Why Am I Baking Sourdough?

Sourdough is one of life’s great bready pleasures. The flavor is really something, and a good crusty loaf is great. The best part is it’s pretty easy. At least the baking part.


History Lesson
Bread really wasn’t A Thing when I was growing up. At least Not A Thing unto itself. Toast in the mornings with breakfast never really happened nor did rolls at dinner. The main reason for this is I’m Filipino, and I got carbs from rice. R-I-C-E. A lot of rice. I probably had as much rice as some small island nations. Bread was a delivery vehicle for a sandwich or a burger and that was pretty much it which meant I only really got bread at lunch. Thinking back on this I think it’s because microwaves weren’t really available for students otherwise I’d probably have rice at lunch, too. What kind of bread was this? Boring old white bread. I think it was quietly acknowledged that the bread wasn’t necessary for anything except keeping sauce off one’s hands.
Until I found out about sourdough.
That’s not exactly right. I had encountered sourdough. I mean, that part was inevitable. I lived in San Francisco. Perhaps being in the middle of possibly the most famous sourdough region in the world made me numb to it. Sourdough bread bowls, Sourdough Jack hamburgers, Sourdough chips at the airport souvenir stands– I didn’t really see them. As I got older and had less lunches prepared by my mom (thanks mom!) I had different kinds of bread. I was a fan of deli sandwiches for the variety, but I kept coming back to sourdough.

Okay, But When Did The Baking Start?
Some time after college I had found even more varieties of bread, but I still kept coming back to sourdough. I liked how it tasted and I’d learned about how sourdough comes from a “mother loaf” or starter. The starter is a live yeast culture that a baker uses to make the bread rise instead of just adding yeast, and one can keep feeding the starter to keep it “alive” and not all consumed in the breadmaking process. Some starters are many years old. It’s a renewable resource! I was familiar with the lovely powers of yeast as I had tried my hand at homebrewing beer, so why not with bread?
I needed a starter, and there are two routes: buy one or make one. I figured I could always buy one if it went south, but making one sounded cool. The DIY decision tree had all sorts of strange options like soaking grapes or blueberries or other plants to start the culture. The option which I decided to do was to just leave the jar open to the air. I would “feed” the starter with water and flour every 12 hours, but otherwise I would do nothing else. The natural yeasts and bacteria and whatnot would grow and, in theory, crowd out the bad stuff like mold. Two weeks of feeding it, and I had a strong smelling, bubbly starter homegrown in San Jose!
Like I said earlier, baking is the easy part. It still takes a little time (18 hours from pour to slice), but it really is easy. Because of the long rise times, the most that’s necessary is backtiming the start of the process from the desired baking time. I use a set of no-knead instructions, and I use only white King Arthur bread flour.
The steps are mix it all up, wait 12 hours, mix it again before the second rise, wait 2 hours, bake in a dutch oven for 45 minutes. I usually set the first rise up after dinner on Friday. That makes the second rise start Saturday morning after breakfast and I’ll bake it just before lunchtime. Despite the time involved, the hands-on time is pretty minimal: maybe 30 minutes between the measuring, mixing, and turning out the loaf.

Thanks For The How, But What About the Why?
There are lots of reasons. And not just because Sourdough tastes great. Also, other than Sourdough being a traditional bread reaching back thousands of years and the coolness of the biology of the starter and the precision and heavy math-y-ness of the baking process — all things that I deeply love — the main reasons for me were Simplicity and Success.
Bread is just four things: flour, water, salt, and yeast. In sourdough’s case it’s using the live yeasts from the starter. Other than keeping quantities and timing it isn’t too bad. I even picked a no-knead recipe to cut down on the work involved. Laziness equals awesomeness. The starter is what does all the work of making it rise and taste good. I love how so few ingredients can taste so complex. I could look into variations like playing with the amount of starter (supposedly less starter is more sour), using different flours like whole wheat or rye for different character, and I could get off my hands and knead to firm it up and give it a different shape, but I really value the simplicity of pulling together a delicious loaf of bread with not a lot of effort or special ingredients.
The first few loaves were not very tall. The starter wasn’t mature, and the rise and oven spring I would get wasn’t very good… but it was always amazingly sour and just the right balance of crusty and chewy! Even the mistake-loaves disappeared at parties and at breakfasts and office lunches. There is something nice in getting a degree of success when trying something new to make the investment worth it. The early wins were a great motivator. Now I get really nice open loaves, too. I even figured out I could bake a half-sized loaf in a 9×5″ loaf pan without a lid – I will put in a second loaf pan half-full of water to keep the oven moist, so it doesn’t brown too quickly.

But I Read Elsewhere That You Don’t Eat Bread!
It’s true. I have been on a mostly paleo diet for almost as long as I’ve been baking bread. That’s a topic for a different post, but what results is I tend to share my bread a lot. That’s also something I value from baking sourdough – the sharing and cameraderie and social aspects of giving the bread away to others. I also can pretty easily gift people some of my sourdough starter. When feeding the starter after initially creating it, one has to discard some or else it will outgrow its container pretty quickly. In a more frequent baking environment one can make loaves of bread or bready things – sourdough english muffins work quite well. Every time I feed the sourdough starter I have an opportunity to give some away, so not only is it a renewable resource, it’s a gift that keeps on giving.