Why Bake Sourdough in an Age of Sustainability

僕自身、何故こんなにもサワードウブレッドを焼く事にハマったのだろうと、不思議に思います。これまでの、人生で趣味と呼べそうなモノは何もなありませんでした。あえて言うのなら、仕事が趣味だと言えるかもしれません。

Bread is very old indeed. Fossilised bread around 14,400 years old has been excavated in Jordan. And by around 3700–3600 BC people were already eating bread that had been deliberately fermented before baking: grain ground between stones, boiled into a porridge, left for several days to ferment — sourdough — and then baked. Humans have been eating sourdough bread for more than five thousand years.

Baking with a single cultivated strain of yeast is, in the history of bread, extremely recent — nineteenth century onwards. Yeast is indispensable if you want bread made quickly, efficiently and to a uniform standard. You could fairly call it a product of industrialisation and of mass production and mass consumption.

現代の都市生活に足りないのはプロセスではないかと思います。スイッチをパチっとやれば明かりがついて、蛇口を捻れば水が出てきて、コンロ使えばすぐに火が付く。 極め付けは、スマホでポチッとすれば明日には欲しいものが家に届く。 入り口と出口が近接化し過ぎて、プロセスが不可視化されてしまいました。

And that, I suspect, is close to the root of a modern sickness. For me, cooking, and baking sourdough, is a kind of meditation — an act of taking the process back.

A bread machine gives you no way to take that process back. Add water to flour, and the dough ferments and rises: you can put your hands into that piece of magic, smell it, feel it happening. What is fermentation? Sourdough lets you enjoy that threshold process to the full — a thing that seems visible and is not.

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Do try baking sourdough yourself.

Getting started with sourdough bread