I’ve always loved baking, ever since childhood. Desserts, mostly, with the occasional foray into yeast. But mostly desserts! A year after getting married, my husband and I moved to Germany where he worked on his doctoral degree. We lived there five years and probably ate our weight in bread many times over. Our three years spent in England made us long for the German bakeries, but we were fortunate to take trips back to the continent and discover many different cuisines. When we returned stateside, I took up bread baking more seriously. We always enjoyed it, but it wasn’t the bread of European bakeries that I had come to know. I dabbled in sourdough, but it felt like too much work. I read everything I could about breads and sourdough, and gradually found ways to make it work for my schedule. My family enjoyed these different breads so much, I started giving it away to friends and my husband’s colleagues. They encouraged me to sell it, and a micro-bakery was born.
Why Sourdough?
When our second daughter was about four, we determined through a number of different tests that she was sensitive to yeast. Not gluten, but yeast. For the better part of a year we gave up most baked goods, and tried a variety of substitutes. A friend then suggested sourdough, and we gave it a go. Not only did it sit well with her, but we all loved it! The flavor was more complex, deeper than yeasted breads. After making standard rustic loaves, I deep-dove into all of the different kinds of breads we could eat. Pizza! Cinnamon rolls! Focaccia! Fluffy sandwich bread! It was all back on the table, and all good for her. For all of us.
In recent years there has been an almost anti-carb movement. Bread = bad for you. But bread has been consumed for centuries, and is a staple in many diets. When it’s cared for, sourdough culture, or starter as it’s often called, can be kept alive for generations. It can be shared from family to family, passed down from parents to children. The fermentation that happens with the grains makes bread more digestible, and also more nutritious. Many people who are sensitive to gluten have found that sourdough bread does not cause the same digestive trouble that other glutenous products do.
There is a certain magic and mystery in baking bread. What starts out as humble ingredients – flour, water, salt, and leaven – comes together over the course of a few days into a transformed substance, something very different than the sum of its parts. The smell of bread baking, the sound of the crackling crust as it comes out of the hot oven, the gorgeous color and scoring on a loaf, the delight of slicing that first piece of a new loaf, and then the depth of flavor in that slice; all of this is part of the bread experience every time I turn on the oven.