Sam's Sourdough Site

Welcome! Come along in my journey of discovering how to make decent bread. I'll be chronicling my process here and trying to explain what I've learned along the way.

What is sourdough?

Sourdough is a type of bread made without using commercial yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). Instead, you use a starter, which is a mixture of flour and water that naturally attracts yeast and bacteria from the air to colonize it. This mixture of bacteria and yeast generates carbon dioxide and other gases that allow the bread dough to leaven. Depending on how you treat a starter, it can produce an acidic environment, giving sourdough its distinctive taste. This is why some sourdoughs are more sour than others: the starter may be at a different stage in its fermentation, or the quantity of it relative to the rest of the ingredients can be varied.

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