It comes up often, on food blogs, on your social media feeds or at your neighborhood deli (if you are lucky). Sourdough the starter. Sourdough the craft. Sourdough the holy grail of bread. Sourdough the savior of bored hobbyists when the pandemic led to an unexpected shortage of yeast.
Whatever definition jumps out at you, it is probably true. Sourdough is all these and much more, which makes this ancient bread tradition well worth the hype. But let’s get in the weeds a bit to find out why many people crave it and rave about it, and why you probably should too.
The odyssey
What got me into sourdough was my lifelong love affair with good bread, and a once-in-a-lifetime (fingers crossed) global health crisis.
I was born and raised in the Philippines, and grew up loving homegrown pan de sal. Soft, bite-size and utterly cheap breakfast rolls at Php 3–4 a piece (less than a dime), I would eat it with eggs and corned beef like a bag of chips.
But growing up also meant evolution, travel and new experiences, which included different cuisines, delicacies and, of course, bread. From peanut butter and jelly or ham and cheese sandwiches, I would learn to live on baguettes and Boursin during a Euro internship, to savor the banh mhi in Cambodia and to make smoked salmon tartines at home. The more I experimented, the closer I got to bread that I wanted: crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside, and has amazing flavors that are hard to describe.
So packed with flavor, in fact, that sans the toppings and the dairy, the bread should be able to hold its own well.
It was only during the pandemic, when suddenly time was abundant, that attempting to recreate the bread of my dreams became a reality. I wanted good bread in my seclusion, but the deli where I used to get my bread was too far to risk getting COVID for. In the meantime, my feeds were abuzz about sourdough, stoking my curiosity. If people are talking about it, then it must be good, right?
There was only one way to find out: make it myself.
Soon I was making enough loaves that friends would proudly share with others. Before I knew it, I had a home-based business. I named it Rise Artisanal to honor how I picked myself up after my career crashed and burned because of COVID-19, and my love for handmade craft.
Why sourdough?
The first thing you should know about sourdough is that it is nothing new. Sourdough baking is an ancient craft, a process of making bread using only three ingredients: flour, water and salt. It was discovered in Egypt circa 4000 BC when wheat grains mixed with water by accident. The fusion yielded a live culture — the levain — which causes bread to rise.
For many years, that was how bread was made, until more food technologies were invented to accelerate production. With greater focus on profit-making, the levain was eventually replaced by instant yeast, the days-long bread fermentation process was eradicated, and flour, like sugar, became refined. Unknown to us then, they were already fine, in their rough form, with whole wheat’s nutritional benefits in the bran intact. As a result, the Wonderbread, the Pullman loaf, or the local “tasty” bread became our bread of choice — soft, white, but bereft of the nutrients that our bodies need — because the bread and flour industry leaders made that choice for us.
With sourdough now making a comeback, it is easy to see why big business chose to abandon it, and why its return must be supported, sustained, and enjoyed.
There are many reasons why that is easy to do.
FLAVOR
Food is nothing without flavor. As a bare minimum, sourdough that many people are willing to queue up for should taste great. And it does. Apart from its known tanginess, there is salt, a layer of nuttiness, and the smell of the woods in a single slice. But don’t take my word for it. Try it, and let your senses run amok.
No sourdough loaf is the same. The type and volume of the flour impacts the taste. The fermentation time affects the acidity. The ingredients used to cultivate a starter influences the flavor. The temperature in the baking environment is critical to dough development. Too many balls up in the air that the baker is expected to juggle well, with his or her own unique touch, tools and temperament. This, I believe, is why most sourdough bakers you find online generously share what they know: the perfect sourdough loaf comes in many forms, it is different for everyone, and there should be at least one baker crazy enough to make it for you wherever you are in the world.
TEXTURE
Darker boules and batards tend to get a bad rap for being a tough chew or downright hard to slice through (if movies are to be trusted) but that should not be the case with the sourdough variety. Whether using whole grains or just regular bread flour, a good sourdough loaf should have a crisp, outer crust and a soft, airy crumb.
That effect can be achieved by experimenting with hydration levels (the water to flour ratio). What I have always wanted, and only recently got, was an outer crust that cracks like a potato chip, so it should be very thin and crackles as soon as the knife pierces its skin. Unlocking that achievement entailed what felt like a lifetime of frustration, an amount of patience I did not know I had and a ton of regular practice.
If your sourdough is giving your jaw a workout, it is either stale or fake. Be warned: a bread that is labeled sourdough does not always mean that it is. Some sourdough loaves use a combination of the starter and instant yeast, with the latter outweighing the portion of the former. Some shorten the folding and shaping process. Some may even skip the overnight fermentation process altogether. To avert potential disaster, steer clear of “sourdough” loaves that are wrapped in plastic (just ask any French boulangerie why they wrap their loaves in paper) and those that are priced similarly as yeasted breads. There is a reason why sourdough is a bit more expensive, and it has nothing to do with your baker’s branding. Sourdough is sourdough because it uses more energy from a human source (it is a handmade artisanal craft) and a power source (fermentation, especially here in the tropics, requires refrigeration), and demands a lot more time (2–3 days).
SHELF LIFE
All that effort and patience becomes worthwhile when you realize that with sourdough, you no longer have to consume an entire loaf within a few days after purchase. You no longer have to confront the misery of food waste if you live alone. Just pop a few small slices into your mouth then store the rest of your loaf in a linen cloth at room temperature for up to five days. If you think you would need more time to consume it, you can store sliced sourdough bread in the freezer instead to let it keep for months. It will taste as crunchy and fresh as bread baked the same day — perfect for when that sudden craving for a sandwich comes out of nowhere.
Think for a second how this could benefit people with little to no access to refrigeration, or to electricity. People who work in geographically isolated areas. People who choose to escape the chaos of urban life and live in the woods. People who are forced to evacuate by an impending storm. If you have sourdough in your daily life, or learn to bake breads that way, you won’t have to starve so quickly, and have the nutrients that canned goods don’t to sustain you amidst the uncertainty.
Hard to say the same for yeasted breads that sit for a while at room temperature. The commercial yeast they use does not have the acids and live culture found in the sourdough fermentation process. Yeasted breads are like fresh produce. They wilt easily and must be consumed right away. If immediate consumption is not possible, fruits and vegetables are pickled to avoid waste. In the same vein, sourdough is bread already in pickled form, and if properly stored (freezer-friendly!), it won’t go stale for a long time.
HEALTH BENEFITS
Like most fermented foods, good bacteria that our guts need abound in just a spoonful of sourdough starter: yeasts, lactic acid bacteria (LAB), and acetic acid bacteria (AAB). LAB, for instance, can help improve digestion of lactose, prevent intestinal infections, and control some types of cancer. Acetic acid, on the other hand, is a useful by-product of AAB which helps control blood sugar, and lowers blood pressure and inflammation. These good bacteria — the building blocks of sourdough — produce the carbon dioxide that leavens the bread.
Sourdough bread is no pandemic fad. It is a revival of a classic, like Rod Stewart aging gracefully in his Great American Songbook. Hard to wither away, harder to forget, no matter how impressive the next big thing is. Could there be bread better than sourdough? Anything is possible, but for us aficionados, we are happy and content with what we’ve got.
Sourdough reclaimed the top spot in our hearts not only for the good reasons, but also for the right reasons. Its resurrection was triggered by the pandemic. There was this urgent clamor for us to change. To live simply. To eat healthy. It took a global health emergency that killed millions to trigger that epiphany. Why go back to the way things were?
Sourdough is back to help us heal ourselves and the planet. Enjoy it, eat more of it, and celebrate that this beautiful bread is now part of the new normal.
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Mai Mislang is a writer, musician and entrepreneur. Before she launched Rise Artisanal, a sourdough micro-bakery, she was a speechwriter and Assistant Secretary/Chief of Staff of Presidential Communications during the term of President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III. After a career in government spanning nine years, she went on her own as a consultant for non-profits. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Tourism from the University of the Philippines and a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School. She is also the lead singer of The Blue Rats, a blues band in Manila, Philippines.