Why We Eat Sourdough (Even When We Don't Bake It)

Before I ever kept a starter, I was buying Sourdough, and if you never bake a loaf in your life, I'd still tell you it's worth seeking out. This first post isn't a recipe or a tutorial. It's just the case for the bread itself.

Real Sourdough is made with three things: flour, water, and salt. The rise comes from a starter, a live culture of wild yeast and bacteria that ferments the dough slowly, sometimes over a full day or more. That long fermentation is where all the good stuff happens.

(Homemade Rustic Country-style Loaves in three shapes: Boule (round), Batard (oval), and Pain de Mie aka Pullman Loaf (rectangle).)

The fermentation partially breaks down the flour before you ever eat it. For a lot of people, that makes Sourdough noticeably easier on the stomach than standard bread. It also reduces phytic acid, a compound in grains that blocks your body from absorbing minerals, so more of what's in the flour actually reaches you. The slow rise tends to be gentler on blood sugar than fluffy commercial bread too. And it keeps longer naturally, because the acidity that gives it the tang also holds off mold without preservatives. None of this makes it a health food you should eat by the loaf, and it is not gluten free, but as everyday bread goes, it's about as honest as bread gets.

And here's a quiet bonus: traditional Sourdough is usually plant based. No milk, no butter, no eggs, no honey. Just flour, water, salt, and time. A lot of breads on the shelf can't say that.

One thing to watch for, though. Some commercial "sourdough" is regular yeast-risen bread with vinegar or sourdough flavoring added to fake the tang, skipping the fermentation entirely, which means skipping every benefit I just listed. The tell is on the ingredient label. Real Sourdough reads something like flour, water, salt, and maybe "starter" or "culture." If you see yeast plus vinegar, or "sourdough flavor," it's an impostor. At a farmers market you can just ask the baker if it's naturally leavened; the good ones light up when you do.

(Beautifully fermented airy inside of a Sourdough Batard I made.) Fun Fact: This is a photo from my first time baking Sourdough. So the fact that I got this level of success on my first attempt shows that baking Sourdough at home isn't as daunting as it sounds, it's just time consuming and precision is needed.

At our house, Sourdough comes from a jar on my counter. My starter is very old, older than anyone alive, and it's been rising bread since long before commercial yeast existed. That's a story for its own post. For now, if you take one thing from this: read the label, find the real stuff, and taste the difference time makes.

There's a lot more to say about Sourdough, from the starter on my counter to how the baking actually works, and I'll share more of that here as the diary grows. In the meantime, I bake often and usually share little updates in my stories as it happens, so if you want to see the process in real time, follow @shannily on Instagram. And next time you're at the store or the farmers market, check that label. Real Sourdough is worth finding.