Sourdough Bread

by Robert Pisor

Bread German baking scientists think of sourdough as simply a renewable muscle for raising bread dough, and USDA chemists describe it as a collection of sugar- or acid-producing lactobacilli. But to me, sourdough starter is mysterious, mystical. . . magic. If bread has a spiritual nature (and who can deny it?), then sourdough starter is its soul.

I made bread at home for years, slowly learning the feel of good dough, methods for baking with steam, the usefulness of scoring the surface with a double-edged razor blade, the technique for transferring dough from wooden peel to hot oven tile.

Slowly, slowly, I reduced the number of ingredients until I achieved a perfect marriage of flour, water, and salt.Now that’s magic: making great bread with only three ingredients. The master of this art was Lionel Poilane, a baker in Paris, and my first great loaf was a careful imitation of his work. I still make that loaf of bread, which I call North Country. His loaf is called levain, after the sourdough starter itself —a unique French preferment with the consistency of

In the early going, I never really felt my starter got started. It always seemed to have a suspect consistency–too much fluid on top, I thought, and not enough action or aroma. Then one day I saw my wife (Ellen Waters ’62) bending her elbow over the counter I used for bread-making, vigorously cleaning the surface with a bleaching cleanser. No wonder my lactobacilli weren’t vigorous! I brought out an old wooden bowl I’d bought at auction, cleaned it with well water, and dried it in the sun.

With well water, I mixed organic flour bought from black-hat Mennonites, and stirred it with my hand as I walked the path from our kitchen to an old stone house where a farmer kept his milk cool 100 years ago. Three days later, the bowl smelled yeasty, almost like new beer, and the levain was bubbling, rising. It was alive!

From that first batch, I made two wonderful loaves of bread to share with friends, saving a couple of ounces of the levain to feed with more flour and water, and then used that sourdough starter to make test loaves of other breads. From that, I saved dough to make Cherry Walnut, Cracked Wheat, Seven Grain, Asiago Cheese and, of course,North Country, the original loaf.

The same sourdough starter that I mixed in the wooden bowl 11 years ago has now lifted more than two million loaves of bread, built a company with nearly 40 employees and six delivery routes in northern Michigan, and established a statewide reputation for Stone House Bread for making wholesome, crusty, delicious loaves.

Now tell me sourdough starter isn’t magical!