Sourdough

Requiring time and patience to get right (plus a little help from some invisible friends) a properly fermented sourdough loaf demands appreciation, writes Catherine Morgan

- Catherine Morgan

In the 2016 Netflix series Cooked, journalist and author Michael Pollan argues that, when it comes to our daily bread, industrialisation may have been a step in the wrong direction. “Often in the rush to make something cheaper we overlook the reason why it was done in the somewhat more painstaking way,” he says. “In the case of bread, what we may have overlooked is the importance of a long slow sourdough fermentation.” This process, he hypothesises, is why traditional sourdough bread may be easier to digest than the mass-produced loaves made by today’s bread-making methods.

“A lot of us think of sourdough as a style of bread,” he says. “But what sourdough is, is the traditional way all bread was made until only about 100 years ago. Sourdough is the proper way to make bread.”

Fermentation

Transforming three basic ingredients — flour, water and salt — into a traditional crusty sourdough loaf requires a starter culture (also called a ‘mother’, ‘chief’ or ‘leaven’), the aforementioned “invisible friends” and an ecosystem of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria that are naturally present in flour and the environment. It is these fermenting bugs that give sourdough its distinctive flavour and character, through the production of compounds such as carbon dioxide, alcohol, and organic acids as they feast off the flour.

Getting started