Help! I’ve joined the cult of the sourdough breadmakers

This ought to be the perfect time for a rant about how we’ve reached peak sourdough. It’s been all the rage for three or four years now and, really, someone needs to take a stand. As annoyingly overrated foodstuffs go, it’s up there with kimchi and goji berries and organic chia seeds: obsessively prepared by people with far too much beard, raved about in the Guardian and especially big in that epicentre of global communism, San Francisco. And it doesn’t even taste like bread — more like Mongolian yak’s yoghurt.

Problem is, I can’t. Because, like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I’ve been got. It began when the Fawn passed me this photocopy of a recipe, together with a jar with a white-ish substance at the bottom smelling faintly rancid. They had been sent as a gift by a colleague who’d got the sourdough religion and wanted to spread the word.