Yeast is everywhere. In the air we breathe. Resting on our hands. And this wild yeast is the key ingredient in sourdough bread.
Stacie Kearney opened her small batch, cottage food bakery Lucky Lady Bread after falling in love with sourdough's ever-changing nature.
"It's also unpredictable, so if you change your timing and change your flour, you can influence the flavor," she says. "You can't control it, you can only work with it."
Kearney's starter — named Carl — dates to 1847, when it traveled the Oregon Trail with Basque sheep farmers. About 100 years later it made its way to and got its name from Carl Griffith, a sourdough enthusiast who began an online group dedicated to sharing the starter with bakers around the world.
Sourdough starter is simple. A concoction of flour and water, which attracts bacteria and wild yeasts and activates them, causing the dough to leaven.
To feed the starter, you add water and flour in parts equal to the starter, which marks the beginning of Kearney's three-day baking process.
From there, the bread goes through a bulk fermentation process in which Kearney lets it rise for between four and 12 hours before shaping it, letting it rise again and then baking it. How long the loaf rises depends on the day's temperature and weather conditions.
"Sourdough is temperature dependent," she says. "The same process in the summertime that takes me 15 hours takes 48 hours in the winter."
Kearney says anything from a storm rolling through to moving to a new city can change the flavor of your sourdough. Different strains of wild yeast inhabit the air. Or the humidity's off. These seemingly minor changes can make or break a loaf.
"Sometimes it's not a mistake you made," she says.
To navigate this, she uses warmer water in her mixture to make the bread rise faster, and colder water (or the refrigerator) to slow down the leavening process.
The inconsistency and finickiness of sourdough can intimidate some novice bakers, but Kearney says that's what makes it so unique.
"That's the beautiful part about sourdough, is it really is a reflection of that moment in time," she says.
Kearney doesn't exclusively make sourdough loaves, but uses the discard from her starter to create other baked goods like brownies.
"You feed [the starter] and then you have to get rid of some of it so that you don't overpopulate your bacterial community," she says.
The discard can be incorporated into virtually any baked good, and Kearney says it adds a slight tang and richness to the product.
She mails the discard from Carl — that old starter — to people around the world. She also sells freshly fed starters at local farmers markets.
Overall, Kearney aims to continue sharing sourdough with people in the community and hopefully inspiring them to start making their own bread.
"For me it's not about selling bread, it's about getting people to know what good bread is," she says. ♦
