May 20, 2020 • 46 mins
In your own kitchen, you can tame wild microbes and use them to bake tasty, slightly tart sourdough bread. In this classic (yet timely) episode, Anney and Lauren explore the twisting history and practical science of making sourdough.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hello, and welcome to Savor Protection of I Heart Radio.
I'm Annie Reese and I'm Lauren vocal Bam, and today
we've got a classic episode for you about sour dough,
which a lot of you have been writing in about
sour dough recently. Won't get into that more in a second,
but also some newer listeners have come in and said
you should definitely do sour dough, and I've been like,
oh wait ah, we have ha yes, yes, this episode
(00:31):
originally aired in June at a time before we knew
how to pronounce plenty. Oh so long ago, so young,
so innocent young, we didn't know plenty and plenty and
the difference. So yes, a lot of people are making
sour dough during quarantine. It is all over social media.
(00:56):
Celebrities are even in on it. Um. Multiple article have
come out about the psychological benefits of what's called stress
baking um, which makes sense to me. Oh yeah, absolutely so.
It makes sense also that people are making sour dough
and here in the US it has resulted in a
run on flour and yea, so I have not been
able to find you since this started. I have found
(01:18):
toilet paper, but not huh. Wow. Yeah, yeah, but sour
dough is useful for that because you don't have to
buy yeast. You can make your own exactly. And I
am definitely going to do this. I found my recipe
I'm going to follow. I'm gonna embark on this journey. Yeah, Like,
do do you have like a go pro? Can you like,
(01:40):
can you like make like a like a time lapse,
a time lapse or maybe or maybe just set up
I wouldn't have to be a go pro, like you
could just take a sequence of photos, but I could
do that as well. It would be the most boring
go pro video. But when that like first bubble, you know,
if you're most exciting things, it would be so beautiful.
(02:03):
I'll definitely keep everyone posted. For a lot of people,
the routine of it, from what I've read, it gives
you some feeling of control, like I've got to check
on my sour dough starter and the needing can be calming.
The process of it where you have sort of this beginning,
middle end, and then at the hopefully you have a
tangible product when you get to the end. It makes
(02:23):
you feel like you've accomplished something which you have you
have you've made you've made food and you can eat
it and it will hopefully taste delicious hopefully. Yeah. Yes,
And there's a feeling of community around it as people
share tips, failures, successes, recipes, these pictures. Um. Some parents
are using it as a science and teaching tool, and
(02:44):
as we say in this classic episode, kind of like
having a pet and a lot of you. I did
want to shout out some listeners who have written in
about their sour dough starters and experiences. Gilbert sent us
a picture of his courtesy of my starter, the Passion
of the Crust. Excellent name, also an excellent name, Jason
(03:07):
sour Dough Starter Bubbles. And then Grace wrote in with
her journey with sour dough when she was in the
early stages. It's kind of nervous about it. I hope
it turned out, Grace. You can check in Kenna as well.
And then of course Jane the bread Girl, whose listener
mail we read a while back. She was embarking on
a sour dough journey. And remember, if you decide to
(03:28):
go on this journey, are you're already on it. You
can use the discard for all kinds of things, muffins, crackers,
quick breads, pancakes, crapes. Oh yeah, I found out the
King Arthur Flower website has a recipe for chocolate sour doughcake.
Oh right, I'm like wow, I'm like mad about it.
(03:50):
I'm like, okay, all right, we need to figure this
out immediately. And by wi I mean me. So yeah, well,
please share with me because that sounds amazing. I'll try
to remember to post a link. Yeah, yeah, yes. Recently,
a yeast scientists Sue deep Argavalla, who who is loving
this whole thing, by the way, and is using it
as a teaching opportunity, said bread is just the beginning.
(04:12):
We are now making meatless products with yeast. We have
been using yeast to produce our medicines. Yeast is an
integral part of how we are going to be solving
COVID nineteening processes. The way we understand cancer, the way
we understand aging that all comes from yeast. Oh oh wonderful. Yeah.
So uh so we're gonna get into the episode. We'll
(04:33):
have a few updates for you at the end, but
for now, let's let former Annie and Lauren take it away. Hello,
and welcome to food Stuff. I'm Lauren vogum and I'm
an eries and our topic for today is sour dough. Bread. Yes,
(04:56):
so the bread. I don't know what else it would be,
but I'm sure or something humans are real creative and
and why sour dough in particular. Well, as it turns out,
bread is not a small topic of human history. In fact,
it is an enormous topic. It is a very large
undertaking just to do sour dough. So not to have
(05:18):
a tin plus our episode, we're gonna like look at
different types of bread and today, um and bread on
top of having a breath of information. Uh there, there's
it's so important to so many different cultures. Oh yeah,
give us a stay or daily bread or all the
(05:38):
idioms um like to earn his bread, or even the
etymology of words like companion, which is a combo of
two Latin words meaning someone you'll share your bread with
all the pan in it, I bet. Oh my goodness, yeah,
I didn't realize. And now I'm like, I'll share my
bread with you, Laura. Oh I would share my bread
with you Anna Okay. I also, oh, this is this
(06:01):
is another one that made me really hungry. Um, sour
dough might be my favorite type of bread, sour dough
is delicious. Whenever my mom baked sour dough, I would
smell at my room and I knew it was going
to be a very special special h my my mom
would make would make a non non sour dough bread
that was always a really good day as well. But Uh,
sour dough, as the name suggests, is sour bread, and
(06:25):
it involves two things that we wind up talking about
a lot here on food stuff, uh, yeast and yeast's
fermentation of stuff. Exactly. Basically, if you eave some wheat,
flour and water or a lump of unbaked dough out,
so I'm naturally occurring lactic acid bacteria while yeast get
up in there, they get a fermentation party started, and
(06:46):
when you add more flour and water to that starter,
you can make bread. Uh. The yeast in sour dough
or any bread really has enzymes that break some of
flowers starches down into sugars and um the yeast, which
are you know, single celled fungi eat some of those
sugars and excrete carbon dioxide and alcohol fermentation. Except here
(07:09):
the alcohol is really just a just a flavoring agent.
It helps break down other molecules in the flour that
produce all of the amazing flavors and the smells that
you get in bread. All of those aromatics um and
the carbon dioxide gas is what will make the bread rise,
assuming that you've needed and rested the dough so that
it's remaining. Starch molecules are are glutinous a k a.
(07:29):
Like chainey and stretchy rather than just like flir. Yeah,
you don't want flour in your bread. Are generally sounds
like something you want to avoid. Always avoid the flair. Meanwhile, oh, meanwhile,
the lactic acid bacteria and you'll remember those from our
yogurt episode. Yes, yes, they are also eating some of
(07:52):
those sugars and excreting a up a lactic acid. More
bacteria pool Lauren's favorite things. Yes, it makes everything better here.
It produces the acidity that gives sour dough that distinctive taste,
although generally speaking, a sour dough does not have to
be sour, just has to be made using wild yeasts
(08:13):
and bacteria. M By the way, the longer that you
let a sour dough starter, you know that the flour
and water mix or the or the dough lump kind
of sit out that the more flavors should develop over time, right,
because you give them bacteria more time to do, it's
more time learning. Yes, um. According to Edwoods Whirld's sour
(08:34):
doughs from antiquity authentic recipes from modern baker's quote, a
true sour dough is nothing more than flour and water
with wild yeast to make it rise as special bacteria
to provide the flavor. Uh bonus. As in yogurt, the
lactic acid produced by the bacteria and and the alcohol
produced by the yeast prevent the growth of harmful bacteria
(08:56):
in your sitting starter Um extra bonus. You can save
a lump of your dough, feed it more flour and water,
and use it to make more other leavened bread later on.
Just like with yogurt, this culture will last for you know,
as long as you keep it alive. How long could
(09:16):
that be? I I read claims of centuries and they've
been unable to prove it. But yeah, that's why I'm
That's why I'm going on the safe side. And the
same day there's there's at least one San Francisco bakery
that claims over a hundred years. I suspect I know
which one that is, and I think we're going to
be talking about them. We will, indeed, But before we
(09:39):
get there, let's let's look at the history. Yeah, a
little a little bit deeper in the history than a
hundred years ago. Here we go history. Bread has been
around for like ever. The oldest loaf of bread discovered
at this point, UM was in Switzerland, going back todd
or maybe Ndred BC history. Yeah, both dates. Yeah, I
(10:03):
think I saw just rates somewhere in that range. Yeah,
wall paintings and bread remains, which is not the best
ry to put it, but pretty much the only way
I could think of putting it. Share Um indicate that
the ancient Egyptians were using sour dough starters to bake
leavened bread, possibly going back up to five thousand years
(10:27):
and kind of like honey, it could go back even
further prewritten words, because it's the thing that just happens,
and because of that, it was probably discovered by accident
when some unsuspecting left out dough encountered some wild east
And it's usually of the genus sacrimces candid it. Yes,
I hope I got close on that pronunciation. I know,
(10:49):
I think that that that that was spot on. Yes
yeah um so yeah yeah, like a like early um
fermentation of of beer and wine and stuff. Yeah, this
is just stuff that was pending in nature. Um. So
it's really hard to pinpoint an original date. No one
was like, hey, guys, I was the one who discovered
(11:09):
the sour dough. Although whoever it was who discovered that
this was a thing, it was almost certainly related to
beer brewing. Yes, um, because the discovery of beer entailed
a lot of experimenting with starter cultures and baking and
beer brewing often happened in the same space, so it
(11:31):
could have gone down that way. Or according to Lawn
Walter's Old West Baking Book, baker got the idea to
add either one of the beer starter cultures or beer
barm to flower and water to see what happened. Barn,
by the way, is the the skummy kind of foam
that develops on top of stuff while it's fermenting. Yes,
this also tripped us up in our six year old
(11:53):
meat recipe. Yeah, I had no idea what that was.
I was, also, to be fair, quite drunk. Um. There
was a lot of meat very early in the morning
there was It was ten am, y'all. I hadn't had breakfast,
and this very nice man brought us ten samples of meat,
and he kept pouring large sample anyway. It was lovely,
it was. But I thought the barn was just the
funniest word I had ever heard in my entire life
at that juncture. It's a pretty good one. Back to
(12:18):
the beer birds, they tried out a bunch of different
cultures and discovered that They tried him out with the bread,
and they discovered that some made lighter, fluffier breads. And
they take a piece of that dough from a bachelor
liked and didn add some flower to keep it alive.
Ak a sour dough starter and a quote from Lawn
Walter's book. I really liked quote. Each starter has its
(12:40):
own characteristic taste and smell. Many older starters are guarded
by their owners as if they were a key to heaven.
They're passed on generation to generation and rarely share not
so friendly bread. No, it's a different time, but it
does still kind of happened. And people give these families
starters fund names like Clint Eastwood. I enjoyed looking through
(13:01):
those names there's yeah, there's there's there's good lists out there. Um.
And of course folks at this time had no idea,
oh why this was happening. You know, they just knew
that if they took a little bit of this one
thing that they made turned out good and they put
it into their next batch, that next batch turned out
good too, right, And going back to her mead guy
briefly for a second, corn at him. That's why we
(13:23):
call spirit spirits because they didn't know what was happening
that was causing the fermentation in the alcohol, and it
was kind of like you're praying to the spirits. Yeah, yeah,
you're like, oh, the soul of the beer, please make
my beer beer and not just rotten barley water. Right,
one thing is better than that other thing. I easily
(13:44):
want you to help me out on this spirit. I
hope that that is true. But it's a fun story. Nonetheless, Yes,
thank you, thank you to Justin amongst mead for that,
for that lovely story. Yes, thank you Justin. So anyway,
bread making and sourdough spread from ancient Egypt to ancient
Greece sometime around eight hundred BC, and at the time
(14:04):
it was a luxury only for the wealthy, and the
baking of it was left completely to women. This was
a fact that everywhere I read they felt compelled to
include a beer. At the time, too, I think was
lady work. So it wasn't until eight hundred b C.
That written records of bakeries offering bread for sale pop
up an ancient Greece. There you go, and then after
(14:26):
contact with Greece, sour dough traveled to ancient Rome, where
improved methods of needing and baking made bread more widely available,
and in one six b C. Cato the Elder detailed
several different types of bread. Greece also spread sour dough
to France sometime around the fourth century BC. Greeks living
in France noticed that if you replaced the water and
(14:48):
bread dough with the foam from a beer like fermented drink,
it produced a lighter, fluffier bread, and the cloudier the loquid,
the better the ant product. Due to Paris's proximity to
the major we producing area of the region, it produced
some of the country's first bakers, and at the time
all the bread they were baking was sour dough, both
because it was all they knew fermentation wise, and it
(15:10):
was cheaper because you didn't need any expensive salt thanks
to the acidity. Ah. Yeah, assault also helps break down
molecules in rising bread and in uh starters, making it
more flavorful, tasty stuff. And then one of our old friends,
Fliny the Elder, he talked about a lot of things.
He really did. He wrote in his seventies seven ce
(15:34):
Ish Encyclopedia Natural History that quote, Generally, however, they do
not heat it up at all, but only use the
dough kept over from the day before. Manifestly, it is
natural for sourness to make the dope ferment, and likewise
that people who live on fermented bread have weaker bodies,
inasmuch as in old days outstanding wholesomeness was ascribed to wheat,
(15:57):
the heavier it was. But okay, yeah. He also claimed
that sarado was better for health, which is truish due
to the good bacteria. I suppose. Yeah, there is a
teny amount of research teeny parttern research, not like plenty res.
(16:18):
I wonder what research Planny was doing. I'm sure it
was fascinating. But according to a two thousand eight acted
diabetological study and a two thousand and eleven study out
of clinical gastro intrology and hepatology in Italy indicating that
due to the lower amount of gluten content and sourdough bread,
it may be more tolerable for people with stilly exercise. Yeah,
(16:40):
small sample sizes though, um it does produce a smaller
search of glucose than most other breads. Well that's good news.
Yeah so grain of salt, grain of salt. It but
the research does exist around the same time, plenty time. Uh.
Roman poet June of All wrote satire ten or the
(17:04):
famous and recently Hunger Games repopularized phrase Panama senses our
bread and circuses comes from. Okay, so that takes care
of the ancient history, and we'll move on to some
more modern stuff after a quick break for a word
from our sponsor, and we're back, Thank you sponsor. Um. So,
(17:34):
so we we divided up the ancient and the kind
of modern history like that, because, as it turns out,
nothing really happened, um in the history of of sour
dough bread for you know, a few millennia right until
the rediscovery of Brewers East around the four six hundreds.
In various parts of Europe doing different stuff at different times. Um.
(17:56):
Germany kind of figured it out first thanks to the
close relationship between brewing and baking in medieval monasteries. And uh.
Then in seventeenth century France, they found that the addition
of brewers heast made a softer, fluffier bread than the
then usual pain brie. They called yeah, the new the
(18:18):
new fancy one with the brewers east was called that
other thing that Annie just said that one. Um. It
was also around this time that um hell Anthony van
Lelon leland hook. Mm hmmmm, I saw it both leland
Hook and lean hook, so I'm not sure which one
(18:42):
it should be. I'm sorry, Dutch. Uh, this dude, he
developed microscopic lenses that allowed him to observe stuff like
bacteria and yeast, These these tiny, uh, single cellular organisms. Um.
He didn't realize that they were alive at the time,
but um, but people did begin to real us due
to due to this kind of research that this yeast
(19:03):
stuff was what made fermentation work. And also apparently there
was a hole to do in French parliament about the
health of brewersies after doctors from the Paris University concluded
used to be detrimental, mainly because one it was bitter
and to the fact rotting water and barley was involved
in this bitterness. So brewers yeast was outlawed in sixteen
(19:25):
sixty eight, but two years later in sixteen seventy it
was mostly reversed and brewersies could once again be used
in bread making in combination with sour dough. A written
recipe from this time called for feeding and rising your
sour dough starter for three times. Two to three sour
dough starters was the norm at this point in time. Huh,
that's that's a lot of that's a lot of work, yes, um.
(19:49):
And the replacement of millstones and mills with steel rollers
in seventeen hundreds made the flower refining process cheaper and
helped shift bread from something that most people made at
home to something more people, especially workers, preferred to buy.
Um and this the the early bit of the Industrial
Revolution was the point around which bread baking really started
(20:11):
moving out of the home and into commercial bakeries and
in cities anyway, in a widespread kind of way. And
in eighteen forty and Austrian baker based in France discovered
how to make bread without sour dough using only yeast
fermentation called poolish. At the time, bakers were still getting
their yeast cultures from brewers, and soon after, in eighteen
(20:34):
fifty four, a patent for manufacturing powdered yeast was issued,
and by eight seventy two France had opened their first
factory of grain fermented yeast that was more consistent and
had a longer shelf life, which, as you would guess,
hit the saradough industry. Pretty hard bread baking using the
Polish method had been fairly common by eighteen eighty five,
(20:57):
and sar dough bread became known as front bread. Yes,
Polish method, Yeah, using geese Poolish polish right. Yes. It's
also around this time that the American gold Rush was
underway and prospectors in San Francisco bread was becoming a thing.
But we will come back to that in a second. Yes.
(21:18):
In the meanwhile, Also around this this eighteen soon time, um,
there was a weird resurgence of the idea that leavened
bread is bad for you. Um. This time started in America. Um,
you know, is Baker's east toxic? Is anything associated with
beer terrible? Are sour things? On Good News at eleven
(21:38):
um in. In eighteen fifty two, a popular cookbook called
Directions for Cookery and its various branches decreed all bread
that is sour heavy or ill baked is not only unpalatable,
but extremely unwholesome and should never be eaten. These accidents
so frequently happened when bread is made at home by careless,
unpracticed or incompetent per since strong, fresh yeast from the
(22:02):
brewery should always be used in preference to any others. Wow,
those are some strong words, but I feel insulted, person,
I know right, and like sour dough is delicious, and
shut your face man incompetent unpalatable, like they have a
word goodness this person. Meanwhile, in eighteen fifty seven, uh
(22:27):
Louis Pasteur published his initial findings about how yeast is
is actually a living organism and the colonies of it
must be alive in order to make fermentation happen, which
is true because dead yeast doesn't do a whole lot
for you know. Um. This did not help the freak
out that some people were experiencing about leavened bread. Um. However,
(22:49):
in the long run, everyone calmed down, and and this
the science let people select the best yeasts and and
the best treatments for them in order to make better
bread products. Um today strains of this very yeast that
that Louis was working with. Sacro mices Sarah visier um
are are bread especially for quick growth in in commercial
(23:10):
baker's East right, and speaking of commercials bakers East in
the nineteenth century, a combination of the development of commercial
bakers East and in Europe specifically regulations preventing long hours
or working at night, meant that sour dough lost even
more ground. Two breads that rose more quickly and consistently
(23:31):
like the baggett. People still baked in home, yes, and
families still passed their starter cultures on in clay jocks.
And an exception up to this was in northern Europe,
where rye bread was popular and sour dough worked as
a leavening agent, where bakers East did not, because rye
doesn't have enough gluten to become fluffy with East alone. Uh.
(23:56):
In nineteen sixty four, bread expert Raymond Calvel wrote, sour
dough breadmaking does not exist any Wow, you love dire
things to say about sour dough, I know, do not
mince words. It wasn't until the nineteen eighties that it
would have a comeback to due to a demand for
(24:20):
a higher bread quality, and also because in the nineteen
seventies a dry sour dough entered the market pretty quickly,
sailing economically past sour do starter cultures. This allowed sour
dough to go from being a semihard to find ish
artisanal bread to something more widespread and commercially available, and
in nineteen France and the UK issued regulations defining sour
(24:44):
dough bread regulations I love them. Yes, mastipulations like the
bread must have a potential maximum pH of four point
three and the scetic acid content must be at least
nine hundred parts per million UM. Germany had a law
differentiating between the more labor intensive starter culture sour dough
bread and sour dough is made using giant sour dough.
(25:05):
This kind of reminds me of Champagne and how specific
they are with what it is. Yeah, No, it's great
all of that. UM. Scientists have worked to identify both
the natural strains of yeasts and bacteria that makes sour
do happen, and also new strains that could be awesome.
There's dizzy only extensive research into these critters and their interactions.
(25:26):
Um More than twenty species of common yeasts and fifty
species of common lactic acid bacteria have been identified in
different sour dough starters around the world. That's beautiful. It
is also beautiful is the bit that we skipped over
about the San Franciscan history of sour dough specifically, And
(25:48):
we'll get to that right after a quick word from
our sponsor, then we're back, Thank you, sponsor. So earlier
we mentioned the Gold Rush and San Francisco sour dough,
which you might have heard that the town is famous for. Yeah,
(26:10):
I have to admit when I think of sour dough,
I think of San Francisco. I think of my belly.
I don't know anyway, um uh. Some some bakeries in
San Francisco, as we said earlier, claimed that they have
kept their starters alive in bold than one hundred years.
But to trace the city's history with sour dough, we
have to go to Mexico. Oh yep. When when gold
(26:36):
was discovered in the American River in northern California in
eighty eight, UM, it kicked off the Great Gold Rush
of eighty nine. This is not in Mexico yet. Um.
But it wasn't only rubes with no mining knowledge who
were hoping to get rich quick who flooded into San
Francisco at the time. UM. Gold miners also came up
from Mexico and Texas. And meanwhile, a whole bunch of
(26:58):
French colonials had taken up residents in Mexico before the
Republic's independence from Spain in the eighteen twenties, and those
French kids brought the tradition of sour dough bread with
them to Mexico. This is great, yeah, um. Side note, Uh,
there's a story from the nineteen thirties to forties about
the quality of of Mexican sour dough. Phil Harris, who
(27:21):
was the bandleader and a performer on the Jack Benny Program,
famous radio show television show. Um uh, supposedly got his
sour dough from this bakery in Tijuana that he just loved.
It was the only place that he would buy his
sour dough bread. Um, right up until on a return
trip he was stuffed by customs agents who slashed open
all of his sour dough loaves looking for As the article,
(27:44):
I found the story and put it quote contraband often
associated with musicians. M hmm. I wonder what that could be. Uh,
No one knows. Cocaine. Um Okay, anyway, I'm back back
to the early early to mid eighteen hundreds. UM. So,
(28:06):
through through these French colonialists, sour dough spread throughout certain
parts of the Southwest. And so when Mexican and Texan
miners came up to northern California during the gold Rush,
they in turn brought it there with them, um. And
they shared the starters and in the method with the
other miners there. They did keep a pot of starter
or a little ball of starter dough with them wherever
(28:28):
they camped and baked sour dough bread, biscuits or flapjacks
in their Dutch ovens or iron skillets over campfires. M
hm hmm. One of the people who would obtain some
of the sour dough starter was Isidore Bodin, French immigrant
from a long line of bakers. He he really dug
this starter and started using it in his bread's when
(28:49):
he opened the boat In Bakery in eighteen forty nine,
which is sometimes hailed as the first Sara dough bakery
in the area. There's a little bit of contention there.
The owners of Colombo Baking come Puny across the Bay
in Oakland, say they were the first people making sour
dough um at any rate, at least a dozen French
bread as they were called bakeries that we're selling sour dough,
(29:10):
which was being called French bread still in some places.
Um what would open in the area by eighteen fifty four,
a dozen among the like sixty three total bakeries that
the city hosted suddenly by then because gold Rush super
wild um and sour do's popularity with the mining population
would ensure its continued salem even through all of the
(29:32):
big baker's yeast trends that we were talking about UM
in the coming decades. There's a there's a story about
Budden's Bakery during the big quake of nineteen o six
in San Francisco and and the fires that spread in
its aftermath. Budden's widow, Louise saved this this family starter
by throwing some of it in a wooden bucket before
she fled that. Yeah, the bakery is still open today.
(29:57):
You can go check it out and argue with my
pronunciation off a name. I went there when I went
to visit my little mother. Oh man, I've never been.
It was so good. I also went to Turteen all
the sour doughs. Yeah, oh, now I want it. Okay.
San Francisco was like baking tour for Annie. I went,
I w I woke up like four am to hit
(30:18):
all the bakeries. They sold out of things. Oh man,
I think I missed that entirely. I think I was
on like a fish. Every time I'm in California, I'm
like sushi and avocados them in my face. Maybe next time, Okay,
next time, next time. There's a lot of good bakeries there. Oh,
I believe you. But but back to the past. Yes.
(30:39):
During the during the Klondike Gold Rush of the eighteen nineties,
uh miners from northern California headed north and brought sour
dough with them again um and and they brought it
with them so characteristically that a nickname for these prospectors
was the sour doughs um. Some stories said the nickname
came from their tendency to keep their starter literally on
(31:01):
their person, like using their body heat to maintain the
culture in the freezing weather. Ruth Almond wrote in a
whole book dedicated to this topic. That quote, A true
Alaskan sour dough would as soon spend a year in
the hills without his rifle as to tough it through
without his bubbling sour dough pot. That's so great, I
(31:22):
know U. Starting around nine, a couple of microbiologists set
out to catalog the yeasts and bacteria that makes San
Francisco sour doughs so special. They found that the yeast
most usually happening in San Francisco bread is Candida millarry
millery maybe either one, And they identified a new species
(31:46):
of lactic acid bacteria called lacto Bacsilus san Francis census. Yeah,
San Francisco, right, your bacteria famous? Uh. The yeast is
is particularly tolerant of acids and doesn't eat maltose at,
a type of sugar which the bacteria needs to live.
(32:07):
Lactovaccilus san census is not unique to San Francisco, though um.
It has since been identified in sour doughs around the world. Wow,
it's getting around, javelin going places. It was first identified
in San Francisco. Okay, it's not. It's not necessarily native
to their um. Also in case you had no idea
(32:27):
like me, Um that the mascot of San Francisco forty niners,
you know, gold Rush of forty nine is still sour dough. Sam,
It's kind of like Prospector, Dude. I don't I don't
know if that. I hope he has a pail and
it has sour dough bread in it. Oh my god,
I hope he just throws loaves of bread at people.
I would go. I would go to definitely go to
(32:49):
that game. I would just have like a bucket like
in a Marti grad parade, but just bread. That's so
much better than beads. All right, So that's a world
rentour of sura dough history. Oh yeah, Yeah. There's a
lot of topics that we didn't go into that are
(33:09):
kind of glancing through that. A lot of stuff about
yeast and other things, um, that we will have to
cover during other episodes because it's super fascinating. I end,
it's so much, it's so much. There's a lot. Oh
my gosh. Well, now let's talk about if you want
to make like your own sour dough, because it's it's
really easy to start at starter culture in theory. Um,
(33:34):
a friend gave me a starter culture in college, but
I forgot to feed it and it died before I
used in anything. And also I've never admitted this to her,
so we'll see if she listens. Get an angry email. Um,
so much for friendship bread. It's also called friendship bread sometimes.
By the way, if if you had never heard that,
it's called friendship bread because you can share your starter
(33:57):
with a friend and hopefully a better friend than I.
I let us, I let a start a culture die
once too. It is really sad. I've heard it compared
to like pets or house plants. Oh no, you gotta
keep it alive. Um. So hopefully if you're better at
(34:18):
it than Lauren and I apparently, or if you live
in Stockholm where they have sour dough hotels, and well,
how sit your starter for three dollars a day? It's
nothing that's so crazy. I love that there's a hotel. Um,
and you want to try your hand at making sardo,
here's what you would do. You just mix equal parts
(34:41):
flour and water like one cup each, maybe a pinch
of sugar. Um, put them in a clear bowl. Some
people also had a pinch of salt. There you go.
You mix them together if you want to. You can
also add a packet of dry yeast to to get
things started, but you don't have to, like like if
you if you leave it alone, it will hypothetically catch
(35:03):
wild yeast that's just hanging out in the air around you,
and and wild lacto Lactobacillus bacteria of some kind or another. Um.
But yeah, So so you just just mix the stuff
together in a in a clear bowl, clear so that
you can kind of really see what's going on in there,
and cover it with a clean cloth like a dish towel,
and just let it hang out room temperature for a
(35:24):
few days, stir it once or twice a day, and
feeded a couple of tablespoons each of flower and water
every day. I know these are all really precise directions,
but that's I'm kind of combining a number of a
number of theories that I saw about how best to
do this. I think I think a lot of it
are in instructions. Um. I think I think a lot
(35:45):
of people are just like, try it and see what
works for you in your environment. Uh. Yeah, I saw
someone use Uh she said she used yogurt to get
the bacteria in there. Sure, yeah, I bet that would
that would sure do it. I kind of love that
you use in general sour dough recipes. Feeding. Yeah, it
(36:10):
does sound like a creature. It's a pet. Yeah, it's
it's a delicious pet. Sometimes you put in the oven
and bake. Oh that sounds there. Put my pet in
the oven. Oh, you're not putting all of your pet
in the oven. Is just part of it. I'm getting
attached to it, like you're a hypothetical starter. I don't
even have so UM. So you'll know, you'll know it's
(36:33):
like done, um when it's developed a froth on the
top and that characteristic um kind of kind of good
sour smell. And once that happens, you can PLoP. You
can just PLoP it in a jar and store it
in the fridge to slow the growth of the yeast.
Just just cover cover it loosely and uh, that's basically it.
(36:55):
You you want to feed it a little more flour
and water once a week. Um. If you're keeping it,
you can also keep it out if you want to. Uh.
I think, especially here in America, people are really really
keen on keeping things in the refrigerator. But you can
hypothetically keep it out just room temperature if you want to,
if you do feed it every day. Okay, that's where
I went wrong. Yeah, I did not refrigerate mine. Okay, okay, Yeah,
(37:18):
if you refrigerated, feeded about once a week. Um, and
as the container gets full, you can just like take
a lump out and throw it out. Sorry, that unlucky
arm of the starter culture. Now it's just going to
grow in the garbage can I mean it would I
mean I actually maybe lucky arm of the of the
yeast because it's not getting baked. Ever, that's true. That
(37:38):
is true. So yeah, that's that's that's about it. Um.
I want to go home and try this. Now I've
never tried it before. Yeah, I've been looking at recipes
to try. Uh. I want to see what I would
get if I if I don't add anything in, if
I just do the pure flower water sugar salt recipe,
And how long does it take? I don't know, experiment Oh,
(37:58):
I need to set up a go pro. Oh I
wonder if I can borrow a go pro? Yeah, and
do it time laps. And if you do, I mean,
if you do, you could in theory keep it decades
like we said at the beginning, So if anyone tries
it out, let us know. Yeah, yeah, if if you
have your own family recipe, let us know, yes please. Uh.
And like most things, there are so many variations oh
(38:21):
yeah of this. You can also buy sour dog cultures
from around the world from sites like sour Doughs International
they have. I was looking at it earlier and uh,
there was one on there called Tasmanian Devil. It's from
Australia and it was like this wildly east. Make any
bread more interesting? It was, I would recommend just going
(38:45):
to look at the yeast strains pretty affordable to um.
Also sour doughs and just for bread, which kind of
mentioned with the prospectors. But you can use it in biscuits, pancakes,
regular cakes, all kinds of stuff to add flavor. Yeah yeah, um.
And there are so many variations of like strains of
sour dough that North Carolina State biologists robbed Dunn started
(39:08):
the sour Dough Project in my favorite fact of the episode,
where he and some fellow researchers are asking home bakers
to submit their starters for DNA sequencing, h and enzyme
level testing and other biochemistry markers. That's so cool. I know,
I was so happy reading this. They want to know
(39:29):
things like if feeding a starter water versus milk makes
a difference, the impact of the climate, the impact of
the baker. Yeah, yeah, supposedly. Um. I read somewhere that
the theory is that any of the lacto lactic acid
bacteria that get into your starter dough come from your hands. Yes,
(39:51):
And they think that there might be a difference between
male and female bakers. What Yeah, And they're in the summer.
This summer summer, the Sour Dough Project is planning a
sour dough bake off with twenty different bakers and twenty
different starters. DNA sequence the starters baked sunbread and compare
(40:13):
the results. I cannot tell you how excited I was
reading about this, and I was already planning on going
to such a joyous occasion in the name of science.
But it's in Oh hey, boss, do you want to
you want to send us to Belgium? Please come on
for science. I know I hope that they that somehow
(40:35):
the Sour Dough Project hears about this and they're like,
we gotta, we gotta fund these girls to come with us.
We should get in touch with them. We should, um,
you know, I mean we can still. I'm we're both compact.
We could probably fit in someone's suitcase. I am willing
to travel via suitcase if I can. In the name
of sour dough. Yeah, all those kinds of sour dough. Okay.
(40:56):
And the final note on that I will leave you
with is that the Shannaire for when you submit your
starter is adorable. So cute makes it really does make
your starter sound like a pit that Surado project. You
can look it up. Yes, and I think that's that's
(41:16):
sour doughs in a in a in a very in
a very compact ball of bread. Oh stuff sounds so appetising,
I know. And that brings us to the end of
this classic episode. Yes, uh, and all right, I promised
(41:41):
some updates. One isn't an update so much is a
thing that we missed in our research? Um there is? Uh, well, okay,
maybe we missed it. Maybe it was just the news
was not so much public as much as it is
now when a lot of articles are being written about
sour dough. But yeah, so there's a sour dough library
(42:03):
in Belgium. What created to help bakeries preserve their strains. UM.
They currently have about a specimens from twenty five countries
which they keep chilled and feed with the original flower
supplied every year by the by the bakeries. UM. Some
are fed with other things. There's apparently one sour dough
(42:25):
starter from Mexico that's refreshed with lime, eggs and beer beer.
I love this, Oh, I love it. Furthermore, UM an update, Uh,
it seems we talked about about baker's and the the
microbes that they have in their hands and how those
(42:45):
might influence sour dough starters, and it seems from research
that's just come out over the past couple of years
that it's it's not it's not that the microbes on
baker's hands influencing sour dough as much as it is
the process of making sour dough that influences is the
microbes that wind up on baker's hands. So like you
can you can always tell a baker by what kind
(43:08):
of microbe culture they've got going on their skin. Oh
that's fascinating, yeah, oh I love it. Oh. And that
experiment that we talked about happening in Belgium, UM in Uh,
so we did not get to go. Sadly, um did
not come through, but the hosts of the excellent podcast
(43:30):
Gastropod did get to go. I'm only a little bit
burningly jealous. Um, just a tad, just a tad. But
but yeah, So if you want to hear all about
how that went down, UM, go listen. I mean you
should be listening to them anyway. If you dig us,
you'll love them. Um. Their episode of Secrets of Sour
Dough is where they talk all about that. So oh
(43:52):
it's great. It's great. And and if if you I
mean Annie or any listeners do wind up make get
a wild Caught sour Dough starter. Um. You can tell
researchers about it for science, like the lines are open, um.
You can google Wild Sour Dough project or head on
(44:12):
over to Rob Dunn Lab dot com. That's r O
B d U N N l A B dot com. Um.
And it's this team of researchers that are collecting data
about wild sour dough strains from around the world and
are and are doing interesting, interesting stuff with with with
microbiology surrounding it. That's so cool. They'll probably look at
(44:35):
mine and be like, is this lines from Star Wars
and Harry Potter. So what's going on in this apartment?
None of your business? Pretty much what it looks like inact.
I don't know how much clear I need to be.
(44:57):
My sour dough absorbed all the entertainment choices I've I'm excited.
I think I really like I think it's gonna be
like a fun project. I'm debating the names already. I
so look forward to finding out what name you settle
on for your sour dough. Oh yeah, the pun level
(45:18):
is going to be off the Shane I suspect and
speaking of we would love to hear how your starters
are going, listeners, how it turned out, bread that you
got from it, what the names are if you name them,
and you can email us at hello at safer pod
dot com. But we are also on social media. You
(45:38):
can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Tag us
in your photos let us know what's going on. Uh,
we do hope to hear from you. Savor is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts on my
Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks as
always to our superproducers Dylan Fake It and Andrew Howard.
Thanks to you for listening, and we hope that lots
(45:59):
market things are coming your way.
Hello, and welcome to Savor Protection of I Heart Radio.
I'm Annie Reese and I'm Lauren vocal Bam, and today
we've got a classic episode for you about sour dough,
which a lot of you have been writing in about
sour dough recently. Won't get into that more in a second,
but also some newer listeners have come in and said
you should definitely do sour dough, and I've been like,
oh wait ah, we have ha yes, yes, this episode
(00:31):
originally aired in June at a time before we knew
how to pronounce plenty. Oh so long ago, so young,
so innocent young, we didn't know plenty and plenty and
the difference. So yes, a lot of people are making
sour dough during quarantine. It is all over social media.
(00:56):
Celebrities are even in on it. Um. Multiple article have
come out about the psychological benefits of what's called stress
baking um, which makes sense to me. Oh yeah, absolutely so.
It makes sense also that people are making sour dough
and here in the US it has resulted in a
run on flour and yea, so I have not been
able to find you since this started. I have found
(01:18):
toilet paper, but not huh. Wow. Yeah, yeah, but sour
dough is useful for that because you don't have to
buy yeast. You can make your own exactly. And I
am definitely going to do this. I found my recipe
I'm going to follow. I'm gonna embark on this journey. Yeah, Like,
do do you have like a go pro? Can you like,
(01:40):
can you like make like a like a time lapse,
a time lapse or maybe or maybe just set up
I wouldn't have to be a go pro, like you
could just take a sequence of photos, but I could
do that as well. It would be the most boring
go pro video. But when that like first bubble, you know,
if you're most exciting things, it would be so beautiful.
(02:03):
I'll definitely keep everyone posted. For a lot of people,
the routine of it, from what I've read, it gives
you some feeling of control, like I've got to check
on my sour dough starter and the needing can be calming.
The process of it where you have sort of this beginning,
middle end, and then at the hopefully you have a
tangible product when you get to the end. It makes
(02:23):
you feel like you've accomplished something which you have you
have you've made you've made food and you can eat
it and it will hopefully taste delicious hopefully. Yeah. Yes,
And there's a feeling of community around it as people
share tips, failures, successes, recipes, these pictures. Um. Some parents
are using it as a science and teaching tool, and
(02:44):
as we say in this classic episode, kind of like
having a pet and a lot of you. I did
want to shout out some listeners who have written in
about their sour dough starters and experiences. Gilbert sent us
a picture of his courtesy of my starter, the Passion
of the Crust. Excellent name, also an excellent name, Jason
(03:07):
sour Dough Starter Bubbles. And then Grace wrote in with
her journey with sour dough when she was in the
early stages. It's kind of nervous about it. I hope
it turned out, Grace. You can check in Kenna as well.
And then of course Jane the bread Girl, whose listener
mail we read a while back. She was embarking on
a sour dough journey. And remember, if you decide to
(03:28):
go on this journey, are you're already on it. You
can use the discard for all kinds of things, muffins, crackers,
quick breads, pancakes, crapes. Oh yeah, I found out the
King Arthur Flower website has a recipe for chocolate sour doughcake.
Oh right, I'm like wow, I'm like mad about it.
(03:50):
I'm like, okay, all right, we need to figure this
out immediately. And by wi I mean me. So yeah, well,
please share with me because that sounds amazing. I'll try
to remember to post a link. Yeah, yeah, yes. Recently,
a yeast scientists Sue deep Argavalla, who who is loving
this whole thing, by the way, and is using it
as a teaching opportunity, said bread is just the beginning.
(04:12):
We are now making meatless products with yeast. We have
been using yeast to produce our medicines. Yeast is an
integral part of how we are going to be solving
COVID nineteening processes. The way we understand cancer, the way
we understand aging that all comes from yeast. Oh oh wonderful. Yeah.
So uh so we're gonna get into the episode. We'll
(04:33):
have a few updates for you at the end, but
for now, let's let former Annie and Lauren take it away. Hello,
and welcome to food Stuff. I'm Lauren vogum and I'm
an eries and our topic for today is sour dough. Bread. Yes,
(04:56):
so the bread. I don't know what else it would be,
but I'm sure or something humans are real creative and
and why sour dough in particular. Well, as it turns out,
bread is not a small topic of human history. In fact,
it is an enormous topic. It is a very large
undertaking just to do sour dough. So not to have
(05:18):
a tin plus our episode, we're gonna like look at
different types of bread and today, um and bread on
top of having a breath of information. Uh there, there's
it's so important to so many different cultures. Oh yeah,
give us a stay or daily bread or all the
(05:38):
idioms um like to earn his bread, or even the
etymology of words like companion, which is a combo of
two Latin words meaning someone you'll share your bread with
all the pan in it, I bet. Oh my goodness, yeah,
I didn't realize. And now I'm like, I'll share my
bread with you, Laura. Oh I would share my bread
with you Anna Okay. I also, oh, this is this
(06:01):
is another one that made me really hungry. Um, sour
dough might be my favorite type of bread, sour dough
is delicious. Whenever my mom baked sour dough, I would
smell at my room and I knew it was going
to be a very special special h my my mom
would make would make a non non sour dough bread
that was always a really good day as well. But Uh,
sour dough, as the name suggests, is sour bread, and
(06:25):
it involves two things that we wind up talking about
a lot here on food stuff, uh, yeast and yeast's
fermentation of stuff. Exactly. Basically, if you eave some wheat,
flour and water or a lump of unbaked dough out,
so I'm naturally occurring lactic acid bacteria while yeast get
up in there, they get a fermentation party started, and
(06:46):
when you add more flour and water to that starter,
you can make bread. Uh. The yeast in sour dough
or any bread really has enzymes that break some of
flowers starches down into sugars and um the yeast, which
are you know, single celled fungi eat some of those
sugars and excrete carbon dioxide and alcohol fermentation. Except here
(07:09):
the alcohol is really just a just a flavoring agent.
It helps break down other molecules in the flour that
produce all of the amazing flavors and the smells that
you get in bread. All of those aromatics um and
the carbon dioxide gas is what will make the bread rise,
assuming that you've needed and rested the dough so that
it's remaining. Starch molecules are are glutinous a k a.
(07:29):
Like chainey and stretchy rather than just like flir. Yeah,
you don't want flour in your bread. Are generally sounds
like something you want to avoid. Always avoid the flair. Meanwhile, oh, meanwhile,
the lactic acid bacteria and you'll remember those from our
yogurt episode. Yes, yes, they are also eating some of
(07:52):
those sugars and excreting a up a lactic acid. More
bacteria pool Lauren's favorite things. Yes, it makes everything better here.
It produces the acidity that gives sour dough that distinctive taste,
although generally speaking, a sour dough does not have to
be sour, just has to be made using wild yeasts
(08:13):
and bacteria. M By the way, the longer that you
let a sour dough starter, you know that the flour
and water mix or the or the dough lump kind
of sit out that the more flavors should develop over time, right,
because you give them bacteria more time to do, it's
more time learning. Yes, um. According to Edwoods Whirld's sour
(08:34):
doughs from antiquity authentic recipes from modern baker's quote, a
true sour dough is nothing more than flour and water
with wild yeast to make it rise as special bacteria
to provide the flavor. Uh bonus. As in yogurt, the
lactic acid produced by the bacteria and and the alcohol
produced by the yeast prevent the growth of harmful bacteria
(08:56):
in your sitting starter Um extra bonus. You can save
a lump of your dough, feed it more flour and water,
and use it to make more other leavened bread later on.
Just like with yogurt, this culture will last for you know,
as long as you keep it alive. How long could
(09:16):
that be? I I read claims of centuries and they've
been unable to prove it. But yeah, that's why I'm
That's why I'm going on the safe side. And the
same day there's there's at least one San Francisco bakery
that claims over a hundred years. I suspect I know
which one that is, and I think we're going to
be talking about them. We will, indeed, But before we
(09:39):
get there, let's let's look at the history. Yeah, a
little a little bit deeper in the history than a
hundred years ago. Here we go history. Bread has been
around for like ever. The oldest loaf of bread discovered
at this point, UM was in Switzerland, going back todd
or maybe Ndred BC history. Yeah, both dates. Yeah, I
(10:03):
think I saw just rates somewhere in that range. Yeah,
wall paintings and bread remains, which is not the best
ry to put it, but pretty much the only way
I could think of putting it. Share Um indicate that
the ancient Egyptians were using sour dough starters to bake
leavened bread, possibly going back up to five thousand years
(10:27):
and kind of like honey, it could go back even
further prewritten words, because it's the thing that just happens,
and because of that, it was probably discovered by accident
when some unsuspecting left out dough encountered some wild east
And it's usually of the genus sacrimces candid it. Yes,
I hope I got close on that pronunciation. I know,
(10:49):
I think that that that that was spot on. Yes
yeah um so yeah yeah, like a like early um
fermentation of of beer and wine and stuff. Yeah, this
is just stuff that was pending in nature. Um. So
it's really hard to pinpoint an original date. No one
was like, hey, guys, I was the one who discovered
(11:09):
the sour dough. Although whoever it was who discovered that
this was a thing, it was almost certainly related to
beer brewing. Yes, um, because the discovery of beer entailed
a lot of experimenting with starter cultures and baking and
beer brewing often happened in the same space, so it
(11:31):
could have gone down that way. Or according to Lawn
Walter's Old West Baking Book, baker got the idea to
add either one of the beer starter cultures or beer
barm to flower and water to see what happened. Barn,
by the way, is the the skummy kind of foam
that develops on top of stuff while it's fermenting. Yes,
this also tripped us up in our six year old
(11:53):
meat recipe. Yeah, I had no idea what that was.
I was, also, to be fair, quite drunk. Um. There
was a lot of meat very early in the morning
there was It was ten am, y'all. I hadn't had breakfast,
and this very nice man brought us ten samples of meat,
and he kept pouring large sample anyway. It was lovely,
it was. But I thought the barn was just the
funniest word I had ever heard in my entire life
at that juncture. It's a pretty good one. Back to
(12:18):
the beer birds, they tried out a bunch of different
cultures and discovered that They tried him out with the bread,
and they discovered that some made lighter, fluffier breads. And
they take a piece of that dough from a bachelor
liked and didn add some flower to keep it alive.
Ak a sour dough starter and a quote from Lawn
Walter's book. I really liked quote. Each starter has its
(12:40):
own characteristic taste and smell. Many older starters are guarded
by their owners as if they were a key to heaven.
They're passed on generation to generation and rarely share not
so friendly bread. No, it's a different time, but it
does still kind of happened. And people give these families
starters fund names like Clint Eastwood. I enjoyed looking through
(13:01):
those names there's yeah, there's there's there's good lists out there. Um.
And of course folks at this time had no idea,
oh why this was happening. You know, they just knew
that if they took a little bit of this one
thing that they made turned out good and they put
it into their next batch, that next batch turned out
good too, right, And going back to her mead guy
briefly for a second, corn at him. That's why we
(13:23):
call spirit spirits because they didn't know what was happening
that was causing the fermentation in the alcohol, and it
was kind of like you're praying to the spirits. Yeah, yeah,
you're like, oh, the soul of the beer, please make
my beer beer and not just rotten barley water. Right,
one thing is better than that other thing. I easily
(13:44):
want you to help me out on this spirit. I
hope that that is true. But it's a fun story. Nonetheless, Yes,
thank you, thank you to Justin amongst mead for that,
for that lovely story. Yes, thank you Justin. So anyway,
bread making and sourdough spread from ancient Egypt to ancient
Greece sometime around eight hundred BC, and at the time
(14:04):
it was a luxury only for the wealthy, and the
baking of it was left completely to women. This was
a fact that everywhere I read they felt compelled to
include a beer. At the time, too, I think was
lady work. So it wasn't until eight hundred b C.
That written records of bakeries offering bread for sale pop
up an ancient Greece. There you go, and then after
(14:26):
contact with Greece, sour dough traveled to ancient Rome, where
improved methods of needing and baking made bread more widely available,
and in one six b C. Cato the Elder detailed
several different types of bread. Greece also spread sour dough
to France sometime around the fourth century BC. Greeks living
in France noticed that if you replaced the water and
(14:48):
bread dough with the foam from a beer like fermented drink,
it produced a lighter, fluffier bread, and the cloudier the loquid,
the better the ant product. Due to Paris's proximity to
the major we producing area of the region, it produced
some of the country's first bakers, and at the time
all the bread they were baking was sour dough, both
because it was all they knew fermentation wise, and it
(15:10):
was cheaper because you didn't need any expensive salt thanks
to the acidity. Ah. Yeah, assault also helps break down
molecules in rising bread and in uh starters, making it
more flavorful, tasty stuff. And then one of our old friends,
Fliny the Elder, he talked about a lot of things.
He really did. He wrote in his seventies seven ce
(15:34):
Ish Encyclopedia Natural History that quote, Generally, however, they do
not heat it up at all, but only use the
dough kept over from the day before. Manifestly, it is
natural for sourness to make the dope ferment, and likewise
that people who live on fermented bread have weaker bodies,
inasmuch as in old days outstanding wholesomeness was ascribed to wheat,
(15:57):
the heavier it was. But okay, yeah. He also claimed
that sarado was better for health, which is truish due
to the good bacteria. I suppose. Yeah, there is a
teny amount of research teeny parttern research, not like plenty res.
(16:18):
I wonder what research Planny was doing. I'm sure it
was fascinating. But according to a two thousand eight acted
diabetological study and a two thousand and eleven study out
of clinical gastro intrology and hepatology in Italy indicating that
due to the lower amount of gluten content and sourdough bread,
it may be more tolerable for people with stilly exercise. Yeah,
(16:40):
small sample sizes though, um it does produce a smaller
search of glucose than most other breads. Well that's good news.
Yeah so grain of salt, grain of salt. It but
the research does exist around the same time, plenty time. Uh.
Roman poet June of All wrote satire ten or the
(17:04):
famous and recently Hunger Games repopularized phrase Panama senses our
bread and circuses comes from. Okay, so that takes care
of the ancient history, and we'll move on to some
more modern stuff after a quick break for a word
from our sponsor, and we're back, Thank you sponsor. Um. So,
(17:34):
so we we divided up the ancient and the kind
of modern history like that, because, as it turns out,
nothing really happened, um in the history of of sour
dough bread for you know, a few millennia right until
the rediscovery of Brewers East around the four six hundreds.
In various parts of Europe doing different stuff at different times. Um.
(17:56):
Germany kind of figured it out first thanks to the
close relationship between brewing and baking in medieval monasteries. And uh.
Then in seventeenth century France, they found that the addition
of brewers heast made a softer, fluffier bread than the
then usual pain brie. They called yeah, the new the
(18:18):
new fancy one with the brewers east was called that
other thing that Annie just said that one. Um. It
was also around this time that um hell Anthony van
Lelon leland hook. Mm hmmmm, I saw it both leland
Hook and lean hook, so I'm not sure which one
(18:42):
it should be. I'm sorry, Dutch. Uh, this dude, he
developed microscopic lenses that allowed him to observe stuff like
bacteria and yeast, These these tiny, uh, single cellular organisms. Um.
He didn't realize that they were alive at the time,
but um, but people did begin to real us due
to due to this kind of research that this yeast
(19:03):
stuff was what made fermentation work. And also apparently there
was a hole to do in French parliament about the
health of brewersies after doctors from the Paris University concluded
used to be detrimental, mainly because one it was bitter
and to the fact rotting water and barley was involved
in this bitterness. So brewers yeast was outlawed in sixteen
(19:25):
sixty eight, but two years later in sixteen seventy it
was mostly reversed and brewersies could once again be used
in bread making in combination with sour dough. A written
recipe from this time called for feeding and rising your
sour dough starter for three times. Two to three sour
dough starters was the norm at this point in time. Huh,
that's that's a lot of that's a lot of work, yes, um.
(19:49):
And the replacement of millstones and mills with steel rollers
in seventeen hundreds made the flower refining process cheaper and
helped shift bread from something that most people made at
home to something more people, especially workers, preferred to buy.
Um and this the the early bit of the Industrial
Revolution was the point around which bread baking really started
(20:11):
moving out of the home and into commercial bakeries and
in cities anyway, in a widespread kind of way. And
in eighteen forty and Austrian baker based in France discovered
how to make bread without sour dough using only yeast
fermentation called poolish. At the time, bakers were still getting
their yeast cultures from brewers, and soon after, in eighteen
(20:34):
fifty four, a patent for manufacturing powdered yeast was issued,
and by eight seventy two France had opened their first
factory of grain fermented yeast that was more consistent and
had a longer shelf life, which, as you would guess,
hit the saradough industry. Pretty hard bread baking using the
Polish method had been fairly common by eighteen eighty five,
(20:57):
and sar dough bread became known as front bread. Yes,
Polish method, Yeah, using geese Poolish polish right. Yes. It's
also around this time that the American gold Rush was
underway and prospectors in San Francisco bread was becoming a thing.
But we will come back to that in a second. Yes.
(21:18):
In the meanwhile, Also around this this eighteen soon time, um,
there was a weird resurgence of the idea that leavened
bread is bad for you. Um. This time started in America. Um,
you know, is Baker's east toxic? Is anything associated with
beer terrible? Are sour things? On Good News at eleven
(21:38):
um in. In eighteen fifty two, a popular cookbook called
Directions for Cookery and its various branches decreed all bread
that is sour heavy or ill baked is not only unpalatable,
but extremely unwholesome and should never be eaten. These accidents
so frequently happened when bread is made at home by careless,
unpracticed or incompetent per since strong, fresh yeast from the
(22:02):
brewery should always be used in preference to any others. Wow,
those are some strong words, but I feel insulted, person,
I know right, and like sour dough is delicious, and
shut your face man incompetent unpalatable, like they have a
word goodness this person. Meanwhile, in eighteen fifty seven, uh
(22:27):
Louis Pasteur published his initial findings about how yeast is
is actually a living organism and the colonies of it
must be alive in order to make fermentation happen, which
is true because dead yeast doesn't do a whole lot
for you know. Um. This did not help the freak
out that some people were experiencing about leavened bread. Um. However,
(22:49):
in the long run, everyone calmed down, and and this
the science let people select the best yeasts and and
the best treatments for them in order to make better
bread products. Um today strains of this very yeast that
that Louis was working with. Sacro mices Sarah visier um
are are bread especially for quick growth in in commercial
(23:10):
baker's East right, and speaking of commercials bakers East in
the nineteenth century, a combination of the development of commercial
bakers East and in Europe specifically regulations preventing long hours
or working at night, meant that sour dough lost even
more ground. Two breads that rose more quickly and consistently
(23:31):
like the baggett. People still baked in home, yes, and
families still passed their starter cultures on in clay jocks.
And an exception up to this was in northern Europe,
where rye bread was popular and sour dough worked as
a leavening agent, where bakers East did not, because rye
doesn't have enough gluten to become fluffy with East alone. Uh.
(23:56):
In nineteen sixty four, bread expert Raymond Calvel wrote, sour
dough breadmaking does not exist any Wow, you love dire
things to say about sour dough, I know, do not
mince words. It wasn't until the nineteen eighties that it
would have a comeback to due to a demand for
(24:20):
a higher bread quality, and also because in the nineteen
seventies a dry sour dough entered the market pretty quickly,
sailing economically past sour do starter cultures. This allowed sour
dough to go from being a semihard to find ish
artisanal bread to something more widespread and commercially available, and
in nineteen France and the UK issued regulations defining sour
(24:44):
dough bread regulations I love them. Yes, mastipulations like the
bread must have a potential maximum pH of four point
three and the scetic acid content must be at least
nine hundred parts per million UM. Germany had a law
differentiating between the more labor intensive starter culture sour dough
bread and sour dough is made using giant sour dough.
(25:05):
This kind of reminds me of Champagne and how specific
they are with what it is. Yeah, No, it's great
all of that. UM. Scientists have worked to identify both
the natural strains of yeasts and bacteria that makes sour
do happen, and also new strains that could be awesome.
There's dizzy only extensive research into these critters and their interactions.
(25:26):
Um More than twenty species of common yeasts and fifty
species of common lactic acid bacteria have been identified in
different sour dough starters around the world. That's beautiful. It
is also beautiful is the bit that we skipped over
about the San Franciscan history of sour dough specifically, And
(25:48):
we'll get to that right after a quick word from
our sponsor, then we're back, Thank you, sponsor. So earlier
we mentioned the Gold Rush and San Francisco sour dough,
which you might have heard that the town is famous for. Yeah,
(26:10):
I have to admit when I think of sour dough,
I think of San Francisco. I think of my belly.
I don't know anyway, um uh. Some some bakeries in
San Francisco, as we said earlier, claimed that they have
kept their starters alive in bold than one hundred years.
But to trace the city's history with sour dough, we
have to go to Mexico. Oh yep. When when gold
(26:36):
was discovered in the American River in northern California in
eighty eight, UM, it kicked off the Great Gold Rush
of eighty nine. This is not in Mexico yet. Um.
But it wasn't only rubes with no mining knowledge who
were hoping to get rich quick who flooded into San
Francisco at the time. UM. Gold miners also came up
from Mexico and Texas. And meanwhile, a whole bunch of
(26:58):
French colonials had taken up residents in Mexico before the
Republic's independence from Spain in the eighteen twenties, and those
French kids brought the tradition of sour dough bread with
them to Mexico. This is great, yeah, um. Side note, Uh,
there's a story from the nineteen thirties to forties about
the quality of of Mexican sour dough. Phil Harris, who
(27:21):
was the bandleader and a performer on the Jack Benny Program,
famous radio show television show. Um uh, supposedly got his
sour dough from this bakery in Tijuana that he just loved.
It was the only place that he would buy his
sour dough bread. Um, right up until on a return
trip he was stuffed by customs agents who slashed open
all of his sour dough loaves looking for As the article,
(27:44):
I found the story and put it quote contraband often
associated with musicians. M hmm. I wonder what that could be. Uh,
No one knows. Cocaine. Um Okay, anyway, I'm back back
to the early early to mid eighteen hundreds. UM. So,
(28:06):
through through these French colonialists, sour dough spread throughout certain
parts of the Southwest. And so when Mexican and Texan
miners came up to northern California during the gold Rush,
they in turn brought it there with them, um. And
they shared the starters and in the method with the
other miners there. They did keep a pot of starter
or a little ball of starter dough with them wherever
(28:28):
they camped and baked sour dough bread, biscuits or flapjacks
in their Dutch ovens or iron skillets over campfires. M
hm hmm. One of the people who would obtain some
of the sour dough starter was Isidore Bodin, French immigrant
from a long line of bakers. He he really dug
this starter and started using it in his bread's when
(28:49):
he opened the boat In Bakery in eighteen forty nine,
which is sometimes hailed as the first Sara dough bakery
in the area. There's a little bit of contention there.
The owners of Colombo Baking come Puny across the Bay
in Oakland, say they were the first people making sour
dough um at any rate, at least a dozen French
bread as they were called bakeries that we're selling sour dough,
(29:10):
which was being called French bread still in some places.
Um what would open in the area by eighteen fifty four,
a dozen among the like sixty three total bakeries that
the city hosted suddenly by then because gold Rush super
wild um and sour do's popularity with the mining population
would ensure its continued salem even through all of the
(29:32):
big baker's yeast trends that we were talking about UM
in the coming decades. There's a there's a story about
Budden's Bakery during the big quake of nineteen o six
in San Francisco and and the fires that spread in
its aftermath. Budden's widow, Louise saved this this family starter
by throwing some of it in a wooden bucket before
she fled that. Yeah, the bakery is still open today.
(29:57):
You can go check it out and argue with my
pronunciation off a name. I went there when I went
to visit my little mother. Oh man, I've never been.
It was so good. I also went to Turteen all
the sour doughs. Yeah, oh, now I want it. Okay.
San Francisco was like baking tour for Annie. I went,
I w I woke up like four am to hit
(30:18):
all the bakeries. They sold out of things. Oh man,
I think I missed that entirely. I think I was
on like a fish. Every time I'm in California, I'm
like sushi and avocados them in my face. Maybe next time, Okay,
next time, next time. There's a lot of good bakeries there. Oh,
I believe you. But but back to the past. Yes.
(30:39):
During the during the Klondike Gold Rush of the eighteen nineties,
uh miners from northern California headed north and brought sour
dough with them again um and and they brought it
with them so characteristically that a nickname for these prospectors
was the sour doughs um. Some stories said the nickname
came from their tendency to keep their starter literally on
(31:01):
their person, like using their body heat to maintain the
culture in the freezing weather. Ruth Almond wrote in a
whole book dedicated to this topic. That quote, A true
Alaskan sour dough would as soon spend a year in
the hills without his rifle as to tough it through
without his bubbling sour dough pot. That's so great, I
(31:22):
know U. Starting around nine, a couple of microbiologists set
out to catalog the yeasts and bacteria that makes San
Francisco sour doughs so special. They found that the yeast
most usually happening in San Francisco bread is Candida millarry
millery maybe either one, And they identified a new species
(31:46):
of lactic acid bacteria called lacto Bacsilus san Francis census. Yeah,
San Francisco, right, your bacteria famous? Uh. The yeast is
is particularly tolerant of acids and doesn't eat maltose at,
a type of sugar which the bacteria needs to live.
(32:07):
Lactovaccilus san census is not unique to San Francisco, though um.
It has since been identified in sour doughs around the world. Wow,
it's getting around, javelin going places. It was first identified
in San Francisco. Okay, it's not. It's not necessarily native
to their um. Also in case you had no idea
(32:27):
like me, Um that the mascot of San Francisco forty niners,
you know, gold Rush of forty nine is still sour dough. Sam,
It's kind of like Prospector, Dude. I don't I don't
know if that. I hope he has a pail and
it has sour dough bread in it. Oh my god,
I hope he just throws loaves of bread at people.
I would go. I would go to definitely go to
(32:49):
that game. I would just have like a bucket like
in a Marti grad parade, but just bread. That's so
much better than beads. All right, So that's a world
rentour of sura dough history. Oh yeah, Yeah. There's a
lot of topics that we didn't go into that are
(33:09):
kind of glancing through that. A lot of stuff about
yeast and other things, um, that we will have to
cover during other episodes because it's super fascinating. I end,
it's so much, it's so much. There's a lot. Oh
my gosh. Well, now let's talk about if you want
to make like your own sour dough, because it's it's
really easy to start at starter culture in theory. Um,
(33:34):
a friend gave me a starter culture in college, but
I forgot to feed it and it died before I
used in anything. And also I've never admitted this to her,
so we'll see if she listens. Get an angry email. Um,
so much for friendship bread. It's also called friendship bread sometimes.
By the way, if if you had never heard that,
it's called friendship bread because you can share your starter
(33:57):
with a friend and hopefully a better friend than I.
I let us, I let a start a culture die
once too. It is really sad. I've heard it compared
to like pets or house plants. Oh no, you gotta
keep it alive. Um. So hopefully if you're better at
(34:18):
it than Lauren and I apparently, or if you live
in Stockholm where they have sour dough hotels, and well,
how sit your starter for three dollars a day? It's
nothing that's so crazy. I love that there's a hotel. Um,
and you want to try your hand at making sardo,
here's what you would do. You just mix equal parts
(34:41):
flour and water like one cup each, maybe a pinch
of sugar. Um, put them in a clear bowl. Some
people also had a pinch of salt. There you go.
You mix them together if you want to. You can
also add a packet of dry yeast to to get
things started, but you don't have to, like like if
you if you leave it alone, it will hypothetically catch
(35:03):
wild yeast that's just hanging out in the air around you,
and and wild lacto Lactobacillus bacteria of some kind or another. Um.
But yeah, So so you just just mix the stuff
together in a in a clear bowl, clear so that
you can kind of really see what's going on in there,
and cover it with a clean cloth like a dish towel,
and just let it hang out room temperature for a
(35:24):
few days, stir it once or twice a day, and
feeded a couple of tablespoons each of flower and water
every day. I know these are all really precise directions,
but that's I'm kind of combining a number of a
number of theories that I saw about how best to
do this. I think I think a lot of it
are in instructions. Um. I think I think a lot
(35:45):
of people are just like, try it and see what
works for you in your environment. Uh. Yeah, I saw
someone use Uh she said she used yogurt to get
the bacteria in there. Sure, yeah, I bet that would
that would sure do it. I kind of love that
you use in general sour dough recipes. Feeding. Yeah, it
(36:10):
does sound like a creature. It's a pet. Yeah, it's
it's a delicious pet. Sometimes you put in the oven
and bake. Oh that sounds there. Put my pet in
the oven. Oh, you're not putting all of your pet
in the oven. Is just part of it. I'm getting
attached to it, like you're a hypothetical starter. I don't
even have so UM. So you'll know, you'll know it's
(36:33):
like done, um when it's developed a froth on the
top and that characteristic um kind of kind of good
sour smell. And once that happens, you can PLoP. You
can just PLoP it in a jar and store it
in the fridge to slow the growth of the yeast.
Just just cover cover it loosely and uh, that's basically it.
(36:55):
You you want to feed it a little more flour
and water once a week. Um. If you're keeping it,
you can also keep it out if you want to. Uh.
I think, especially here in America, people are really really
keen on keeping things in the refrigerator. But you can
hypothetically keep it out just room temperature if you want to,
if you do feed it every day. Okay, that's where
I went wrong. Yeah, I did not refrigerate mine. Okay, okay, Yeah,
(37:18):
if you refrigerated, feeded about once a week. Um, and
as the container gets full, you can just like take
a lump out and throw it out. Sorry, that unlucky
arm of the starter culture. Now it's just going to
grow in the garbage can I mean it would I
mean I actually maybe lucky arm of the of the
yeast because it's not getting baked. Ever, that's true. That
(37:38):
is true. So yeah, that's that's that's about it. Um.
I want to go home and try this. Now I've
never tried it before. Yeah, I've been looking at recipes
to try. Uh. I want to see what I would
get if I if I don't add anything in, if
I just do the pure flower water sugar salt recipe,
And how long does it take? I don't know, experiment Oh,
(37:58):
I need to set up a go pro. Oh I
wonder if I can borrow a go pro? Yeah, and
do it time laps. And if you do, I mean,
if you do, you could in theory keep it decades
like we said at the beginning, So if anyone tries
it out, let us know. Yeah, yeah, if if you
have your own family recipe, let us know, yes please. Uh.
And like most things, there are so many variations oh
(38:21):
yeah of this. You can also buy sour dog cultures
from around the world from sites like sour Doughs International
they have. I was looking at it earlier and uh,
there was one on there called Tasmanian Devil. It's from
Australia and it was like this wildly east. Make any
bread more interesting? It was, I would recommend just going
(38:45):
to look at the yeast strains pretty affordable to um.
Also sour doughs and just for bread, which kind of
mentioned with the prospectors. But you can use it in biscuits, pancakes,
regular cakes, all kinds of stuff to add flavor. Yeah yeah, um.
And there are so many variations of like strains of
sour dough that North Carolina State biologists robbed Dunn started
(39:08):
the sour Dough Project in my favorite fact of the episode,
where he and some fellow researchers are asking home bakers
to submit their starters for DNA sequencing, h and enzyme
level testing and other biochemistry markers. That's so cool. I know,
I was so happy reading this. They want to know
(39:29):
things like if feeding a starter water versus milk makes
a difference, the impact of the climate, the impact of
the baker. Yeah, yeah, supposedly. Um. I read somewhere that
the theory is that any of the lacto lactic acid
bacteria that get into your starter dough come from your hands. Yes,
(39:51):
And they think that there might be a difference between
male and female bakers. What Yeah, And they're in the summer.
This summer summer, the Sour Dough Project is planning a
sour dough bake off with twenty different bakers and twenty
different starters. DNA sequence the starters baked sunbread and compare
(40:13):
the results. I cannot tell you how excited I was
reading about this, and I was already planning on going
to such a joyous occasion in the name of science.
But it's in Oh hey, boss, do you want to
you want to send us to Belgium? Please come on
for science. I know I hope that they that somehow
(40:35):
the Sour Dough Project hears about this and they're like,
we gotta, we gotta fund these girls to come with us.
We should get in touch with them. We should, um,
you know, I mean we can still. I'm we're both compact.
We could probably fit in someone's suitcase. I am willing
to travel via suitcase if I can. In the name
of sour dough. Yeah, all those kinds of sour dough. Okay.
(40:56):
And the final note on that I will leave you
with is that the Shannaire for when you submit your
starter is adorable. So cute makes it really does make
your starter sound like a pit that Surado project. You
can look it up. Yes, and I think that's that's
(41:16):
sour doughs in a in a in a very in
a very compact ball of bread. Oh stuff sounds so appetising,
I know. And that brings us to the end of
this classic episode. Yes, uh, and all right, I promised
(41:41):
some updates. One isn't an update so much is a
thing that we missed in our research? Um there is? Uh, well, okay,
maybe we missed it. Maybe it was just the news
was not so much public as much as it is
now when a lot of articles are being written about
sour dough. But yeah, so there's a sour dough library
(42:03):
in Belgium. What created to help bakeries preserve their strains. UM.
They currently have about a specimens from twenty five countries
which they keep chilled and feed with the original flower
supplied every year by the by the bakeries. UM. Some
are fed with other things. There's apparently one sour dough
(42:25):
starter from Mexico that's refreshed with lime, eggs and beer beer.
I love this, Oh, I love it. Furthermore, UM an update, Uh,
it seems we talked about about baker's and the the
microbes that they have in their hands and how those
(42:45):
might influence sour dough starters, and it seems from research
that's just come out over the past couple of years
that it's it's not it's not that the microbes on
baker's hands influencing sour dough as much as it is
the process of making sour dough that influences is the
microbes that wind up on baker's hands. So like you
can you can always tell a baker by what kind
(43:08):
of microbe culture they've got going on their skin. Oh
that's fascinating, yeah, oh I love it. Oh. And that
experiment that we talked about happening in Belgium, UM in Uh,
so we did not get to go. Sadly, um did
not come through, but the hosts of the excellent podcast
(43:30):
Gastropod did get to go. I'm only a little bit
burningly jealous. Um, just a tad, just a tad. But
but yeah, So if you want to hear all about
how that went down, UM, go listen. I mean you
should be listening to them anyway. If you dig us,
you'll love them. Um. Their episode of Secrets of Sour
Dough is where they talk all about that. So oh
(43:52):
it's great. It's great. And and if if you I
mean Annie or any listeners do wind up make get
a wild Caught sour Dough starter. Um. You can tell
researchers about it for science, like the lines are open, um.
You can google Wild Sour Dough project or head on
(44:12):
over to Rob Dunn Lab dot com. That's r O
B d U N N l A B dot com. Um.
And it's this team of researchers that are collecting data
about wild sour dough strains from around the world and
are and are doing interesting, interesting stuff with with with
microbiology surrounding it. That's so cool. They'll probably look at
(44:35):
mine and be like, is this lines from Star Wars
and Harry Potter. So what's going on in this apartment?
None of your business? Pretty much what it looks like inact.
I don't know how much clear I need to be.
(44:57):
My sour dough absorbed all the entertainment choices I've I'm excited.
I think I really like I think it's gonna be
like a fun project. I'm debating the names already. I
so look forward to finding out what name you settle
on for your sour dough. Oh yeah, the pun level
(45:18):
is going to be off the Shane I suspect and
speaking of we would love to hear how your starters
are going, listeners, how it turned out, bread that you
got from it, what the names are if you name them,
and you can email us at hello at safer pod
dot com. But we are also on social media. You
(45:38):
can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Tag us
in your photos let us know what's going on. Uh,
we do hope to hear from you. Savor is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts on my
Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks as
always to our superproducers Dylan Fake It and Andrew Howard.
Thanks to you for listening, and we hope that lots
(45:59):
market things are coming your way.
Savor News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Lauren Vogelbaum
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com