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posted by chromas on Tuesday November 20 2018, @10:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the kitcheneering dept.

Eater has a longer article on how sourdough, and bread in general, is back in fashion and the changes being inflicted on the millenias-old staple by tech bros.

“I spent a lot of time — I don’t want to say ‘debugging,’ because that sounds really technical — but just working on recipes and trying to teach myself and there really weren’t a lot of materials out there at the time to do that,” he told me by phone this spring. “With bread baking, you kind of follow an algorithm to produce a result and that result isn’t always what you think it’s going to be, so you kind of have to step back and debug and diagnose the steps along the way. How did I go wrong here? That’s because technically the temperature might not be right or the dough strength might not be right. That iterative procedure and working through those algorithms kind of appeals to engineer. There’s the precision part of it, but also, when it comes down to it, technical people like to work with their hands. You want to construct something and I think bread is a good way to do that.”


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday November 21 2018, @02:37AM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday November 21 2018, @02:37AM (#764540) Journal

    Sourdough isn't so complicated that you need a book to learn how to do it. Make a starter, make bread, you're done.

    First, making a starter is in fact an easy process, but most people think it's incredibly challenging. The reason is because of all the crap out there about it. As I said, there's a lot of BS lore out there (e.g., "catching the wild yeasts from the air" when most of the yeast that gets a starter going is likely found on the flour; many traditional "starter" recipes involved adding all sorts of contaminants from grape skins to potatoes to milk, which likely led to most contamination rotting and failure, or starting with bakers yeast to "kick start" things when it just interferes with the establishment of proper microorganisms, etc., etc.). There's a lot of BS lore about maintaining starters too -- from "don't touch it with metal utensils" or "don't use plastic" or whatever to stuff like you have to maintain THIS feeding schedule or you can't maintain a starter under these conditions (temperature, type of flour, hydration level, or whatever).

    There is simply a lot of crap out there about this, and it has only been sifted through in the past decade or so... and you'll still see all sorts of nonsense in cookbooks about this.

    Secondly, it's easy to make standard "sourdough" bread. It's less easy to understand how to use "sourdough" (i.e., natural yeast) as a tool to make just about any bread type, including sweeter breads, brioche, or whatever you want. If you don't want the sour flavor to be prominent, you need to understand the longer process. Again, it's not especially complicated, but that process was basically unknown to American home bakers until recent years.

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