This is Sookie the Sour­dough Starter:

Sookie is alive. She’s a colony of yeast and lac­to­bac­cilus and lives in my fridge. She feeds on flour and looks a bit like frothy pan­cake bat­ter. I made her over the last few days and today I used her to bake some bread. I found these instruc­tions by S. John Ross very help­ful. I pretty much fol­lowed them to the let­ter, although I used gra­nary flour for today’s loaf.

And now I have bread:

The crust is torn along the side clos­est to the cam­era due to unex­pect­edly intense oven-spring (the loaf expand­ing in the oven as it cooks), even though I slashed the top. This is how the sliced sur­face looks:

Bread seems kind of mag­i­cal to me. You start out with these basic sub­stances — flour, water, oil, salt and sugar — and end up with these com­plex flavours and tex­tures. There’s some­thing amaz­ingly sat­is­fy­ing about mak­ing some­thing like this out of such sim­ple ingredients.