What is Sourdough bread and how is it made?

If you have ever mentioned wanting to visit San Francisco, California, the number one thing people always put on their top 10 list (besides visiting Alcatraz and riding the cable cars) is trying the sourdough bread. Sourdough has been around since at least 1500BCE in Ancient Egypt, when we find the first archaeological evidence and written records, but it is likely much older than that. The true origin story of sourdough has long been lost, but it was likely the first form of leavened bread discovered by pre-historic humans.

Sourdough gets its "sour" flavour from wild yeast, which has a symbiotic relationship with the lactobacilli who produce the lactic acid that gives the bread its unique flavour. Cultivated yeast is used in most other breads. To make sourdough is fairly simple, if time consuming. First you have to create a starter dough, though if you're lucky a neighbour already has some starter and you can just ask for about 4 ounces.

Otherwise, It takes about one week to create a starter dough or “mother dough.” After that, only a couple minutes each day to maintain your starter for baking. In fact, some batches of starter dough are hundreds and hundreds of years old! For some reason, the environmental factors around San Francisco work together to make some of the best tasting sourdough in the world.

People have paid upwards of $600 for batches of sourdough starter from San Francisco and the Klondike areas of Alaska for the “authentic flavor.” Unfortunately, the flavor from any starter dough begins changing the moment you move it to a new location. Climate, altitude, types of wild yeast available, different bacteria, etc… all factor in to the flavour of your sourdough. The longer it spends in a new region, the more it tastes like any other sourdough from that region. It can change flavour as quickly as just a few weeks!

If you’re interested in creating your own starter or “Mother Dough” at home, be aware that it takes at least a week to get to the right state to bake with. Depending on how much humidity or temperature variation there is in your kitchen, it may also take longer. Also, there are three things to always remember when creating sourdough starter:

Use Whole grain flour – the yeasts that create the unique flavor live mostly in the cereal hulls, which are discarded to make refined flour. After your starter is made, you can use any flour you want for the actual bread making.

Acidify the flour medium – by using apple cider or pineapple juice instead of water, the yeast has more food and can grown more quickly. Beer also works well and was one of the original ways to make starter.

Maintain the temperature at approximately 24°C (75°F) – this is the ideal thriving temperature for yeast. If you aren’t able to keep it at this temperature, don’t worry, just get it as close as you can (not too warm or too cold). It may just take a bit longer to get your starter to the baking stage.

I found an Instructable that looks to have some fairly good pictures of the process, but there are tons of sourdough starter recipes and methods online so feel free to experiment with your own methods. My husband prefers using half an onion, but others have used pineapple juice, honey, or even beer to get their starter going.