On the sourdough starter — a fermented mixture of water and flour used as a leavening agent — rests the fate of a boule of sourdough bread. Patience is a key ingredient. The starter demands feeding and attention till it is ready in five to seven days. With the Covid-19 lockdown, packed schedules have been cleared, and with the kind of time available, there is a surge of interest in making sourdough.
“Those who have wanted to bake now have the time for it,” says Sujit Sumitran, the ‘bread whisperer’ from Goa. Over the past few years, Sujit has travelled across the country taking intensive, day-long classes on how to make this fermented bread, as well as hosted classes at his home in Goa.
Now, he has had many enquiries for online classes but so far he has demurred. “I can’t ship the starter, then how?” he wonders, since he uses his own starter for his sessions, and then gives some to participants, so they can start making sourdough with it. He also has starters of varying vintages and geography.
A starter is the cultivation of wild yeast in a form that can be used for baking, wild yeast is present in all flour. It is used instead of yeast, for fermentation. Selvan Thandapani of Bengaluru’s SourHouse (sourhouse_in) has been, for the last one week, posting short tutorial videos of how to make a starter. In each video he shows how the starter should look, grow, be discarded and ‘fed’.
- Although Sujit Sumitran is not conducting online classes for the time being, he has his hands full with baking — for his neighbours. “Here, in Goa, people eat a lot of bread — in the morning and evening. Only lunch would be something else like rice. Bread is important and there is not too much of it available now. So I have decided to bake bread for my neighbours,” he says. One of the first batches of enriched loaves, he says on his Instagram handle, “have Goan jaggery, eggs, butter and milk instead of water.” The inclusions on some are blue poppy seeds and lemon pepper. He says it feels like “a splendid way to give back to the community.”
Thandapani conducts workshops and retails too. He uses 20 gm of all purpose flour mixed with an equal amount of water, stored in a 150 – 200 ml transparent container stored at room temperature in warm cities. The container should be loosely covered — either a cap or cheesecloth. Each day, after the first 24 hours, around three-fourths of it is discarded and more flour and water added to remaining mixture to ‘feed’ it. This is done for five to seven days till the starter is ready.
Delhi-based expert Anita Tikoo, who conducts sourdough workshops, says the current shortage of bread in supermarkets and more time at hand are reasons for the surge in interest. “People need something to keep them occupied; they would have thought about baking earlier but didn’t have the time to follow up. Now there is time,” she says.
She recently conducted a live sourdough starter session via her Instagram handle (a_madteaparty). When Tikoo announced it, she had more than 250 requests to participate. She has since been getting regular updates on the starters. “There is a lot of excitement about it on Instagram, especially about making the starter from scratch. It is a great distraction and one can get very involved in the process,” she continues, “I want to remove the air of mystery around it. It is not intimidating and everybody can do it.”
Side treats
Sourdough bread is said to have many benefits as opposed to yeast-made bread, especially due to the use of the starter making it easy to digest. Tikoo recently conducted a live session of how to make crumpets using the discard, “The discard is the leftover starter. You take a small amount of starter to make a fresh batch. The rest is called discard but can be used to cook a host of leavened breads from waffles and pancakes to pita and parathas.” The starter or discard can be added to the flour and mixed depending on the bread one intends to bake. Dough for traditional Indian breads such as parathas are not fermented, but adding starter leavens it.
This is Bengaluru-based Sufiya D’s first tryst with sourdough. “I have wanted to do this for sometime but never had the time. Now with the lockdown, I finally got down to it,” she says. She follows Tikoo and a few YouTubers for tips. It has been a week now and her starter is ready; she is excited about how it is turning out .
The approach of bakers is cautious; they don’t want to waste ingredients and stretch resources. Like Anita Singh (whose Instagram handle is sourdoughbakesandfermentation) of Mumbai, who conducts workshops and bakes commercially. Singh says, “I have not been baking more as I have to be careful with the ingredients since the lockdown is complete here. I use things that we have at home — wheat, millet, semolina — luckily we have a stock of whole wheat flour at home. I bake when we are done with our bread at home.”
Adds Tikoo, “It is also about mindfulness. Watching the starter grow is meditative and calming. You have to pay attention to it and be very involved with it. It also gives people a sense of community, of belonging, while inherently being a process suited to being on your own, being alone.” She, and others like Thandapani, suggest naming the starter; Sufiya calls hers ‘Bubbly’ while Thandapani called one of his ‘Gloopy’. As Tikoo says, “You think of it as your own, as something living — a pet. It occupies the mind positively.”
