Test 017
Reading Practice: The Small Bakery
Reading Text
The jar on the top shelf has been hissing softly since Tuesday. Marta lifts it down, unscrews the lid and listens: a small, steady fizz. Inside, a pale grey paste has risen and fallen. It is the sourdough starter, and for the last eight months it has been the most important employee in the bakery on Mill Street.
Marta opened the shop six years ago and for the first four of them she baked with ordinary yeast. The bread was good, she says, but it was the same every day, and customers stopped noticing it. Then a friend gave her a spoonful of starter in a jam jar. For three weeks the dough behaved badly — one loaf came out flat and heavy, another burnt on the outside while remaining raw in the middle. Marta was mixing the flour at half past five every morning and throwing most of it away. She nearly stopped.
What changed her mind was a rainy Saturday in March, when an old man waited outside the locked door at ten to seven. He had walked from the other side of town because a neighbour had told him about the bread. "If the shop were still closed, I would have waited anyway," he said. Marta gave him a warm loaf for nothing, and he came back the next week with three friends.
Now the routine is fixed. If the starter is not fed by four in the morning, it will not be ready by nine, so Marta arrives at half past three and turns on the light. She keeps a notebook where she writes down the room temperature, the time and how the dough felt under her hand. Two regulars, a postman and a student, buy the same loaf every Thursday and say it is better than anything in the supermarket. By midday the shelves are usually empty.
"People ask whether standing in a queue for bread makes sense," she says. "It does, if the bread is still warm when you get it. You cannot hurry a starter; you can only wait for it."