We’ve heard it since we were young, whether it was through Bible studies (for you unfortunate many; I, myself, was stricken with the Catholic upbringing), or simply through unknown, omniscient adage, that “Bread is the Staff of Life.” It really is, if you think about it. Whether you agree with it or not, current FDA dietary guidelines dictate that 60% of our diet should reign from carbohydrates, most of those sourced from cereal grains – bread included. Bread, in one form or another, has been one of the principal forms of food for man from earliest times. In the British Museum’s Egyptian galleries you can see actual loaves made and baked over 5,000 years ago. Wheat cultivations have been found in pits where human settlements flourished 8,000 years ago. Further back, people in the Stone Age made solid cakes from stone-crushed barley and wheat. A millstone used for grinding corn discovered in the Andean mountains is posited to be 7,500 years old. The Romans used it as a form of social stratification, so noted by Pliny A.D. 70 : “The wheat of Cyprus is swarthy and produces a dark bread, for which reason it is generally mixed with the white wheat of Alexandria.” It has been relentlessly argued that bread is both the saving grace and the dying grace of our civilization, providing wholesome nutritious food, and modern illnesses like diabetes.
Yet, in modern times, in looking back through bread’s illustrious history, we can agree on one principle: that bread today is best baked with traditional leavening instead of packaged yeast products. Out of the electronic age and into the biological age, we are just now beginning to realize the health implications resulting from our post-Industrial Revolution and post World War II histories. The advent of artisanal products, slow food movements, and local agriculture have been a boon to the embracing of hearth-based bread loaves, composed of the only four truly-needed ingredients: flour, water, starter, and salt.
Now, many people may ask, “what about yeast?” Yeast, in many of its commercial forms, is a modern by-product of whisky distillers packaged for ease of use for when the desire to bake arises. Many consider this a healthy practice, as yeast is naturally cultivated and present in many foods, in the air, even. However, many health professionals believe such forms of yeast are one of the great, undetected health detriments. Dr. William Crook, author of “The Yeast Connection,” touts that domestic, purpose-cultured yeasts, like the common Saccharomyces cerevisiae, serve only to promote the growth of bad intestinal bacteria, and thus create an off-balance environment in the digestive tract, compromising your ability to absorb nutrients fully and properly. To bypass this, followers of this scientific theory insist the only proper way to provide leavening in bread is to cultivate your own wild yeast culture, usually of the Lactobacilli genus, in what artisanal bakers term a “starter.”
Regardless of whether you agree with Dr. Crook or not (ignoring the bad pun implications of his unfortunate name), the notion of capturing wild yeasts and growing them from scratch is as natural as can be, and anything homemade is bound to be much better than something you buy from the store. So a starter can’t be too hard to make, right? You just toss some flour and water together, then let the airborne yeasts nibble away at the sugars? Theoretically, this is the case, and it’s often the truth, given the right circumstances. However, our friendly wild yeasts, including my local Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis, are incredibly delicate, often bombarded in the flour with rivaling cultures, most notably the food-spoiling bacteria, leuconostoc (note: leuconostoc masquerades as yeast in the early stage of a seed culture starter, in that it generates a lot of carbon dioxide making it appear that the wild yeast cells are growing rapidly. However, the wild yeast needs a more acidic environment than exists during the first few days of the starters’ existence and, unfortunately, the leuconostoc interferes with yeast growth during this grand masquerade, and so the wild yeast will not have a chance to propogate and grow in numbers, leading to the starters’ demise). The ancients did not use yeast as we know it today; they prepared a leaven or “barm” from ground millet kneaded with “must” (leftover fermenting grape juice) from wine-tubs. Wheat bran was also used, kneaded with a three-day-old must, dried in the sun, then made into little cakes. When required for making bread, the cakes were soaked in water, then boiled with the finest flour, after which the whole was mixed in with the meal. Another old method for making barm was to prepare cakes of barley meal and water; these were baked on a hot hearth, or in an earthen dish upon hot ashes, and left until they turned a reddish-brown. Afterwards, the cakes were kept shut in a vessel until they turned quite sour. Eight ounces of this was enough to make about 14 lbs of bread.
We can easily replicate these old, well-trodden methods of baking to make a superior bread today befitting of a king (which, ironic to the statement, is to who great bread was often served). Growing your own starter is very easy, given the right environment, meaning the right acidity (leuconostoc bacteria cannot grow in as high an acidic environment as yeast can). Below I have written a simple step by step method for starting a beautiful, healthy, sourdough culture courtesy of breadtopia. I like to use fresh-ground wheat berries or other grains.
1). Mix 3 1/2 tablespoons whole wheat flour with 1/4 cup unsweetened pineapple juice. Cover and set aside from 48 hours at room temperature. Stir vigorously 2-3x/day.
2). Add to the above 2 tablespoons whole wheat flour and 2 tablespoons pineapple juice. Cover and set aside for a day or two. Stir vigorously 2-3x/day. You should see some activity of fermentation within 48 hours. If you don’t, you may want to toss this and start over.
3). Add to the above 5 1/4 tablespoons whole wheat flour and 3 tablespoons purified water. Cover and set aside for 24 hours.
4.) Add 1/2 cup whole wheat flour and 1/4 to 1/3 cup purified water. You should have a very healthy sourdough starter by now.
Of course, after you successfully grow your own starter, you may wonder how exactly you continue nurturing it. All good artisanal bakeries maintain their mother culture by continually feeding it; it is a live organism, after all. The great part is once a starter is alive and kicking, keeping it alive isn’t nearly as difficult granted the yeast species is quite resistant and virulent once it’s grown beyond its infancy stage. So maintenance? No problem. When you feed your starter, feed it with approximately equal weights of flour and water. That equates to about 2/3 to 3/4 cup of water for every cup of flour. As a general rule of thumb, the amount you feed your sourdough starter depends on how much of it you have to start with. When practical, you want to approximately double the amount of starter you have each time you feed it. However, if you already have a couples cups of starter on hand and typically only use a cup of starter in your recipes, it doesn’t make sense to have to double the existing two cups of starter. In this case, just dispose of one cup or more and then double what remains (this offers you a chance to share your starter with others; give a cup to a friend). If it’s been a long time since you’ve fed your starter and you don’t plan on baking for a while, just stir in 1/2 cup of flour and about the same amount of water and forget about it. That will at least buy you a few weeks before you have to worry about it again. Refrigerate it, too, as this will slow the yeast’s growth.
Voila! Sourdough cultures and breads to come.
