Elevate Your Holiday Gifts By Gifting Sourdough

Elevate Your Holiday Gifts By Gifting Sourdough

Originally published on Medium

This holiday season, give yourself a break from the madness of last-minute shopping by giving away sourdough — a tasty, healthy, and simple bread that your favorite artisan bakery would be happy to bake for you.

What is sourdough?

Sourdough is the ancient process of making bread. 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. This levain (or starter) is simply a mixture of flour and water that is constantly nurtured, contrary to its more modern, chemically-induced iteration — instant yeast.

The bread resulting from this process is also referred to as sourdough or sourdough bread.

At the height of the pandemic, the sourdough craft was resuscitated when people suddenly holed up in their homes started baking en masse and inadvertently caused a shortage of yeast.

In my biased view, we are better for it.

If you have not tried sourdough before, read on to know why it is a worthy Christmas present and why it deserves a place at your holiday table.

Though experiencing a revival, sourdough never really went away. Many old-time bakeries such as Boudin and Tartine in San Francisco, Berkshire Mountain Bakery in Massachusetts, and Poilane in Paris have been keeping alive for years bread that is free from industrial intervention, bread that yields all the vitamins and nutrients our bodies need, and bread that preserves the complex flavors making it surprisingly delicious. Good sourdough bread holds up well on its own, making butter, jams, cheese and cured meats merely optional.

A healthy gift is a thoughtful gift. It shows that you care about the well-being of your loved ones. A gold watch or a signature handbag would be nice too, but do our friends really need that after two years of house arrest?

After the pandemic, one cannot go wrong with being more health conscious, and sourdough is a way to make things right again. For one, sourdough bread is fermented. It cannot rise without a mature starter, which usually ferments overnight. As I have discussed in this article, “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.”

Without our health we are nothing - a reminder that could speak loudly with a loaf of bread as a gesture of gratitude and love.

After the pandemic, one cannot go wrong with being more health conscious, and sourdough is a way to make things right again.

Sourdough is freezer friendly

The major downside of eating mostly fresh food, especially if one is too busy to prepare meals, is that the shelf life of produce and homemade bread is too short. Not everyone is kitchen-ready, or have the desire to be and take the time to cook, much less pickle, leftover vegetables.

The good news is sourdough keeps longer than most breads. It stays fresh for up to three days (may be longer if stored in a linen cloth or bread bag), which may still pose a waste issue for those who live solo. On the third day, however, whatever is left may be sliced and stored properly in the freezer. When you crave, just pull it out, let thaw on the counter or toss straight into the toaster oven. It will come out just as tasty as the first day.

Slicing prior to freezing is recommended for its weight management benefits — you only consume what you can, when you can. Sliced bread thaws much faster too, so you won’t have to wait too long to get your fix.

Let’s say you just love sourdough too much that one variant is not enough. You like to have a bit of everything — seeded, dark rye, seeded rye, cranberry walnut — whenever you want it. Out of nowhere, someone gifts you two giant tubs of ice cream. You now need to make room for it. Whatever it is, we’ve been down that road before: a freezer that seems to get smaller by the day during the holiday season.

Not to worry — sourdough bread is also capable of reinventing itself. Love granola? Try this recipe. Making a salad? Add some sourdough croutons for a flavorful crunch. Entertaining? Cap the meal with this bread pudding.

For foodies like me, edible presents are the best.

In my opinion, gifting food is never a bad idea because everyone has to eat at some point. That means that when it comes to gifts, food like sourdough spares you from a ton of thinking! Male, female, LGBTQ — whatever the preferred pronoun is, a sourdough gift applies to a 7 billion+ category: human.

There is, however, an important caveat: gluten. Many people are allergic to it, and sourdough has wheat, which contains gluten. While studies have shown that sourdough can counteract gluten sensitivities, let common sense prevail. If you have friends who can only consume gluten-free products, honor that and gift them something else.

By enjoying and sharing sourdough, not only do you enable good health. You are also likely supporting a small artisanal craft business.

In his book The Rise of the Craft Brand, author Ben Zifkin talks about quality as a building block of craft brand success. He further breaks down quality into three elements: superior materials, better-sourced ingredients, and sustainability.

By design, really good sourdough typically emerges from a craft business. Aside from ticking all three boxes, sourdough undergoes a tempestuous baking process, with time and temperature in constant conflict, and the baker, though trained, a subjective arbiter. When a loaf is finally formed and shaped, it still has to undergo overnight fermentation to allow the acids and good bacteria to form. As I have already discussed in this article, the titans of industry that fast-tracked bread production had profits to make, and making room for this long but vital nutritional step in the bread-making process would have cut through their margins. As they dominated, so did the focus on overhead reduction, which is why for many years, the only bread we have come to know is Wonderbread, which is not wonderful at all.

This is not to say that the bigger bakeries are unable to manufacture sourdough. They have, after all, the industrial mixers, refrigerators and the budget for outsized ovens. But all of that capital investment has to be repaid, and repayment would be delayed if bread, in sourdough baker speak, is retarded, or allowed to rise overnight. To be sure of the quality, try to get sourdough bread from an artisan, a baker who bakes bread by hand, and is committed to preserving that process and the flour-salt-water trifecta — the way bread was made in ancient Egypt.

The good news is, if you reside in Metro Manila, Philippines, there is a new artisan bakery in town crazy enough to embrace the tempest, all in the name of good bread.

Why Rise Artisanal?

Many a sourdough baker have emerged from their foxholes since the height of the pandemic, and I am proud to be one of them.

Like many independent professionals, I had lost work contracts when the world economy suddenly contracted and experienced a deep paralysis.

Given the sudden abundance of time, I took online courses and learned new skills. One skill stood out for its uncanny ability in alleviating my grief, and that was baking. Prior to March 2020, I had never baked anything in my life. Not even cookies.

The combined need for healthy, tasty bread and COVID-19 risk avoidance proved the mother of invention. It forced me to learn to bake bread from home.

That process became the source of my serenity. I was motivated by the challenge, and the ability to instantly enjoy the small fruits of my pain. What followed was this compelling need to preserve my peace going into the new normal.

Without giving it much thought, and with the love and support of my family and friends who patiently tried, tested and helped improve my loaves, I decided to turn my new pandemic hobby into a full-fledged business in 2020, calling it Rise Artisanal Breads (Rise Artisanal, for short) as an homage to the phoenix rising from the ashes and the virtue of survival. Rise Artisanal started offering sourdough (which took more time to fine-tune) in May 2021.

But what, you might ask, makes Rise Artisanal different from all the other sourdough-hobby-turned-businesses within the pandemic cohort alone?

The short answer is customization. There is now so much good bread out there, but we do what we do in small batches because each customer is different. Some have allergies. Others are vegan. Some like it plain. Others love add-ons. It is harder to get a nut-free variant from an industrial baker that makes seeded sourdough in bulk.

But those personal choices are what our bakery exists for, and we are delighted to meet those demands. We want bread enjoyment to be inclusive, and recognize the efforts of the plant-based community, so all our sourdough loaves are vegan. We want people with health issues such as diabetics to still enjoy the occasional dessert, so we use sourdough in our cookies and pies. We want healthy food like sourdough accessible to all.

In our view, when you want to enjoy something, and are willing to part with a portion of your hard-earned money for it, it has to be perfect, or very close to it. The product we are about to enjoy has to make us feel that it had our personal preferences in mind. Isn’t that why a well-tailored suit is worth going to Savile Row for? Surely there is room for bespoke bread too, which is how we intend to serve our customers — the personalized way.

We want bread enjoyment to be inclusive, and recognize the efforts of the plant-based community, so all our sourdough loaves are vegan. We want people with health issues such as diabetics to still enjoy the occasional dessert, so we use sourdough in our cookies and pies. We want healthy food like sourdough accessible to all.

The service

That Rise Artisanal was born at a time of limited personal interaction is one of the reasons why we do business in a way that is more personal. That sudden loss of freedom and community at the onset of COVID-19 is still palpable that finally gaining some of that back is a gift we cannot afford to take for granted. That we are here, alive and well, and baking bread to help others feel alive and well, is truly an honor.

We do that by accommodating additional requests that are doable without the extra charge, such as:

We wrap our sourdough loaves in a way that reflects our purpose: good for humans and good for the planet. Storage instructions are printed on paper on which customized notes are handwritten. We pack them neatly into boxes with a ribbon and a card. The same goes for our sourdough desserts such as the apple pie and the brownies, which are baked in a reusable aluminum tray.

We deliver our loaves to our customers, and offer discounts for bulk orders. This is our way of trying to reduce the carbon footprint of motorcycle deliveries, which in Metro Manila is significant, since many of us have become so dependent on them. If you plan to gift sourdough, we ship for free as long as the minimum number of loaves is met. This takes a load off of already busy people, many with children, driven to almost insanity during the holiday frenzy. That cumbersome duty of thinking of what to give, wrapping those gifts, and painfully writing by hand the same greeting on each of the cards, can actually be outsourced. Just message us here to know more.

Before you know it, our favorite season is upon us again. Indeed, it is a season of giving but it is also a season of excess. Perhaps you would like to consider giving something that is far from being deemed excessive, which is arguably, anything healthy?

If you are still reading this, do consider upping the ante of your holiday gifts this year by giving a gift that keeps on giving: sourdough. It is delicious, worth sharing with everyone, and keeps well for a long time. It might be challenging to re-gift, as it might also be something your loved ones are looking forward to.

Mai Mislang is a writer, musician and entrepreneur. Before she launched Rise Artisanal, a sourdough 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.

 

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