Benefits Of Sourdough

My first starter!

     One of my new year's resolutions is to make more food from home, using whole ingredients, rather than buying things with tons of extra ingredients from the store. Yes, this is going to be a TON off work. So I am starting things very slow and mastering one thing at a time. With this trend of homemaking food rather than buying from the store I am seeing a rise in people making sourdough.   

    I have always loved the satisfying videos of people scoring, decorating, and even painting, their sourdough and I always thought it would be something I would love to learn someday. Little did I know that someday would be today! The only things I knew about sourdough were that I needed a starter and they can look really cool after scoring so I thought it might be a good idea to do some research before I got into it. 

    My first question was how do you make sourdough and a starter? A starter is made by adding water and some kind of whole, unbleached flour to a jar and letting it ferment in a warm place for a week, feeding it every day, in order to encourage the signature sourdough bacteria to grow! Once a starter is established it is fed and at the peak off the feeding frenzy it is used to make a bread dough that is set out to rise for several hours and then baked into bread. Phew! Thats a time commitment! I also learned that there are so many things that go into the perfect loaf. Room temperature, humidity, percentages of flour, water, salt, and starter, the time you let your loaf proof, the type of flour you use, and even different mixins. 

    If you are overwhelmed right now, don't worry, so was I. I almost gave up before I even started! I have a home bakery and a baby, there was no way I had time to adopt another kid named sourdough. Then, I thought to myself, why do people do this if it is so hard? So I took a bit of a deep dive into the health benefits and history of sourdough. 

    I did a quick WebMD search of sourdough (Sourdough Bread: Is It Good For You?) and found that sourdough "is an excellent source of calcium, potassium, magnesium, folate, and niacin." However, the main (nutritional) reason that people are making this, according to the people I follow, are for the antioxidants. These antioxidants are amazing for gut health. They are also rumored to help lower the risk of cancer and some chronic diseases and illnesses. "Goodness gracious!" I thought, "All this from a slice of bread?" If you're anything like me, You would much rather eat a slice of bread than a leaf of kale. So I changed my mind and decided to give it another chance.

    *Disclaimer* I do realize that bread is still bread. Different flours have different nutritional values and too much grain is bad for you. I don't plan on going on a bread only diet. 

    After more research into the sourdough making process and reading recipe after recipe, I found out that sourdough is less about the recipe and more about the method. The best sourdough bakers barely have a recipe and just go with the flow of the dough! They have their initial ratios and then adjust their bulk ferment time, shaping, proofing time and even secondary ingredients or add ins, based on what their dough looks like at each stage. I also found that there are so many ways to screw up your bread, but just as many ways to salvage it. You can turn a wet, over proofed dough into focaccia or put it into a bread pan instead of a dutch oven. You can bake an under proofed dough as is and if its gummy in the middle turn it into a big bread bowl or breadcrumbs or repurpose the whole thing into a bread pudding. There are techniques for effectively reviving a stale or burnt loaf and freezing a loaf to save for another day! The starter even is so resilient that you can revive a starter from dehydrated dust/chips or from just a few grams leftover in your jar from a bake day that used a little more starter than you expected. 

    When all was said and done, I found that sourdough is a very complicated process that has a million ways to work and none of them are really "wrong". It leaves so much room for creativity and adjustments to achieve the flavor profiles you want. Sourdough is nothing to be afraid of! So bear with me as I start this adventure in sourdough and learn with me so that hopefully by the end of the year we are all pros in this ancient technique in bread making.