Sourdough Is More Than a Fad

Sourdough bread has a history that reaches back nearly as far as our own. In fact, until the late 1800s, a culture of naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria was the only method we had for leavening bread.

There is discussion about how sourdough leavening first came into being. Sourdough historian and scientist, Ed Wood, conjectures that its origin may be found in flat cakes of cereal grains like wheat or rye that were left unbaked and forgotten in the warmth of summer, making them the ideal home for a community of wild yeast. Some thrifty cook must have noticed the forgotten cake and baked it, thereby observing its rise, and over time an imaginative baker may have capitalized on this accident, creating our first intentional loaves of leavened bread.

Today, we have physical evidence that traces sourdough loaves to Ancient Egypt, where a bakery turned out bread for those who built the Great Pyramids. Likewise, on the cavernous walls of the tomb of Ramesses III we can see engravings of bakers making bread loaves in various shapes and sizes. And among the Roman ruins of Pompeii, there remain charred loaves of bread that survived the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius; they were found inside an oven, preserved in charcoal, covered in ash, each one marked with a baker’s stamp.

We have sourdough recipes from 1600s France that call for feeding the starter three times before making dough, just as many of us do today. When Americans settled the Western Frontier and moved north to chase gold, they took their sourdough starter with them, ultimately earning them the moniker “sourdoughs.” We have long called bread the “staff of life” for the way it has kept us nourished through our daily toil, as well as through the wind and dust of war and upheaval.

The late 1800s brought the development of commercial baker’s yeast, which has among its virtues speed, predictability, and the easy means to standardize a machine-baked loaf across time and season. But subtlety, serendipity, the lovely means to tingle your senses and facilitate warm communion with both starter and loaf — these are not among them.

In our modern times, sourdough has moved in and out of fashion, from near non-existence in the 1900s to its recent pandemic upsurge. I wonder if we can attribute the new embrace of sourdough bread baking to the grounding comfort of ritual, the way it instills in us the pride and security of self reliance, and how it graces our homes with an aroma that wends beyond the kitchen to synchronize the music of the household. Or it could simply be that when we take a loaf out of the oven and gaze upon it in wonder, grateful and admiring, we are changed.

In recent years, sourdough attracted the label “artisanal,” connoting ambitious and complicated. But if it was all that difficult and delicate a process, it would never have occurred naturally in the warm summer months of our ancestors or found its way across millennia from then to now.

After years of baking with sourdough and teaching the process to countless others, I can offer you this: As long as you have flour and water, you will always have bread. It is that sure and holy and empowering an alliance.

Copyright, Ellen Arian, Ellen’s Food & Soul

Baking With Sourdough Is Nearly Foolproof

The tacit promise of sourdough, and of your commitment to maintaining a starter and baking a loaf, is that you nearly always get bread. Most cooks have known an underbaked cake, overcooked vegetables, or dishes that are over spiced, over salted, or altogether ruined. Sourdough is a world apart; no matter the slip up, you will have bread on your table.

Consider overproofing. If your dough stays too long on the countertop before you transfer it to the refrigerator, it becomes gassy and fragile and will collapse when you move it from bowl or brotform to pot. The dough will be a trick to handle, but it will rise again, not as high and round as it would have, but it will rise in the oven and you will bake good bread.

What about the opposite, underproofing the dough? By this I mean leaving it for too little time on the countertop and ultimately baking it before it has fully risen. In this case, there will not be as many gas bubbles as you need to help the dough fully expand, which will make the finished loaf smaller and denser than it would otherwise be. The loaf may also be underbaked because heat more slowly permeates an underproofed loaf. Still, your bread will be fine.

How about forgetting to salt your dough? Here it helps to understand that the role of salt in bread baking is to slow fermentation. So if you forget to add salt, which someday you will, your dough will rise round and high more quickly than usual and you may initially feel pleased with yourself. In the refrigerator, the dough will rise almost beyond the limits of the brotform or bowl, and you may start to feel queasy; what you are seeing is the yeast taking their usual ride, but without any brakes on.

In the end you will bake your dough, perhaps still unaware of your error, but then you will taste the bread and you will know. You will faintly remember forgetting to add salt. You will, of course, have bread, but it will not be bread with any flavor and you cannot salt bread after the fact. Not even a layer of salted butter will disguise this error. The best path forward for an unsalted loaf is to make bread crumbs that you can toast and salt and use to embellish all sorts of dishes. In a way, this counts as having bread.

What if you forget to score the loaf before baking? When you first put dough in the oven, rapid gas production pushes the dough up and out in a final rising burst before the crust hardens. Scoring controls the direction of the rise and prevents the surface of the dough from tearing open. If you forget to score the loaf, your bread will not rise as round or high as it would have and it will tear, making it less beautiful, but you will undeniably get flavorful bread.

What if your starter dies and, without realizing it, you make a dough using DEAD STARTER? This happened to me when I was a young baker never imagining the demise of my starter. So I went on baking, more than once, with starter than had perished or nearly so. The loaves I baked were small and dense. There were large holes throughout the crumb as if greedy moths had taken up residence, yet I did get bread, which in my ignorance I served and nothing bad happened.

All this is to prove what an ally sourdough is, helping to put food on the table through every imaginable distraction and misstep. Honoring the intersection of talent and luck, sourdough reminds us that we are not less worthy when our efforts take a turn any more than we are masterful when in the sun-bright bliss of morning we turn out a golden loaf: glossy and well risen, flawlessly scored, and baked to precision.

Copyright, Ellen Arian, Ellen’s Food & Soul