IT'S ALIVE!

"Let there be work, bread, water, and salt for all."  

Nelson Mandela said that. And he was right. Bread is awesome. Bread is the "stuff of life." Picture hungry people, and you'll see them in bread lines. Break bread with people and you find community. Get comfortable with a way of doing things and that way becomes your bread and butter. Put on a wool sweater and get toasty.

Earn your daily bread.

At one point, all bread rose without commercial products. Fertile Crescenters probably discovered leaven just as they discovered alcohol. A bit of grain and water sat in a forgotten clay pot, developed an acidic smell and a bubbly froth like a head of beer.

It was yeast. 

Before cats, there was yeast.

The word yeast comes to us from Old English gist, and from the Indo-European root yes-, meaning boil, foam, or bubble.

In Hebrew, the word for leaven is chametz. Its meaning comes from the Semitic root Ḥ-M-Ṣ, to be sour. This is an ancient word.


Sourdough starter is simply a mixture of flour and water that has had some time to sit in a warm place, so yeast microbes can start to grow, eating the sugars in the flour. Starter is perishable — it's alive. Like most things that go bad easily, noncommercial yeast is more "fresh" than any supermarket item marketed with that adjective. You have to use it or lose it, and part of using sourdough starter is refreshing it — baking with part of it and keeping the rest of it alive by feeding it more flour and water.

Great-Grandma Zelda wrote down "cakes of yeast" in her recipes, but Zelda's grandmother wouldn't have had to purchase yeast in any form — cake, dry, instant, rapid-rise or what-have-you. All she would have to do is feed her pet yeast and she'd be all set.

In a way, taking care of a starter is not that much different from keeping other domesticated stock: We feed cows, chickens, and sheep so we can eat meat, eggs, milk, and cheese. We provide livestock with food, water, and shelter. We breed them. Then we kill them and cook them. Some people even name their sourdough starter.

I hadn't thought of bread in this way before I had a sourdough starter to take care of. What would we do with it when we went away for a couple of weeks in the summer? Who would feed it and keep it bubbling away happily in its crock?



The starter I bought was originally cultivated 200 years ago.

It's still good.