A food for unmarried men who didn’t know how to cook

September 23, 2022 12:03 PM

San Francisco’s Famous Sourdough Was Once Really Gross
posted by meowzilla (29 comments total)

Gah. I love Gastro Obscura so much.
posted by heyitsgogi at 12:10 PM on September 23, 2022 [3 favorites]

larousse gastronomique has an interesting section on sourdough, nothing about 49' ers.
posted by clavdivs at 12:20 PM on September 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

I would never have known this without reading the FPP, but it totally tracks.

Folks who've lived more than a few years in the Yukon are often called "sourdoughs." I never really knew why or thought to ask, but it's presumably because of the same mining slang. Tourist shops in Dawson City (a former gold rush town that is now extremely tiny and exists mostly as a tourism destination -- the population is said to at least double during the summer months, because of tourists and temporary workers who head back south in the winter) even sell "Yukon Sourdough" starters (which are, I guess, dehydrated starters, since they come in powdered form).

Fun fact about San Francisco sourdough, and all sourdough, is that there isn't much point in paying a hefty sum to order a starter if you don't live in the city. Since sourdough works by pulling wild yeast out of the air, your fancy San Francisco sourdough starter will soon transform into a Your Location sourdough starter which will develop a different taste, based on the types of wild yeast that live in your home.
posted by asnider at 12:44 PM on September 23, 2022 [15 favorites]

Harriet is Proof's starter: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=920204011750230
posted by wmo at 12:58 PM on September 23, 2022

The flavor relies on facilitating a secondary metabolic process . . .

Any resources on trying this? I'm pretty experienced with a my regular rye sourdough with an overnight rise, but i'm curious about upping the acidity for flavor. I've not seen a consensus on thefreshloaf, but I haven't looked in awhile.
posted by Think_Long at 1:16 PM on September 23, 2022

I wouldn't be surprised if bad sourdough did kill some miners, considering how foul a bad starter smells. I tried to make one during the pandemic, which either did nothing or did that very quickly after its initial promise. Pretty quickly I had to admit to myself that, even at the best of times, I don't actually like sourdough. But you know how it was then. For all I knew, that would be the bread I'd get for the foreseeable. (I later learned to make flatbreads that weren't very presentable but did the trick.)
posted by Countess Elena at 1:37 PM on September 23, 2022

This is so cool. Thanks for sharing
posted by Mchelly at 1:59 PM on September 23, 2022

Like so many others, I tried to build a sourdough starter during the pandemic, and failed. It stank. Then somewhere I read that dogs might be the cause, which makes sense. I have made starters successfully before we got our big beast.
posted by mumimor at 2:01 PM on September 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

obligatory gas-gangrene bread

(Which seems to be perfectly safe, at least within the traditional practices for it -- I might rather not try it just from a recipe.)
posted by away for regrooving at 2:09 PM on September 23, 2022 [4 favorites]

This is far from settled.

Hence your well-earned cognomen.
posted by y2karl at 2:10 PM on September 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

Is it harder to keep a "starter" of yeast going than a natural one? That's what I don't understand here.
posted by melamakarona at 2:21 PM on September 23, 2022

> In any case, the initial population of a starter is almost entirely from the grains used for feeding, not from the air.

I was unaware, but this does make sense. In that case, wouldn't it matter more where you get your flour (assuming the starter is as "unstable" as I previously implied)? And, if so, I imagine there might actually be *less* regional variation than is often assumed due to the way grain is pooled.
posted by asnider at 2:23 PM on September 23, 2022

I wouldn't be surprised if bad sourdough did kill some miners, considering how foul a bad starter smells.

It's very difficult to kill yourself with sourdough, because the process of baking bread quite effectively kills everything living in the dough.

Is it harder to keep a "starter" of yeast going than a natural one?

It's very difficult to keep bacteria and other yeasts from colonizing your starter, so you're going to end up with sourdough eventually, no matter what you start with.
posted by ssg at 2:26 PM on September 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

> Is it harder to keep a "starter" of yeast going than a natural one? That's what I don't understand here.

Most commercial yeast is pretty fast acting, so I think that, yes, it would be harder to keep a starter going if it was created using commercial yeast rather than the wild yeasts found in sourdough. But, even if that's not the case, I think the idea of miners using sourdough starters is more to do with not carrying a bunch of commercial yeast packets into the mountains with them. A hypothetical started made with commercial yeast would (probably?) still yield something like a sourdough if kept under similar conditions. Plus, most of these guys just didn't know what the heck they were doing...it seems kind of amazing they were able to maintain their starters at all. I mean, the one (possibly apocryphal) story about a guy swishing a stick around his tent until his disgusting ball of loose starter dough stuck to it suggests these things weren't exactly being kept under ideal conditions. I can barely keep a starter alive on my kitchen counter. I wonder at the thought that a ball of dough tossed under a cot in a dirty tent would be viable for anything other than toxic, unrisen bread.
posted by asnider at 2:30 PM on September 23, 2022

Fun fact about San Francisco sourdough, and all sourdough, is that there isn't much point in paying a hefty sum to order a starter if you don't live in the city. Since sourdough works by pulling wild yeast out of the air, your fancy San Francisco sourdough starter will soon transform into a Your Location sourdough starter which will develop a different taste, based on the types of wild yeast that live in your home.

There is some validity to ordering or otherwise obtaining a given live sourdough starter from a particular location if you really want to try to replicate that particular taste, but it has a very short life span and needs to be used almost immediately before it adapts to the local environment.

But, yeah, I've had to have this conversation with a number of home bakers and break the bad news about how long their starter is going to last and be the same as the original they got it from and how much it will change depending on how far it is moved from its initial location - and it's weird to me that a lot of home bakers seem resistant to acknowledging or knowing this that it really doesn't matter where they sourced their starter from and that they really want it to be this unique, individualistic or rare thing.

So they know someone who has some really nice sourdough culture, they like the bread that is made with it and they want to have the same at home and so they get some starter sourdough culture and do everything right and taking care of it and feeding it like a weird yeasty pet.

And I totally get it. Everything about it has this cool, interesting intrigue like you have a unique thing like it's a rare orchid or succulent or even a certain unique breed of a dog, or a breed of chicken or other invertebrate animal.

But then eventually the local wild yeast takes over and it changes the profile to their own unique sourdough culture and environment and it's no longer that original unique thing because that's just how wild yeast and wild cultured foods work.


All that being said, I have questions about wild sourdough cultures especially in wildcrafting, bush living and Gold Rush history because those weirdos were ostensibly walking around with sourdough starters on their person, in their pockets or otherwise in their cook mess kits or camping gear and otherwise in really close daily contact with their living sourdough cultures. And, well, even modern well bathed people are really yeasty.

Which stands to reason if a given miner or frontier-living person had a particularly tasty sourdough culture, you would be ostensibly be enjoying the taste of, well, parts of them as in the hyper local yeast population, culture and profile of that given individual that's been carrying that culture around for who knows how long.
posted by loquacious at 3:04 PM on September 23, 2022 [7 favorites]

obligatory gas-gangrene bread

I made some salt-rising bread inspired by this FPP; it was much more successful than my multiple attempts at sourdough. But my poor starter does add a nice flavor to bread leavened with commercial yeast.
posted by TedW at 3:06 PM on September 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

I guess this means that when Boudin Bakery in SF says they're using the original 100+ year old starter, they really mean it's a descendant, and we don't really know how much of that is identical to the original?
posted by meowzilla at 3:37 PM on September 23, 2022

For some really interesting discussion about sourdough starter from other mefites, I recommend my Askme here. We did, as per my marked best answer buy some starter from the recommended source when we gave up and it's going gangbusters! Recommended if you're failing, puking at the smell, and dont want to kill any Yukon miners!
posted by atomicstone at 3:42 PM on September 23, 2022

Sourdough, it’s people?
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 6:12 PM on September 23, 2022

Ehh, these Gastro Obscura articles with no citations and click bait titles are annoying. Ma Ingalls discusses making sourdough in By the Shores of Silver Lake which takes place in 1839. Pioneer families, trappers, anyone who traveled frequently at the time knew about sourdough. It just so happens that hundreds of random people, mostly men who had never had to cook a thing in their lives, descended on California in 1849 and no doubt baked some shitty bread. Most of them weren't even in San Francisco when they were baking it. Nothing has changed about San Francisco sourdough- an inexperienced baker can still make terrible bread, and some desperate people might eat it.
posted by oneirodynia at 6:47 PM on September 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

we don't really know how much of that is identical to the original?

The starter of Theseus.
posted by lhauser at 8:24 PM on September 23, 2022 [7 favorites]

From that ask-me, this is a really sweet sour little project. In case anyone needs or needs to share sourdough starter.
posted by aniola at 8:54 PM on September 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Most 19th-century Americans preferred bread that was sweet rather than sour. According to one 1882 advice book for housekeepers, the “ideal loaf” was “light, spongy, with a crispness and sweet pleasant taste.”

This reminds me of the delicious, airy, sweet breads often found at bakeries in Portuguese communities. It was the bread from one such community in Hawaii that became famous in the US as 'King's Hawaiian' bread.

It is also interesting that it might have been the rough-life miners' terrible sourdough bread that created the term and nostalgia for 'sourdough', but it was the French and Italian bakers, using old European sour dough recipes, which apparently created the bread we call sourdough today.

Boudin is still around and has lots of locations around California.
posted by eye of newt at 10:03 PM on September 23, 2022

(edit correction: King's Hawaiian bread was created by a Hawaiian baker, Robert Taira, who was
influenced by the bread of the local Portuguese community).
posted by eye of newt at 10:11 PM on September 23, 2022

But then eventually the local wild yeast takes over and it changes the profile to their own unique sourdough culture and environment and it's no longer that original unique thing because that's just how wild yeast and wild cultured foods work.

This sounds like a fine opportunity for a sourdough starter trading group. A cultural exchange, if you will.
posted by solarion at 12:22 AM on September 24, 2022

PSA: you can get a free sourdough starter from a culture that's purportedly been maintained for over 150 years by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to the 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Preservation Society.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 5:28 AM on September 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

There is some validity to ordering or otherwise obtaining a given live sourdough starter from a particular location if you really want to try to replicate that particular taste, but it has a very short life span and needs to be used almost immediately before it adapts to the local environment.

From recent science it's looking increasingly like this old belief about sourdough cultures just isn't true. "However, it was later discovered by the Sourdough Project that L. sanfranciscensis could be found in nearly 90 other countries-- either spread from other successful sourdough starters, or native to the regions themselves. L. sanfranciscensis is, in fact, identical to separately-identified European strain Lactobacillus brevis var. lindneri. The San Francisco name stuck, despite the bacteria’s lack of specificity to that region." Further, L. sanfranciscensis seems likely to outcompete other lactobacilli:

Among sourdough starters, as little as 30% and as many as 95% of the lactic acid bacteria have been recorded to be Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. This high percentage of L. sanfranciscensis may be due in part to the species’ antimicrobial activity. Though homofermentative bacteria generally have greater antimicrobial properties against coliforms than heterofermentative bacteria, L. sanfranciscensis produces a bacteriocin-like inhibitory substance (BLIS C57) that has bacteriocidal and bacteriolytic properties. All known lactic acid bacteria strains in sourdough, other than Lactobacillus fructivorans, are sensitive to this compound. Therefore, production of BLIS C57 by L. sanfranciscensis likely contributes to its ability to dominate a sourdough starter.

A somewhat small recent study (doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2020.01212) gave some credence for environmental effects, but it's notable that the starter with the most unusual yeast and bacteria was from a Lambic brewery, which seems maybe an extreme example. A different, much larger recent study suffers a bit from a US bias in its sample set, but the study authors were still able to show that "geography, process parameters, and abiotic factors are poor predictors of sourdough starter microbiome composition."

Some fermentation-relevant taxa were enriched under particular conditions (Figure 2D–E, Figure 2—source data 6). For example, younger starters were often dominated by the LAB L. plantarum (indicator strength (IS) = 0.238, p<0.001) and L. brevis (IS = 0.254, p<0.001), while older starters often contained L. sanfranciscensis (IS = 0.043, p=0.01) and P. parvulus (IS = 0.222, p<0.001; Figure 2D, Figure 2—source data 6). Previous studies have not found strong associations between flour type or other fermentation practices and yeast species present (De Vuyst et al., 2014; Vrancken et al., 2010). In our study, S. cerevisiae was weakly associated with starters whose grain base was whole wheat (IS = 0.157, p=0.04). Most of the other fungal indicator species were non-yeast molds and plant endophytes, which were enriched under particular climatic conditions (Figure 2E, Figure 2—source data 6). No AAB taxa were enriched under any particular fermentation practice or climatic condition.

The history and origins of sourdough starters may also explain the distribution of some widespread microbial species. Sourdough bakers can either begin their starters de novo from flour and water or obtain an established starter from a business or individual. The LAB L. brevis was associated with de novo starters (IS = 0.206, p=0.04). There were 73 starters in our collection that were originally acquired by home bakers from a bakery or other commercial source and L. sanfranciscensis was abundant in these commercial starters (IS = 0.267, p=0.04). This suggests that L. sanfranciscensis thrives under commercial production conditions and has been widely distributed among bakers, where it persists in home fermentations.

Note also that in the first study linked above (the smaller one) acetic acid producing bacteria were only found in the sample from the Lambic brewery, while in the second study the presence of AAB was notable, if inconsistent:

One striking pattern across our dataset was the highly variable abundance of AAB across individual starters. These bacteria have been reported in sourdough (Minervini et al., 2014; Ripari et al., 2016), but are generally understudied as indicated by their almost complete absence in many key reviews of sourdough microbial diversity (De Vuyst et al., 2014; Gänzle and Ripari, 2016; Van Kerrebroeck et al., 2017). In our sample set, 147 starters contained AAB (>1% relative abundance) including Acetobacter, Gluconobacter, or Komagataeibacter species (Figure 2A, Figure 2—source data 2). AAB require specialized culture conditions (Kim et al., 2019) and cultivation biases in previous studies (De Vuyst et al., 2014; Gänzle and Ripari, 2016; Van Kerrebroeck et al., 2017) may explain their widespread omission from our understanding of sourdough biodiversity.

In their discussion the authors of the latter study comment:

For example, L. sanfranciscensis was prevalent in older starters and starters purchased by participants from a business, which supports the hypothesis that it is selected for by bakers over generations of sourdough production (Gänzle and Ripari, 2016). Future studies that explicitly test how starter composition changes over time and across geographies in home fermentations are needed to better understand selection and stability in these ecosystems.

I'm no microbiologist but it seems the science is moving away from the belief that the local environment will overpower the cultures in a sourdough starter (unless your local environment is an airborne yeast factory like a Lambic brewery), and toward the idea that given enough time and feeding sourdough cultures tend to converge on domination by the bacteria that got its name from San Francisco.

P.S. if you want to jump start the presence of AAB in a new starter culture, maybe do start with some apples?
posted by fedward at 8:14 AM on September 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

From recent science it's looking increasingly like this old belief about sourdough cultures just isn't true.

TIL.

Granted I'm no microbiologist and definitely don't have the chops to critique any of this, but I have noticed when there are very definite changes in the quality of a given sourdough culture over time, particularly with regard to taste and rising rates.

But there's so many natural variables there in baking it could be a lot of different things like the content of the water and flour being used, rising time and even baking styles and temps. Maybe those sourdough cultures are changing less than I think they are and it has a lot to do with other factors.
posted by loquacious at 7:54 PM on September 24, 2022

Maybe those sourdough cultures are changing less than I think they are and it has a lot to do with other factors.

I've totally been living the stereotype of the computer nerd being nerdy about baking, although I don't own a Patagonia vest and try not to be a tech bro (or any sort of bro, really). But that means that I've read just about everything I can get my hands on, and I'm always struck when people repeat received wisdom without ever digging any deeper. I want to make it clear I'm not trying to pick on anybody in this thread: even the standard texts tend to handwave over the received wisdom because baking for so long has been passed down through tradition and apprenticeship. All of that tradition and apprenticeship worked, though. It's not like doing things the way everybody before you did them is bad. There's a lot to learn, and I'm still mastering the craft. I claim no expertise, just a very curious nature, with all its faults.

On the other hand that adherence to tradition and received wisdom is what leaves openings for new (or lost and revived) trends in baking to sweep through the culture. Leahy's no knead recipe is an example of this; Reinhart's pain a l'ancienne baguette technique is another. Everybody assumes there's one best way to make bread until somebody comes along and says, "what my recipe presupposes is, maybe there isn't?

But anyway. I am excited about the idea that there's more to learn, and what I think the recent studies have shown is that there are still many more variables to isolate and test. I suspect that one reasons home bakers don't get the same consistent results as professionals is just down to the fact we can't control all the factors the same way, and we're not baking frequently enough to learn all the adaptations that would make our results more consistent from loaf to loaf. For instance I only bother adjusting for desired dough temperature when it's really cold outside, because I just don't want to deal with how long the dough takes to rise in our cool kitchen. And I maybe could feed my starter more often, but that would be inconvenient and it leavens bread as it is, so I think it's OK? Maybe it could be better, but it's not unhealthy. My bread is definitely different across the seasons, but it's always good. That's good enough for me.
posted by fedward at 10:33 AM on September 25, 2022