Three Reasons to Try Baking with Sourdough
I've been maintaining a sourdough starter off and on for about ten months now. Sometimes I bake with it several times a week, and sometimes it languishes in the back of the fridge for a month. The experience has been very illuminating to me, and I think that everyone should give it a try atleast once in thier lives.
1. Sourdough is suppose to be healthier for you
The reason I wanted to try keeping a sourdough starter was because I read that the wild yeasts break down the gluten and other wheat proteins into a more digestable form. I wanted to find a scientific study backing up this claim buy i haven't found anything in my (addmitedly superficial) research. This book claims as much in the first few pages. However, there wasn't a reference that lead to a peer-reviewed study. I even asked the author myself on facebook, but he never replied.
So are the nutirents in sourdough easier to digest than normal bread? I don't know. Maybe. My husband is much less gassy when we eat sourdough bread, but that's only anecdotal evidence.
2. Sourdough is good in an emergency
Commercial yeasts are beautiful magical things. I can decide that I want to make pizza for dinner and thirty minutes about an hour later we're pulling them out of the oven. On the other hand, if I want to make pizza dough from my sourdough starter I really need to decide at least six hours in advance.
There's a reason that commercial yeast is ubiquitous in today's world.
We get commercial yeast by a careful process of feeding seed yeasts molasses and air at predetermined times, at predetermined temperatures. This slurry is then allowed to grow until it is ready to be mechanically seperated and dried to the desired state.
Active dry yeast has a shelf life of about four months in the pantry and a little longer when you keep it in the freezer. If there is ever a large scale emrgency where shipping lanes go down for an extended period of time you will not be able to make bread without knowing how to maintain a sourdough starter.
3. Sourdough can be delicious.
When I was a kid I absolutely hated sourdough. It was sour, and yucky, and not the kind of bread I liked. Whenever my mom bought the stuff it would just sit on the counter until it turned stale or possibly moldy.
My siblings and I... were not the most adventurous eaters growing up.
Anyways, the only reason i was willing to try sourdough at all was because this blog post promised that it didn't have to be sour.
My breads run the gamut from "tastes like normal bread" to "pleasantly tangy" depending on how much starter I put in the dough and how long I allow the bread to rise.
All of it is subtily complex in flavor and amazingly delicious.
So there you have it. Three solid reasons to give sourdough a try. The good news is that it's super easy to get started.
I made my sourdough following this tutorial here.
Are you going to give sourdough a try? or do you already have your own starter
? Tell me in the comments!
