Sourdough International, Inc

THE NEW ODYSSEY OF BREAD

Mention sourdough bread and your mouth starts to water. But when was the last time you ate a piece of sourdough bread without commercial yeast? A sourdough bread made with a natural leaven is a completely different bread with a completely different taste.
For thousands of years breads were leavened by slow fermenting natural leavens. In the 1920s the Industrial Revolution developed fast leavening yeasts to keep up with modern machines producing bread and delicious flavor of bread was lost for unknown reasons for the next 80 years. In the 1970s it was discovered that the flavors of bread were produced by a specific form of bacteria, requiring about 12 hours to form the flavors. In general, fast commercial yeasts contain none of those bacteria. Today home bakers around the world are deserting commercial yeast and returning to slow fermenting leavens from history.
Today home bakers from around the world are again becoming fascinated with natural, slow fermenting leavens from history. We see evidence of this daily at Sourdoughs International, Inc., where we grow, harvest, and dry natural, slow fermenting cultures from around the world.
Why the fascination? The simple answer is that, in many ways, sourdoughs improve the quality of our lives. They have a unique, inherent charisma, and they still produce the best bread the world has ever known. They are soul-satisfying and fun: we call them “endorphins of the kitchen.” They truly offer an extension of a personal quality beyond what we eat to what we do and what we are.
Within the last hundred years, there have been monumental changes in commercial bread baking and these changes are often not an improvement. In centralized industrial bakeries, large baking conglomerates produce packaged breads and refrigerated or frozen dough for distribution to retail stores and local bakeries. The distribution of industrial bread doughs means that even if a bread is baked fresh at a local bakery, it often still contains all the additives and chemicals included by the wholesale producers to grease its progress through the massive machinery – and none of the beneficial microflora that make bread taste like bread. And this is not only an American story: the deterioration of bread quality is worldwide occurring even in the European heartlands of great bread.
As a result the growing cadre of home bakers have continued using natural leavens and today are widely recognized as important participants in The New Odyssey of Bread. They enjoy baking with natural leavens and they are getting a lot of company. It is only a matter of time until commercial bakers join the flood. There is no reason why they shouldn’t. Commercial bakeries in San Francisco rebuilt their cultures as often as 3 times every 24 hours and never used commercial yeast. The best breads available today are produced by home bakers and they are becoming competition to be recognized.