Right now, I have to go take the risen dough and shape it into two loaves. Then it has to rise for another two hours, except this dough is going to get to rise overnight, because it's ten p.m. and I'm going to bed. Tomorrow morning, I'll finish the bread -- and finish the motion to strike the expert. Although both could be described as tedious processes, the difference is that the gummy sourdough process results in something nourishing and useful. Sometimes, I'm not so sure that's the case with litigation.