Sourdough used to be such a mystery to me, as it is to a lot of people, I imagine. I’d look over thick books on the subject, I’d peruse endless pages of sourdough recipes, have some sort of mini anxiety attack and close the book, never to look at it again. We love to over-complicate things, don’t we? I’m not sure why, but I see it in all facets of life. The result of the over-complication of sourdough is that most people who initially show an interest in the subject eventually shy away, believing it’s too technical. It’s similar to cooking in general. The more people make things look difficult, fancy and over-complicated, the less interest we’ll tend to show. The inevitable side effect is that people opt for the convenient processed food, which we all should know by now isn’t doing anyone any favours in the health department. The same can be said for bread. If you look at the ingredients list for processed bread it’s as long as your arm. But home-made sourdough has the same three ingredients it’s had for centuries: flour, water and culture.
I’m no doctor of medicine or nutritionist, nor am I a researcher in food science, but I can’t help wondering what all those ingredients in supermarket bread do to our bodies. I wonder why so many people have bread issues these days. I don’t remember anyone having bread allergies or being gluten intolerant when I was at school. Maybe bread is doing something to us that it didn’t thirty years ago. Has the way bread is produced changed so much that it’s making us sick? Like I said, I don’t know the answer, but I did know I wanted to stop eating processed breads, so years ago I started to make my own. Initially I used dried yeast, then I moved one step further to independence and took up sourdough. I haven’t looked back.