Ed Wood
Sourdoughs International
PO Box 670
Cascade, ID 83611
So what is this thing we call "sourdoughs"? Most of you already know, I hope, they are not something that originated with Yukon prospectors nor with the California forty niners looking for gold. To the contrary, for some six to ten thousand years, in countless languages, they were "the staff of life" but no one called them sourdoughs. The Egyptians claim discovery of leavened bread but that is regularly disputed by various archaeologists who, however, tend to agree on very little anyway. The Egyptians did introduce the concept that something mystical, supplied by one of their Gods, created the bubbles to make dough rise. To be certain they didn't lose that mystical "something" when they "started" a new dough they always included some from the old batch. For absolute centuries there wasn't a better method and a "starter" was used with each new dough. Village bakers passed these "starters" to their sons, generation after generation and the taste and texture remained essentially the same, ----superb for over 5,000 years! That is exactly what sourdoughs still are today.
On December 7, 1991, a story broke in U.S. newspapers when an Egyptologist from the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute announced the discovery of a massive ancient bakery buried in the sand at the foot of the pyramids. In a press release Mark Lehner said "We're talking colossal baking here, easily enough to feed 30,000 people a day". The bakery with its hearth, dough vats and bread pots dated to Egypt's fourth dynasty or about 2575 B.C. As I read the story I could already imagine scraping the walls of that old bakery to recover the organisms that made man's first leavened bread. I scrambled for a telephone and called the Oriental Institute. They told me Lehner was still in Egypt but offered me a number where I might catch him between digs if I called often enough. I dialed at once; the bubble God must have smiled, because Lehner picked up the telephone. We talked a long, long time. He really did want to use those baking tools that were buried for nearly 5,000 years but he didn't know anything about baking. I convinced him that I did.
But it was nearly two years before a letter came from the National Geographic Society with an invitation to join Lehner in Giza and help him rediscover how Egyptians baked man's first leavened bread. Then all of a sudden there were a million things to do overnight to get ready to bake like an ancient Egyptian. First we had to find some emmer, the ancient wheat the Egyptians used for that bread, then grind it into flour and then sterilize it so we didn't take any organisms with us. We hoped to capture some very old ones in Giza and we didn't want any unwelcome contaminants. At about this point I began to appreciate the people around me. Every time a problem surfaced, someone volunteered a solution. For example, after a fruitless international search we finally located emmer at Lorenz Shaller's KUSA (it means sacred grain) Foundation in Ojai, California. I ground it into flour and it was sterilized by the Mountain States Tumor Institute with a massive dose of radiation. The sterility was confirmed by the laboratory at the Mercy Medical Center in Nampa. The enthusiasm and interest in the project were simply incredible. No request was too small or too big.
When we finally arrived in Giza, and there were numerous delays enroute, the news was bad. The Egyptian authorities wouldn't let us even close to the room where Lehner's baking implements were stored. There had been a recent theft from the collection and they weren't taking any further chances. In addition the excavated bakery had been covered with sand to protect it from the elements and the tourists. It was back to the drawing board but Mark Lehner proved to be the ultimate improviser. He immediately started to construct a replica of his bakery at a site in the country and contracted with a local pottery maker to reproduce the bread molds made to his specifications. Then he took us into several tombs to study wall drawings of Egyptian life to help us understand their baking methods. By flashlight we gazed upward at ancient bakers in the various stages of preparing bread while others carried large cone shaped loaves balanced on their shoulders for the departing pharaohs. But exactly what those figures on the wall were doing wasn't all that obvious. In some scenes they appeared to be pouring something into cone shaped pots, while in others they were stacking the same pots upside down over an apparent heat source since they seemed to be shielding their faces with uplifted hands. What was going on? Were they just firing freshly made ceramic pots or were they were burning out the remnants of bread from previous baking? Believe me, when you're in the company of archaeologists, there is no shortage of theories.
It was essential that we capture a wild sourdough culture as soon as possible or the project would never get off the ground so that was the first priority. We were staying at the Mena House, one of Cairo's oldest and best hotels located at the very base of the Great Pyramid, Khufu. One of our group had a room on the 6th floor which had a small outside balcony and that looked like an ideal place to set our trap. A huge palm spread a canopy over the entire area producing a lushness of winged life and heavy, sweet aromas. I mixed up some of our sterile flour with water, covered it with cheesecloth to keep out the bigger critters and offered a little prayer to the bubble God. It didn't take long. On the third day the prayer was answered. That mystical "something" was in the trap and eating everything in sight. It wasn't scraped off the walls of that ancient bakery but it had come on the breeze from an Egyptian pyramid built in 2690 B.C. It would do. We had packed our supplies in styrofoam containers which we converted to proofing boxes and soon had gallons of sourdough bubbling away in just about every corner of our room. I often wondered what the cleaning staff must have thought.
There was a long delay in getting those bread molds which consisted of two identical cones. When put together they formed a football shape. We speculated that the bottom cone could serve as the baking pan in which the dough would rise. There were suggestions that if we put the top over the bottom, the dough might rise and fill both halves. Then we would have a football of bread which would produce two cones if we cut it in half. For some reason I just didn't believe that was the way the Egyptians did it. We did lots of experiments with lots of disasters and lots of incinerated bread. We discovered, more than once, that it isn't easy to regulate the heat from glowing charcoal. On one occasion I heavily greased the pots with local buffalo fat to keep the bread from sticking. To my chagrin, the fat seeped through the pots and several ignited simultaneously creating a really intense blaze and some very black bread which everyone, except me, thought hilarious. But we learned something from every mistake. I finally concluded there must be some fundamental reason why those bakers on the tomb wall were stacking pots over a fire. So while our dough was rising in the bottoms, we also started heating the tops over charcoal. When the leavening was complete, we moved the bottoms to a bed of charcoal (we had just about learned how by this time) and put the hot tops in place forming, in effect, a preheated oven over each rising dough. That turned out to be the answer we were looking for. After weeks of relative failure the results were truly spectacular! From every mold I shook out a nearly perfect cone shaped loaf. The team cheered while I paraded around with a cone of bread balanced on my shoulder just like the guy on the tomb wall. Later Mark told us similar bread molds were found in individual homes in addition to his bakery. From that we concluded almost instantly the Egyptians must have also invented man's first home baking machine in which they produced their first leavened bread.
So how did we get from 10,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand years, to where we are now? Just a little over 300 years ago, a Dutch lens grinder saw microscopic life and made sketches of yeast in beer. Oddly nothing much happened for the next 200 years. Then all of a sudden science went fast track. "The staff of life" for centuries was emasculated in less than 30 years. Louis Pasteur in 1857 proved it was fermentation by wild yeast that made dough rise and the "bubble-God" theory was history. In 1881 just 118 years ago Chris Hansen in Denmark plucked single organisms from mixed cultures and grew them in pure culture. From there it was relatively easy to select specific organisms to do specific things. Next came the industrial revolution and a marriage combining microbiology, big machines, automation, speed, convenience and increased production. To produce an "industrial bread" a new yeast was developed to make leavening bubbles in minutes not hours. They called it "baker's yeast". It creates an extremely fast fermentation that pumps up loaves almost as fast as machines mix dough. A "starter" is no longer needed. It is a very efficient process. But, following "Murphy's Law" something went wrong. Baker's yeast doesn't produce the exquisite taste of sourdough. Not at all! Instead the flavor comes almost entirely from a different long slow fermentation by the beneficial bacteria we now recognize as lactobacilli. By the time industrial bakers recognized the error they were addicted to the convenience and economic rewards from using fast yeast. They didn't think slow lactobacilli were necessary and believed they could duplicate the flavor by adding acetic or lactic acid or just plain vinegar or whatever else it might take. They were wrong! If wine makers followed the same logic, they would simply add a little alcohol to grape juice, skip the fermentation and call it wine. Some now call industrial bread an edible napkin.
Ironically, the following two statements appear in a 1997 research report from the American Institute of Baking. "The authentic natural process sourdough remains one of the best breads produced anywhere in the world. In the United States, and even in areas around the world, San Francisco sourdough is still regarded as the benchmark by which all other sourdough breads are judged". Ironic? The Institute is largely supported by the commercial bread industry which plays a substantial role in producing the "edible napkin" that has displaced 10,000 years of real bread.
Perhaps this is a good place for a short comment on the nutritional value of that "edible napkin". We are fortunate that the FDA requires the enrichment of either flour and/or bread by the addition of thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, iron and folic acid. Unfortunately the baking industry chooses to also add a plethora of chemicals to change the physical characteristics of flour and dough to improve their "machinability". These include surface active agents (surfactants) to help doughs go through machinery without sticking or tearing. Others soften the final bread texture or strengthen dough by modifying the gluten. And a host of emulsifiers are included just to improve mixing characteristics or increase shelf life. All of these "special" additives have one thing in common: No or very limited nutritional value. At least one has been banned recently as a potential carcinogen, after more than 30 years of use.
With rare exceptions the deterioration of bread quality is a worldwide phenomenon. The outstanding international exception is Lionel Poilane and his manufacture near Paris with 24 wood fired ovens. In an elegant description Rudolph Chelminski in the January 1995 Smithsonian Magazine tells the Poilane success story which started with the dismal decline of French bread. In a blistering commentary Chelminski blames in large part the development of premixed flours, industrial leavenings, frozen doughs and automatic ovens but says a depressingly large portion goes to what he calls good old greed. And he describes French bread as a generous-looking loaf that weighs nothing, made from cheaper, alabaster-white grades of flour and inflated like the Michelin man, uses up less flour and therefore increases the baker's profit margin. In contrast Poilane success is based on natural yeasts and manual methods performed by individual bakers with no chemical additives. In addition to France his breads are marketed in Germany, Japan and the Middle East. A small measure of his success is the sale of 16,000 loaves a year in the United States. A primary Poilane objective is to help people everywhere understand and respect bread---real bread. German bakers are now also going back to naturally fermented doughs.
Is there significant competition to the Polane quality in this country? The short and the long answer is no. Consider one example. The Interstate Bakeries Corporation is the largest wholesale baker and distributor of fresh delivered bread in the U.S. with annual sales of 3.12 billion dollars, 67 bakeries and 32,000 employees. Their distribution network delivers to over 200,000 retail outlets on 10,000 delivery routes. Their net profit in 1997 was $100 million. And there are several similar huge bread conglomerates. If your local bakery isn't on their list, it is probably the exception. A substantial amount of their bread is delivered either as refrigerated or frozen dough and all the local bakery does is warm it up or thaw it out and bake it. There's nothing necessarily bad about that except the frozen dough contains all the additives and chemicals included by the wholesale producer to grease its progress through their machines. Doesn't sound much like Poilane, does it? Their success in exporting doesn't sound much like Poilane either.
We define authentic sourdough as bread made by the fermentation of wild yeast and wild lactobacilli. The texture and the intensity of flavor are determined by fermentation alone. The key is adequate fermentation and the speed of baker's yeast eliminates it. Without adequate fermentation, both texture and flavor are lost. Thus the "yeast of bakers", in its various forms, should never be used in a sourdough recipe and never, ever in a sourdough culture!
Sourdoughs, today? Most of the good ones, all of the best ones are produced in the home although a few small artisan bakeries do produce good authentic sourdoughs. Good advice and reliable cultures are in short supply although there are plenty of "how-to" books available. Most authors offer directions for collecting a wild culture and many start out with commercial yeast. That you cannot do. For a stable culture the challenge is to capture not one, but two organisms, a vigorous wild yeast for leavening and a symbiotic lactobacillus for flavor. The most stable are those where each organism supplies something that contributes to the survival of the other. Worldwide there are many species of wild yeast and lactobacilli which in combination produce different fermentation products. These differences account for the sometimes subtle, sometimes strikingly different sourdoughs. Collecting cultures is a little like big game hunting. You just never know when a real trophy is going to appear.
When Jean and I were in Saudi Arabia between 1983 and '85, we spent our free time searching the Middle East and Europe for sourdough cultures used by generations of bakers long before the science revolution developed baker's yeast. We came back to the U.S. with 10 unique cultures never contaminated by commercial yeast and, of course, wrote a book about them. When I subsequently retired from pathology, we decided, on the spur of the moment, to promote authentic sourdoughs from our Idaho mountain and send those same cultures back around the world to home bakers. That was almost 15 years ago. Now 90% of our orders come through our web site at www.sourdo.com What started as a retirement hobby now almost commands our full time attention. But we love every bit of it and share Poilane's objective: helping people everywhere understand and respect bread---real, honest bread.
I frequently ask myself why are people around the world still so interested in sourdoughs? The simple answer is, because in many ways, they improve the quality of our lives. Sourdoughs have a unique inherent charisma. They are soul satisfying, fun and what I call the endorphin of the kitchen. And they still produce the best bread the world has ever known. They offer a moment of personal quality extending beyond what we eat to what we do and to what we are. No, kneading sourdoughs won't reverse society's problems but it can, in a small way, improve our lifestyle a lot. Today almost 100% of you know something about sourdough. Perhaps not how to bake it today but you could know how tomorrow! What will it look and taste like? Why, exactly like it did yesterday when the Egyptians baked it the very first time. I like to say, "There's something alive in my kitchen and it is 10,000 years old!"
