Inside was a note from chef Michael Kalanty, introducing her to the glop: Lucky Lady 99. Her strength and lineage, Kalanty wrote, might make her a good candidate for a three-year mission to Mars ... someday. In the meantime, enjoy!
Lucky Lady is a microbial paste, specifically a sourdough yeast culture. She is the 99th entry in the sludge library of Belgium, otherwise known as the International Sourdough Library at St. Vith, a gift from the longtime executive baker for Le Cordon Bleu cooking schools. The library farms fungal colonies from around the world for a bakery conglomerate.
The guck arrived while Binsted and I were in southern China. It sat heating up in a mail locker in Kaneohe until we returned to Hawaii, just barely avoiding—little did we know then—yet another hardy microbe, SARS-Co-V 2.
Binsted and Kalanty had been discussing the intricacies of baking bread on Mars. Binsted was the principal investigator on a space experiment on Mauna Loa, HI-SEAS, the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, where fake astronauts pretended to live in a Mars habitat to study real Martian problems—like what to cook for dinner and how to not murder other astronauts stuck with you in your 1,200-square-foot geodesic dome.
Bread is simple; it's nothing but water, flour and yeast. But in space, simple is very, very hard. You have only the water you can carry; while it's essential, it's also expensive. Every drop gets weighed as a cost against rocket fuel. On Mars, water is scarce and must be extracted. Both on the trip to and on the surface of Mars, water will be recycled, meaning your own pee will become the water with which you bake your bread, which ends up back in your pee.
Flour is about half as heavy as water, requiring half as much boost to launch. The wheat-to-water ratio became apparent when Binsted purchased a fifty-pound bag of flour, enough to fill a thirteen-gallon trash can (which is where we put it). By contrast, fifty pounds of water is only six gallons. Lucky Lady's weight is negligible; she will get bigger so long as you feed her. No one knows how yeast will behave in microgravity other than (scientists assume) that it will blow bigger bubbles during fermentation. This alien bread experiment has yet to be conducted, as there's no easy way to simulate zero-g or the low gravity of Mars long enough to bake a space baguette.
Nevertheless, with all three components—water, flour and Lucky Lady—I set to work feeding and cooking Miss 99. I've been escaping to Hawaii from New York winters for the past twenty years, and this is why I am a writer but also why I am broke. My rent gets paid in sweat, which means occasionally indulging Binsted's sci-fi kitchen fantasies, including ostrich egg Scotch eggs and roast mer-pig, swapping halves of a parrot fish and a piglet.
Lucky Lady arrived just prior to the pandemic. Our pictures of meager sourdough loaves were posted to social media a few weeks ahead of the nationwide shortages that emptied supermarket shelves. All at once Lucky Lady 99 became very popular. Everyone wanted a piece of her, and she was breeding with vigor. Across the globe, sourdough practice soon colonized our own individual isolation experiments, however impractical it was for a prospective outpost on Mars. Bread on Earth takes time—and boy, did we have time—yet not so much time you can't fold dough in the two minutes between Zoom cocktail hours.
Lucky Lady was a star—until our long national nightmare ended and supermarket shelves were once again full of wonder (bread).
