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Natural Fermentation—What the Hell is that?
Appears in
Published 2021
Sourdough can be controversial. It shouldn’t be. It’s the way bread was leavened for millennia. It was only in the nineteenth century that systems were invented to mass-produce yeast. Before that, we used a byproduct of beer-making yeast to make bread. All bread was naturally leavened.
By that I mean yeast and bacteria harvested naturally and used to ferment dough (and make bread rise by producing carbon dioxide). If you mix flour and water, eventually bacteria and yeast colonize it. Once it settles, you have a stable colony called a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast). That’s how bread’s been made forever.