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Singer and actor Liv Austen has turned a health issue into a passion for cooking, by taking control of every ingredient that goes in to her meals. Every week she shares something she has learned from cooking from scratch, and goes through a recipe she loves, so you can cook alongside the podcast. Cook from scratch - your body will thank you.
You may have started following me because of a lot of sourdough content about a year ago. I got super into sourdough after thinking for ages that it was a very complicated thing to do. But as it turns out, anyone can do it! Cue a new topic, nay, a new series for The From Scratch Body; on my blog, my podcast and also on YouTube. I was very excited, and it became a part of my everyday routine to feed my starter. I baked bread, bagels, focaccia, baguettes and much more using my sourdough starter that I created myself. I felt, as so many sourdough enthusiasts before me, very accomplished, and really loved sharing my recipes and ideas with you.
There’s a weird sense of achievement in sourdough, because the ‘from-scratch’ element is taken a step further, where you’ve even created the yeast to bake your bread. My husband would always joke that I was so proud of my breads and other baked goods that it was like I had made a chubby little baby. Well, last year I welcomed an actual chubby little baby, and that really did change things. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been truly humbled by how incredibly time-consuming it is to be a mother. Always boasting about my recipes being achievable for everyone, I now have a completely newfound respect for how sometimes it’s not about time, but rather timing. Sourdough is - at a basic level - easy. I still stand by that, anyone can do it and I love that I’ve learnt how.
However, in the months after having a baby, my sourdough starter went from being something I was excited about feeding and timing my baking to, to now being stressed about the fact that the starter was only active when it was impractical for me to be baking, or if I managed to make a dough to rise overnight, there was no guarantee that I would be hands-free in the morning long enough to be able to actually fold the dough, turn the oven on, put the bread in and take the bread out at the required times. Something that was once a simple little dance became a complicated tap routine, and too much for my brain to focus on alongside motherhood.
On a particularly frustrating day I decided that I no longer needed this jar on the kitchen top reminding me of my lack of time and old life, I opened the jar and poured the whole thing down the sink. It may not sound very dramatic, but guys… it was my first ever sourdough starter. I had created it and brought it to life - so to speak - on my own, I had been researching, experimenting, failing and succeeding. I had shared videos every day from the first week of the sourdough starter’s life and I’d kept it alive through a house move - through giving birth. It was sad for only a moment, because obviously with a bit of perspective, the chubby little baby - the real one that I was now looking after every day - was much more important.
I feel like this has been an important lesson for me as a content creator who claims to understand people’s limited time to cook from scratch. I have now gone back to baking bread with commercial yeast for the time being, and really if you think about it, that’s more than most people do, or it is at least more than we are expected to do in these ultra-processed times. I’m grateful that I have practiced the skills of baking so much that baking my own bread from scratch with commercial yeast seems like the “easy option”.
Sourdough is arguably the very best way to bake bread for your body, so if you are able to, you can find the step-by-step guide on how to create your own starter on my website and my YouTube channel and in previous podcast episodes. But if, like for me, it’s just not happening right now, don’t worry. You do what you can with the time that you have, and it doesn’t have to be all or nothing when you’re cooking at home, you just do your best. If your best is buying bread from the shops most weeks, but occasionally having the opportunity to bake, then that’s totally fine. We are all just trying to be healthy, and avoiding ultra-processed whenever we can.
I would love to hear from you if there are certain aspects of cooking at home that stress you out rather than bring you joy - because I would love for us all to find solutions that encourage us to do our best rather than give up entirely.
When my little boy gets a bit older I intend to have him help me create a new sourdough starter, and if I forget how to do that, I can always just go and watch my own videos back, so it was certainly not for nothing.
If you are interested in baking bread, but wanting to stick to using commercial yeast for now, here is a great video with 10 Tips For Perfect Bread.
Which parts of home cooking do you find stressful, hard or demotivating? I’d love to hear from you! Email me at liv@thefromscratchbody.com