September 2019

The biggest thing in the sourdough internet this year has been a series of experiments by a guy named Seamus Blackley (apparently famous for making the xBox). It came to a peak in August, when he revealed in a series of Twitter posts that he’d been working with an Egyptologist and a microbiologist to harvest dormant yeast spores from inside a 4,500 year old pottery crock. He coaxed them back to life, and then baked a loaf of bread with them. This was so astonishing that it got a fair amount of mainstream media coverage. 

If you get me talking for more than six minutes about food, you will know that for me, food is about story. The real sustenance I dish up is in the memories of the people who discovered and grew and cooked and ate this food in the past. Sourdough tells a story. 

We’ve only had commercial leaveners (such as baking powder and dry yeast) for a couple of hundred years. Before that, it was sourdough. Sourdough is animated by spores of a living organism that’s wild in the air. We trap them with food - flour and water - and keep feeding and growing them in a glass jar or pottery crock. They can even be dried out and dormant, and then returned to life with more flour and water at the right temperature (that’s what commercial yeast is). If you treat your sourdough starter right, feed it well, you can convince it to raise a loaf of bread, or even a cake. 

To bake any kind of yeast bread, it helps if you have a feeling for it, but working with sourdough means nurturing a relationship with another living being. The starter I’ve had for six years works best when it has a complex, rye-thick smell, and air holes the size of blueberries. I know the first ferment is ready for more action by the way it clings to the side of the bowl and the strong strands of protein wrap around the air pockets. 

Every single time I am baking in partnership with my sourdough, I am aware that I am doing nothing special. For millennia, bakers have been reading these exact same signs of smell and texture to bake bread.

Sourdough leavening for bread first came into use in ancient Egypt. The yeast spores were a byproduct of beer making. In the Fertile Crescent, nutrition-dense grains such as wheat and barley thrived in the rich soil where they originated. Jared Diamond teaches us that this coincidence of nature meant that the Egyptians had a food-making system so efficient that the people had time left over to develop writing and metalworking and to build pyramids. In contrast, the people native to California struggled to extract enough nutrition from acorns, which had to be gathered inefficiently and then soaked to get rid of toxins. While the native Americans spent all their time laboring to get enough nutrition, easy wheat spread north from Egypt, where the Europeans benefited so much, Diamond writes, that it was central to their ability to dominate and subjugate most of the rest of the world. That original Egyptian sourdough - nutritious, simple to bake and transport, beautiful and plentiful - is a driver of the history of the entire world.    

So naturally when Seamus Blackley wanted to bake the oldest leavened bread on the planet, he went for those Egyptian pottery crocks. The experiment in August was very strict. He autoclaved his instruments and sterilized his jars, because he wanted to make a starter that was only the ancient yeast, no modern contaminants. He used older grains, barley and einkorn, that the Egyptians would have used themselves. 

But earlier, in the spring, he did some test runs. That didn’t get nearly as much attention, which is probably why, when someone asked him on social media if he would share that less-pure-but-still-ancient sourdough starter, he said yes. He put plastic bags in mailing envelopes back in May.  

A week ago, a friend of a friend casually mentioned that he was one of the people who got the starter in the mail. “My wife keeps telling me that I need to get rid of some of it,” he said, shrugging. “It’s cluttering up the refrigerator.” The next day, I had a jar of it in my hand.

When he handed it off to me, it was thin and vinegary. I was worried. Sourdough starter should be about life, the strong, clear lines of protein connecting big, healthy pockets of air. It should smell both rich and clean, like tomato plants in the sun, or red wine. This starter smelled like cheap white vinegar, almost dead. 

I fed it water and einkorn, an old unhybridized kind of wheat. I left it out on my warm kitchen counter, covered, next to the eggplant from my father’s garden and the eggs from our backyard chickens. I looked at it every few hours, willing it to live, and then I smelled it. I fed it every evening, water and creamy einkorn flour. After a few days, it was still vinegary, and I was afraid it wasn’t going to work. I made a second jar just in case. 

I Googled, more than I have ever Googled in six years of sourdough baking. I followed every rabbit hole and Reddit thread about reviving sourdough starter, and I decided to keep feeding it and hoping. On the fifth day, I woke up and opened the jar even before I drank my coffee. It had the strong protein clinging to the sides of the jar. It smelled beautiful, like fruit and freshness. I almost swooned with how alive it smelled. 

There’s this rage with sourdough baking - encouraged by the Tartine book ten years ago, and fueled by an army of engineers-turned-bakers - to bake perfectly precisely. It’s obsessed with hydration percentages and rigid temperature measurement. I’ve tried following their instructions, and they totally work. However, for this first bake with my ancient starter, I just felt my way through it. I relied on my senses to tell me when it was time to add the salt and turn the dough. I relied on my years of experience, too, although this bake was nothing like any I had experienced before.

It was so easy. I thought it was going to be difficult, this ancient and foreign yeast, but it stretched and grew and shaped, rose and relaxed more effortlessly than any dough I had ever worked with. 

All yeast dough is a miracle of chemistry and biology. This one, grown from the remnants of a long-dead civilization, was, to me, both alive in the present moment and representative of the entire sweep of human history.

From the moment that I first held it in my hand, I knew that I wanted to use this ancient sourdough starter to bake challah for Rosh Hashana. The Jewish new year starts at the end of September. It calls us to return, to our right paths, our tradition, to the people in our lives. I bake the challah for one of my Jewish communities as we begin the ten-day process of self-examination that is our sacred path, re-cycling around the sun. The people in this community are my friends and spiritual partners. Making the ceremonial bread, which is shaped in a circle like the year, is an important part of the way that I prepare myself and give back to my community. 

The celebration of the Jewish new year is thousands of years old. It is mandated in the Torah, our most sacred book, which also tells the story of the subjugation of the Israelite people by the ancient Egyptians. The Egyptians loom large in the story of the creation of the Jewish people, but to the Egyptians, we were insignificant, one of dozens of tiny civilizations chewed up and spit out by the Egyptian empire. 

But now, today, on my kitchen counter, I carefully shape the revived essence of the Egyptians’ great contribution to the sustenance of the world: leavened yeast bread. Their yeast can be resurrected, but the Egyptians are dead, and their civilization is dead. But the holiday when Jews eat this bread is very much alive. The Jewish civilization does not need to be revived. We have been renewing ourselves for all of these thousands of years, every year on Rosh Hashana. 

BTW: The bread is delicious.