Sourdough has been having a moment. It’s always had its devotees, but when COVID lockdowns occurred, sourdough really got a boost. What looked like too much work before — what do you mean I have to feed it every day? — suddenly seemed like a feasible objective.
I am personally a huge fan of sourdough. If we are ordering sandwiches someplace, I always opt for the sourdough bread if it is available.
FYI, it takes a lot of work to make really good sourdough. Not too much work, just you have to have your wits about you. You would think that you wouldn’t forget to add flour and water to it, but, maybe you get busy with other things… I’ve called sourdough the Chia Pet of baking. If you aren’t familiar with the Chia Pet, you can check it out here. Chia Pets were supposedly easy to grow but also were high maintenance, didn’t last long, and tended to get moldy. They had their moments a few decades ago, but they are still around.
Making great bread takes practice
My luck was best with the home-grown starter. It wasn’t too fussy and didn’t seem to care whether it was fed every 12 or 24 or 36 hours. It wasn’t too sour, and it wasn’t too mild. The Goldilocks of sourdough, if you will.
I also had some starter from San Francisco. All sourdoughs are somewhat different because their mix of microbes are different. In theory, they should, over time, all become just like the local sourdough, but over a period of 6-8 months that never happened to my starters.
The San Fran sourdough starter began with a packet of dried starter from, you guessed it, San Francisco. That starter made really sour bread. So strongly acid. And it was finicky. It went from yeasty to fruity to rotten fruit/ferment fast, maybe over a course of 12-18 hours. So it wasn’t very tolerant of flexible feeding schedules. It made good bread, but it was so sour.
Having two sourdough starters — the Copley and the San Fran — simultaneously at work meant bread every day, or if not bread, then pancakes or something else. The starters lived in jars in separate cupboards in the house, and only one was ever allowed out into the light at a time– to minimize cross-contamination.
Twice the feeding, twice the dishes and cleanup, twice the bread. Well, we were overrun. I dried quite a bit of sourdough starter from each one (now safely stored in plastic bags inside jars in my freezer) so they can be re-constituted. But we needed a break. For now, we are off sourdough.
Here’s their goodbye poem:
Sourdough: I let them go
One named Copley, one called
San Francisco. Also Alaska
as if all Alaskan microbes
made the same bread.
The Chia Pet of baking.
Unnecessary but wanted
nonetheless. Also loved
the flavor of, but as it’s said
they didn't always love me back.
They too aggressively yearned
to Yeast Me Now. Let me
edit, explicate--hah hah, as if.
As if the explanation mattered
to the lost, the gone, the battered.
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