At least, not tame yeast.
That's the gospel according to Ed Wood, a retired pathologist and sourdough bread expert. I called on Wood because I wanted to know where sourdough came from. Bear with me, because I'm about to sound a wee bit stupid, or at least baking-impaired.
Pictured: Sourdough starter I had absolutely nothing to do with. (My DIY is pasted on, yay!) This image comes from Flickr user fooey, and shows starter on day six of a 14-day process. It's under CC.
I have seen people make sourdough--specifically, Amish Friendship Bread--by snipping off a bit of fermented "starter" dough and mixing it with flour and water. But it occurred to me last winter, while flipping through an old TIME/LIFE illustrated book on the cuisine of the American Northwest, that I had no earthly idea where the starter came from. ("Little plastic baggies handed out by old ladies at church" being an obvious, but not very satisfying, answer.)
Real sourdough, Wood tells me, begins with nothing but flour, water and your friendly, native microscopic flora and fauna. Set out a mixture of wet flour, and wild yeasts and bacteria will drop in to munch on it. The yeast produce fermentation and make the bread rise by consuming sugars in the flour and breaking them down into water, alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. The bacteria also eat sugars, leaving behind acids that give sourdough its tangy taste. There are starter recipes out there that call for store-bought yeast, but Wood brushes them off as flavorless junk. San Francisco's Exploratorium science museum has a more objective explanation. They say wild works best because yeast and bacteria are balanced. Purchase your yeast, and any wild bacteria will end up hopelessly outnumbered, unable to compete with yeast for sugary sustenance. No bacteria, no flavor.
I'm a pessimist by nature, especially when it comes to baking, so I had to ask: With all the wild bacteria and yeast out there, do you always get the right ones?
"Oh, no," Wood told me. "You have to be a little bit lucky to get a good wild yeast that will leaven the bread and a good bacteria for flavor. You don't always end up with something worth making bread out of."
How do you get it right? Trial and error. "Bad" bacteria will taste (or smell) worse. The wrong yeast will lead to flat bread. The good news: An unfortunate starter--no matter how funky--isn't likely to make you sick. The bad news: No matter how experienced you get, making starter remains more art than science.
But it was an art that worked for thousands of years. Again, I'm baking-impaired, but I had no idea that sourdough was the world's first type of rising bread. In fact, it was really the only type of rising bread until the middle ages, when European bakers began using the yeasty byproducts of beer-making, instead.
The first sourdough bread makers were the ancient Egyptians. Back in the early 1990s, Wood worked with National Geographic archaeologists to recreate Egyptian bread, using the wild yeasts and bacteria of Cairo and a recipe based on evidence uncovered at an ancient bakery once used to feed the men who built the smallest of the Giza Pyramids in 2470 BCE.
Egypt isn't the only place Wood has traveled in search of sourdough. Wood lived in the Middle East for several years and spent much of that time collecting samples of generations-old starter from bakeries throughout the region. Wood sells some of these starters online at Sourdough International, and he's also written a couple of books about the geographical and archaeological variations in sourdough recipes.
The Exploratorium also has some pleasantly non-intimidating instructions for making your own starter.
Thumbnail: Chris R. Sims
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Hey Maggie - awesome to see you back here :)
On topic: this post makes me miss sourdough. Badly. Why does Japan not have good sourdough?? :(
Maggie! You're back! I love you! (Well, your posts anyway.)
And they don't have good sourdough where I am, either (also in Japan).
What are the odds of me coming in here to comment and finding that someone has already made THE EXACT COMMENT I WAS GOING TO MAKE?
13tales and Kyle must be cosmic twins! :-)
Seriously: people who have a good sourdough going will almost always be proud of it an willing to share. So that's the best way to get it. There are bakers in France and Spain who are using sourdough cultures started hundreds of years ago. They'll gladly give you a chunck if you ask. (although I doubt they'll send some to Japan)
But if you really want to start one yourself, and don't want to do the trial and error thing to get the right yeasts and bacteria, here's a tip: buy some nice, ripe, organic grapes and squeeze them into the starter dough in stead of water. Without washing them of course. Your first dough will contain grape skins and seeds but that doesn't matter: the first steps of getting a good dough started involve a lot of adding flour and throwing away dough. By the time your dough will be ready to bake, most of them will be gone. The grapes must be organic: non-organically grown grapes are covered in a thick layer of pesticides.
Impressive... so many simple things we get for granted are so old actually. Your posts are always very interesting Maggie. Good to see you back at boingboing.
If you'd like to learn more about the biochemistry of yeast fermentation (and all other processes in bread-making), I can't recommend Emily Buehler's Bread Science highly enough. Not only does it provide a fascinatingly thorough literature review of bread-related research, but it also provides an excellent practical understanding of things like how allowing your dough to autolyse improves the eventual product or how particular shaping techniques yield better loaves.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/bookreviews/breadscience
That photo looks like something out of a film by the other Ed Wood.
Really, it's not so hard. I left out my jar of flour and water in a warm place and four or five days later I had sour dough. I've now kept the same culture for two and a half years.
I think if I can get it right first time, on the other side of the country from all the mythical San Fransisco sour dough yeasts that are supposed to be floating around, then anyone can do it.
Keeping it alive is easier still. It stays in the fridge. If I've been baking, I just add more flour and water. If I go through baking dry spells, I forget about it for three, four or even five weeks. No problem, I take it out, wake it back up, add more flour and water, and pop it back in again. It tastes great.
I've dried out and crumbled up a few clones of my culture in case my #1 ever does bite the dust, but so far never had to use them.
I like to improve my chances of getting the starter going by using fruit juice instead of water for the initial mixture. The acidity of the juice make the media somewhat selective for the appropriate yeasts and bacteria.
I hang out in some baking circles online, and Ed Wood's sourdo.com starters are always recommended to people wanting to get into baking with wild yeast. I use the France culture from the site myself, and find the flavor it imparts to be wonderfully sweet and complex every time ("sourdough" is a bit of a misnomer that just refers to wild yeast, they're not all sour like San Francisco sourdough). I'm not sure if he can ship internationally but I can't see any reason why he couldn't: the starters themselves come dry and sealed in packages, so you gaijin might want to give the site a shot. I'd also recommend his book Classic Sourdoughs for instructions on proper care of a starter (and more importantly, what to do when things go awry).
@13tales: is there *any* sourdough in Japan? I spent a year in Tokyo, and I couldn't find any whatsoever.
This may sound gross, but you can use your crotch to create the starter.
I have some 150-year-old starter that has been in my husband's family for over 35 years. Came across the country with the pioneers in a friend's family. So great, and love the "hooch" it produces on top as it is stored. Stir it in for a great flavor!
www.wildfermentation.com/
Wild Fermentation is a great resource and book by Sandor Ellix Katz. The site and book will really get you enthusiastic about fermenting and using wild yeasts, although the science of the process is secondary to the feel-good properties of fermenting and the recipes. His philosophy is that fermenting is natural, ancient, very healthy and very simple to execute.
I periodically go through phases of making sourdough bread, and if I don't have a starter, I'll try to "catch" several different blends initially, and see which one turns out best.
Here are some options. All of them start with warm water and flour, and I initially incubate a VERY runny version of the flour/water/fruit/seeds in a thermos for 24 hours before straining out the fruit/seeds and proceeding to grow out the rest of the starter.
Here are some candidates for sources of culture:
-grapes. The whitish bloom on grapes is a yeast. Throw a few unwashed grapes into a runny flour/warm water mixture for 24 hours ('runny'= very, very runny pancake batter consistency), remove the grapes, and you've just innoculated your flour with the yeast/bacteria from the grapes.
-caraway seeds: this is a traditional Russian way of getting a starter going, even if you have no intention of making a caraway-flavored bread (I learned this from this cookbook, which also contains a lot of other Russian fermentation recipes for everything from dark rye bread to kvass 'beer' to brined watermelon: http://www.amazon.com/Art-Russian-Cuisine-Anne-Volokh/dp/0020381026).
Strain the seeds out of the starter after the first 24 hours- starter is just a yeast source only- even if you're planning on adding caraway seeds to your bread, you don't want old rotten ones floating around in there.
plum skins: same principle as grapes
'wild' method as described in Maggie's article
In my experience, 'poor-quality' starters don't make a bad-tasting bread, they just don't leaven the dough enough. I like trying multiple options so as to increase my chances of finding an aggressive, yeasty strain. Otherwise you can always take your wimpy-but-tasty starter and add a little commercial yeast to the recipe to give it the leavening. Most cookbook sourdough recipes tell you to do that anyway.
Re: Japan and sourdough. In addition to the baker or person making the bread having to get the right kind of local yeasts for a properly flavored bread, natural yeast populations vary by locale. San Francisco sourdough is well known because of it's specific flavors. You can't get that just anywhere because of the natural yeasts that occur in that area but not elsewhere.
It is my understanding, that even if you were to take a sourdough starter that was begun and had lived in San Fran and move it elsewhere, that the yeasts in it would eventually consist only of the naturally occurring yeasts at the final location. I could be wrong.
I would hazard to guess that in addition to potential cultural factors, Japan lacks "good" sourdough due to the yeasts that occur there not producing a bread with a good taste.
The Amish are brain-hacked meat puppets doing the will of this alien yeast.
Do you really think unaltered humans could raise a whole barn in one day? Or eat scrapple?
I think the general tip is that there are more useful bacteria on the outside of things like grain or fruit (or veges - I've seen one starter recipie with rhubarb) than the middle. So whole-wheat flour, whole grapes or raisins, that kind of thing.
These kiwi guys have been researching wine science, which is relevant: It seems like, in a nice sweet juice, the heat and CO2 and alcohol produced by the yeast can encourage them to dominate from quite small numbers.
How you keep it afterwards is just as important: using it regularly improves the strength, and NOT REFRIDGERATING. One can loose a perfectly good bug to the bread equivalent of flesh-eating horror disease.
No, you are not wrong about the naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria. Local organisms will take over the original seed culture within a couple of feedings of the barm. Purchasing a seed culture from some other area is futile if you are expecting the flavor of that particular seed culture. You can only get San Francisco sourdough in San Francisco.
Peter Reinhart's books are the master on the subject of wild yeast breads. The Bread Baker's Apprentice (Cookbook of the Year, James Beard Winner) is especially good on the subject of sourdoughs.
Here is a relevant comic:
http://www.sphericalcow.org/index.php?p=5
I really don't know about all this fruit juice, grape skins, catching cultures from the air talk. In nature, the place a yeast-and-bacteria ecosystem lives is on its food, and many of these ecosystems are very specific about what they eat. So, if you want to find a nice symbiosis of yeast and bacteria which will digest grain starches, look on the outside skins of grains!
There are yeasts and bacteria that will eat fruit sugars, sure - they live on fruit, and they're not optimised for munching on grain starches. I think it's more likely that fruit juice just creates an acidic environment which will keep other airborne nasties multiplying until the good stuff gets established.
I've started several cultures with crushed organic grains of various types, mixed with flour and water. All of them have worked, been tough enough to withstand me forgetting about them in the back of the fridge, and made loaves with great flavour. You can buy any organic whole grains from healthfood stores, and they'll all have a skin of yeast you can work with.
A customer once complained about the sourdough pancakes being really sour and asked "How old is this?" The owner/chef came out of the kitchen and told them that he was pretty sure that it was 26 years old. That was 12 yeas ago. The restaurant was sold, but that sourdough lives on and we still get loaves for Christmas from the same "start" now 38.
Everyone says we should eat less "processed" foods these days, but fermentation is a good example of a process that enhances the nutritional value of the food instead of depleting it. It's amazing to think how many food were traditional prepared through a fermentation process; cheese, yogurt, sausage, saurkraut, pickles, ketchup...
When living in Tunisia a couple summer ago, I was surprised to learn that most of the world drinks their milk soured (a natural fermentation process). In Tunisia, they call it "chicken milk." I think the current probiotic trend is a result of our tendency to neglect the time-honored tradition of fermentation.
Huzzah!
Welcome back Maggie. I'm still waiting for you to divorce your extraordinarily lucky husband... A beautiful mind does it for me every time.
to the moderator:
Hate the new layout. What was so good about having each entry in full was that you could scan them all and find that something you thought you had no interest in was in fact worth investigating further. Endless clicking and waiting gets boring quick.
I have been baking bread for years, but once I started using wild yeast starter, my bread is much better. If you refresh the starter often enough, it doesn't really get very sour.
I prefer to call it levain.
I have my first "from scratch" starter in progress. A fun science project.
Daniel Leader's "Local Breads" has been a great guide.
@oneswellfoop
Actually, I think it has more to do with the culture here - it's hard to find any bread that I like, period. Japan has no long-standing tradition of bread-making, and modern japanese people seem to prefer bread of the "white, soft, and sugary variety". Yuck.
My favourite bread in the world is from a boutique-bakery called "Phillipa's Bread" - they're based in Richmond, Melbourne and they sell from a few places around the city. They do a fucking gorgeous sourdough that's crusty, and chewy, and so damned delicious that it gives me breadgasms. That's right, I said "breadgasms".
Dammit. I'm sad. I want some now. Thanks, boingboing :(
I have had sourdough in Japan from hoity-toity shops in Tokyo, but it never seems sour enough. Plus, it's really expensive.
Overall, the bread situation is way, way better than it was 10 years ago.
Ive been making sourdough bread for years, i have a batch on the fizzle in the kitchen now. Sour dough is said to be much better for the stomach and guts. I love it and it doesnt usually taste sour unless it gets abit old.
Jeffrey Hammelman's book on bread baking changed the way I bake - its really simple - mostly just flour, starter, water and salt:
Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes
He has a great discussion of how to make different types of starters, and what sorts of starters to keep around. Buy a scale, though!
I tried making sourdough once, flour + water, easy enough. The result smelled like a mix of alcohol and vomit. A bit embarrassing really.
The result smelled like a mix of alcohol and vomit
Sounds like it was about ready.
Someone once said to me it's a shame the alcohol in bread burns off in cooking, otherwise it would be the best thing since hash brownies.
If you can get rye flour you can always make a starter. Takes a week.
Every day put equal volumes of rye flour and warm water (say a cup measure) into a tub and stir. After day 4 or 5 you will have a perfectly good starter. Rye flour seems to have its own natural yeasts built in. Works well for me.