Nevada/California Regional Convention
"Good as Gold"

What Makes Sourdough Bread Different?

Imagine being a miner during the California gold rush. You've just made bread dough from your last supplies of flour and salt when someone yells, "Gold!" Temporarily forgetting your hunger—you run off to the gold fields. Many hours later you return. The dough has been rising longer than usual, but you are too cold, tired, and hungry to care. Later you find tht your bread tastes different from previous batches; it is slightly sour. During the gold rush, miners baked so many sour loaves that they were nicknames "sourdoughs."Originally, breads were leavened by wild yeast from the air, which had been trapped in the dough.

Later, bakers kept a starter culture of yeast—dough from the last batch of bread—to leaven each new batch of dough. Sourdough bread is made with a special sourdough starter culture that is added to flour, water, and salt. The most famous sourdough bread made today comes from San Francisco, where a handful of bakers have continuously cultivated their starters since 1849.

Conventional bread is made from flour, water, sugar, salt, shortening, and the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. San Francisco sourdough is made with Saccharomyces exguus yeast and the Lactobacillus sanfrancisco bacteria.

Tortora, Funke, Case. Microbiology (Benjamin/Cummings).
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