Sourdough Diaries — Butter and Salt

This is a sourdough bread blog, now.

Kidding.

Kinda.

I’ve watched the world go crazy over sourdough bread now for years and, to be honest, I was just never interested. It seemed like a long, tedious process and I wasn’t even sure I liked sourdough bread.

That was until I visited my friend Brittany in Lexington, KY. I walked into her home one chilly night to her girls turning flips from one couch to the other, toys covering much of the living room floor. She turned the corner from the kitchen and she was glowing, relaxed and the whole house smelled like what I imagine heaven will when the gates open. There was a pot of chili on the stove, her husband Robbie was talking 100 miles an hour on the phone (you’ll soon see that I resemble one of these people much more than the other — ha!) She said, “Sit. I’m toasting you a piece of bread.”

What? Why? What kind of bread? I can’t eat that. Why are we eating bread? Also, I can’t stay long. I don’t want to interrupt y’alls night time routine. Also, why sit? Can I stand?

Of course I didn’t say any of these things out loud, but they were all thoughts that flooded my mind. Before I knew it, I was very much sitting at the kitchen table and she slid a plate with a warm piece of sourdough bread in front of me. But that wasn’t all. It was lathered in butter and had the perfect sprinkling of sea salt. Bread. Butter. Salt. Huh?

What followed was an hour or more of heart-level conversation — skipping quite literally all of the small stuff. Over warm, buttered bread. At the risk of sounding dramatic, it was a spiritual experience. But that actually makes sense, because “breaking bread” is all over scripture.

I realized that night that I don’t know that I’ve ever just welcomed a friend (or even family?) into my house without my shoulders up to my ears in a furious sprint through the house to ensure my kitchen counter is clean, candles are lit and that the Dyson has made at least 2 passes through my kitchen and living room. But I can also all but guarantee that heaven looks a lot more like Britt’s kitchen table than my surface-cleaned home.

Thus, a love affair for sourdough bread began and it’s a journey I’ve been on for a year or so — in the quiet of my kitchen, taking any opportunity to have friends and family pull up a seat in my kitchen for a warm slice of bread. With butter and salt.

Up Next: Meet my sourdough lifeline — and let’s talk “starters”!

Meet Brittany Ross. Wife, mom, friend, expert in slow living, author, leader, lover of people.

Brittany wrote a book that deeply changed me last year. If you’re in a season that feels dark, uncertain, or you just aren’t sure what God is doing with your story, dive into these pages.

Thanks for the warm bread…and so much more, Britt.