Sourdough and the Scientific Method
Exploring the Intersection of Yeast, Experimentation, and Life's Milestones
It was inevitable. I was staring down the barrel of the hardest academic semester of my life and needed an outlet to restore my energy– something to reinvigorate my creativity. The answer floated into my consciousness one fateful October night: Yeast.
I think it takes a certain kind of person to become addicted to sourdough. I knew I would eventually find my way to bread-making months before I even had my plan to create a starter. During the pandemic, it felt as though everyone and their mother was baking sourdough bread, sourdough pancakes, or sourdough chocolate chip cookies. I was still too young, too naïve, to entertain such pursuits. My time would come.
Fast forward to October 2024, one full month into my first semester as a PhD student in chemical engineering. I was going through hell with my classes and actively trying to forget about the thermodynamics PSET I had due the next day. There I sat, with a bowl of lemon chicken orzo soup for dinner. It was delicious, don’t get me wrong, but I needed a better vessel than a mere Amazon Basics soup spoon. My senses were truly yearning for a crusty slice of homemade sourdough bread. That notion sent me down a delicious thought-spiral. I was finally ready to enter the rabbit hole that was bread making. Just like that, my fate was sealed.
I proceeded to do what I do best: obsess. My YouTube search history now contained classic titles like “Amazing Sourdough Recipe”, “The Last SOURDOUGH STARTER RECIPE You Ever Need”, and “18 Sourdough Basics YOU Should Know”. Every piece of information I gained was further fuel for my fire. I loved the idea that my starter would be a snapshot of this period in my life. It would be an incubator for the wild yeast existing around me, such that every tasty creation could trace its origins back to this very moment. Moving to Cambridge, getting engaged, living in my first apartment, and starting grad school at MIT– these were times that deserved to be preserved in dough.
I always do better with a deadline. At this point, I knew that creating my sourdough starter would (hopefully) take a week or two. Because it was now mid October, I made it my goal to be baking by Thanksgiving. I wanted to bring a classic sourdough boule home to my family.
It was a simple protocol on paper. I added a 1:1 ratio of unbleached all-purpose flour to warm, filtered water to a wide-mouthed mason jar, and then mixed it all up to obtain a thick, pancake batter-like consistency. Every 24 hours (ish), I would dump about half of the jar in the trash, then replenish with more flour and water. I used a rubber band to mark the level of the mixture and placed the whole contraption on my kitchen counter to act as my “warm environment.”
I found myself excited to wake up every morning and check on its progress: Did it rise? Are there bubbles? How did it smell? My years of practice with scientific observation were really being put to the test. I was dumbfounded with the overlap between mammalian cell culture and sourdough: The optimal environment, media additions, and daily upkeep required that ultimately lead to the growth and success of your desired “culture”.
Slowly, the days passed, but with nothing to show for it. I kept adding more flour, more water, more prayers– but my starter wasn’t starting. It just smelled like nasty bacteria and frankly made me very sad. I plunged into literature once again, more determined than ever. The starter recipe I had been following said it should start to double in size after about a week, but obviously, this wasn’t universal. Where was I going wrong? I found a few resources that mentioned the true impact of environmental conditions on the success of the starter. I also read some sources that varied the ratio of flour to water. I devised a new plan, armed with this critical insight: The scientific method at work.
I moved my jar to a warmer spot in my kitchen: the stove top, and I started adding slightly more flour than water for each feed. Wouldn’t you know it? A few days later, we had a breakthrough. Like any other morning, I got out of bed to check on the starter. I knew I was in luck the minute I turned the corner to face my alley kitchen. Even from a distance, I could see that the starter’s level was about a centimeter over the rubber band marking its original height. I cautiously took the cover off the jar and peered in to examine its contents. Not only did I see the tiniest of bubbles, but I wasn’t immediately slapped in the face with the smell of rotting food. It actually smelled like sourdough.
I carried this joy with me for the rest of the day. I had cultivated my own starter, populated with the very microorganisms that existed in my apartment. And if that’s not the coolest thing, I don’t know what is.
Armed with my active starter (now to be affectionately known as “Bready”), there was only one thing left to do: transform him into the best damn sourdough loaf the world has ever known. I closed all my open sourdough starter-related tabs and began the research cycle once again.
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