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San Francisco’s famous sourdough was once gross
- jollyllama 4y agoOnce? I find this article to be an accurate description of sourdough breads (SF or otherwise) I have eaten; I don't like the taste of them at all.
- ghaff 4y agoIt may be an acquired taste especially stronger versions. But it's most of what I eat and what I usually make at home.
- extragood 4y agoThat can be said of literally any food. For instance, I hate chocolate. And upon learning that, people will sometimes tell me, "oh, you must be thinking of /American/ chocolate. You'll like /real/ chocolate". Nope. I've humored enough people and sampled various combinations of cacao, milk, dark, Belgian, Swiss, and so on. I don't like chocolate.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- caslon 4y agoHave you tried white chocolate? It's not really chocolate and it doesn't taste similar, but it might quiet the chocolate elitist crowd.
- ryanbrunner 4y agoIn my experience, white chocolate has a better chance of turning up the noses of chocolate elitists than not eating chocolate at all.
- dylan604 4y ago>And upon learning that, people will sometimes tell me, "oh, you must be thinking of Nope, I think you must be an alien sent here to study us, but didn't quite get everything about being human right. Not liking chocolate is a shibboleth on if you can be trusted. You clearly cannot. ;-)
- zwieback 4y agoCame here to say that, it's way too sour. Sourdough is okayish when done well but I prefer yeast 100% of the time.
- taeric 4y agoI confess I feel that most of the love of sourdough is a propaganda thing. I do like it now, but a good french loaf is still better.
- christkv 4y agoI find slow overnight fermentation with industrial yeast can be pretty decent when you don’t have the time to keep a starter going and just want to bake some bread once in awhile. Big fan of no knead method.
- ghaff 4y agoI've tried the no knead method and didn't really like the results. I took a bread baking class that had more conventional needing and IMO the results were so much better. (I have a stand mixer which makes it easier.)
- orionion 4y agoSourdough bread & diabetes: is sourdough the best bread for people with diabetes? https://www.sourdough.co.uk/sourdough-bread-diabetes/ https://www.sourdough.co.uk/sourdough-bread-diabetes/
- dredmorbius 4y agoYou might want to experiment with pre-ferments or poolish: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-ferment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-ferment> (Discussed in several of the better sourdough cookbooks, Tartine and Flour, Water, Salt IIRC.) I've yet to try this myself, YMMV.
- naet 4y agoI am from the bay area so maybe I acquired the taste early, but I love a good strong sourdough personally. I think a big part of what people enjoy eating is culturally inherited. If you've been told all your life that good bread should be sweet, you're likely to regard a different less sweet loaf with suspicion or derision. Certain cultures relish in eat things that may seem pungent or unlikable to outsiders. I didn't initially enjoy kimchi, but after some time having it around here and there I've come to love the unique intense flavor.
- foxyv 4y agoMost sourdough is gross. It's very rare that I prefer it over a nice loaf of simple white or whole wheat bread. One advantage it has, is its unique taste. It reminds me of Clam Chowder and nice seafood restaurants. However, if they offered a simple baguette instead I would be perfectly happy.
- silisili 4y agoIt's definitely a unique flavor. My wife makes some that have these darker wet pockets of 'extra sour' that I love. Kid finds it absolutely gross, and I can see why completely. Just like Vegemite, and anchovies. I love them, but admit the flavor is...odd.
- dunham 4y agoAlso beer brewed with brettanomyces.
- abcanthur 4y agoPockets of extra sour!? Fascinating, what is her secret?
- silisili 4y agoI asked her - she said it happens because it's not mixed properly lol. Specifically, she said it happened because I didn't get her enough notice and so she shortened the process, not refolding and restretching as much as she normally would.
- washadjeffmad 4y agoBaguette is traditionally a sourdough. Specifically, a liquid dough levain. This whole article seems strange because "sour-" the root doesn't exactly mean "sour" the taste. It's from "sauer" which implied any aerobic ferment or oxidation, since the old name of oxygen (and still in German) is sauerstoff. Yes, ferments often produce telltale organic acids, but the takeaway is that sourdough isn't called sour because of the flavor, but because it implies that it's derived from an existing culture and not a fresh ferment, like Jack Daniel's Tennessee "sour mash" whiskey, which notably does not taste "sour".
- classichasclass 4y agoI appear to be distinctly in the minority, but sourdough is the usual bread I buy and eat, even though Colombo got swallowed up into Bimbo Bakery along with everything else. (My wife's "Rustik" bread? Also Bimbo.)
- aerostable_slug 4y agoBimbo even bought San Luis Sourdough (made down in San Luis Obispo), which used to be excellent. 'Used to be' being the key phrase. Luckily, someone who had worked there started Brian's Own, which is very good.
- dylan604 4y agoBimbo "bought" Mrs Bairds, but that was because Bairds got in trouble for price fixing and Bimbo bought them for pennies. I don't remember any of the details, but I wonder if some of these other brands were caught up similarly?
- fsckboy 4y ago> I appear to be distinctly in the minority, but sourdough is the usual bread I buy and eat where do you live? on the US west coast it can be difficult to not buy sourdough, it's usually all they have. source: I don't want to buy sourdough
- classichasclass 4y agoThe US west coast ;)
- djur 4y agoWhere are you shopping? Any supermarket I've ever been to has shelf after shelf of sweet white, whole-wheat, and multigrain breads as well as sourdough, rye, etc. as well as French bread and assorted "artisan" loaves.
- wizofaus 4y agoSurely that can't be true if you buy your bread at Walmart or similar. And it must be a relatively recent phenomenon - the various times I was in that part of the world (most recently I guess 12-13 years ago) I don't remember sourdough bread being especially prevalent.
- ijidak 4y agoThe article implies that sourdough is relatively new. Wasn't sourdough the only way to make bread for most of human history? Even in the Bible, "leaven" was dough that was already undergoing fermentation, that they would bury in new dough. (Luke 13:21, Galatians 5:9)
- Avshalom 4y agoIt's how you'd have started things but then you selectively grow less sour yeast strains until you have what you want for bread/beer.
- fsckboy 4y agoregular yeast dough also works that way, it doesn't need to be "sour" dough for the yeast culture to munch on the new dough food, so that evidence alone is not definitive.
- dredmorbius 4y agoThe sour note comes from the lactobacillaceae and develops with a long (usually cold-retarded) ferments, not the yeast itself. A short warm ferment provides very little of the signature sour taste. A prolonged (2--3 day) cold ferment can be quite sharp. And a pre-ferment or poolish can develop a more sour note using baker's yeast.
- dredmorbius 4y agoThat's not my read. Just that sourdough was not typical of American baking at the time (mid-19th century): In 1849, when gold miners began arriving in San Francisco, most Americans didn’t bake or eat sourdough bread. American bakers typically leavened their bread with “barm” (a yeast derived from beer brewing) or one of several relatively new commercial yeast products. From TFA. Whether or not sourdough was prevalent or not relative to barm (often a synonym for sourdough) isn't clear. Google's Ngram Viewer is ... interesting if not especially clear. "Barm" is the leading term from the 1600s through the early 19th century, where "sourdough" becomes the dominant term around 1920: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=barm%2Csourdough&year_start=1600&year_end=2000&case_insensitive=on&corpus=en-2012&smoothing=10 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=barm%2Csourdou...> (I'm not confident that "barm" refers strictly to leaven, and sampling some of the 17th century results shows ... numerous Dutch and German texts....)
- SmellyPotato22 4y agoI feel like the most Bay Area bread is Dutch Crunch. So ubiquitous here and very delicious.
- hypeatei 4y agoThis is one of my most missed foods after moving away from the Bay Area. Going to the Safeway deli and getting a Dutch crunch sandwich...I'm hungry now.
- cameronh90 4y agoIn the UK we have "Tiger Bread", which is my favourite type of bread. I wonder how that differs to Dutch Crunch.
- drifkin 4y agoI think it's the same
- astrange 4y agoIt's the same thing. We call it Dutch Crunch because it came from the Netherlands. Oddly the rest of the US has sourdough but none of them have ever heard of Dutch Crunch. Which is just as well because it really cuts up your mouth.
- ryanbrunner 4y agoDo you know what they call it in the Netherlands? My wife is Dutch and we've been to the Netherlands a bunch of times and I'm trying to picture what it is you're eating. Most of the bread we ate there, or that my wife's family eats is a pretty unassuming white bread (a grocery store italian loaf wouldn't be a bad comparison) just buttered, usually with a slice of gouda or ham.
- klyrs 4y agoTijgerbrood, apparently https://www.kqed.org/news/11761468/dutch-crunch-a-bay-area-favorite-but-not-a-bay-area-original https://www.kqed.org/news/11761468/dutch-crunch-a-bay-area-f...
- joshu 4y agoSourdough is interesting because it is a yeast plus a lactobacillus to make the lactic acid. Lots of things are cured with lacto fermentation including hot sauce and half sour (not vinegar cured) pickles. I love making my own fermented hot sauce but as an east coaster i can’t really stand sourdough.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoI was an east coaster and I could not stand the lack of sourdough.
- chrisseaton 4y ago> as an east coaster i can’t really stand sourdough Lol what does which coast you live on have to do with how you appreciate sourdough or not?
- jjulius 4y agoRegions have their own culinary cultures, so someone growing up on the East Coast might hardly be exposed to sourdough the way someone in SF might. If you're not used to a cuisine or a certain food or flavor profile, it may be kind of a shock to you when you try it. Granted, you can easily get sourdough on the East Coast, but it's not as ingrained as a part of it's culture as it is in SF.
- chrisseaton 4y agoYeah I’m from the UK, but I still like Japanese food from the other side of the world. A different type of bread made in the same country seems a bit extreme.
- mint2 4y agoA lot of comments are calling sourdough gross - strange. is it a west coast thing to think it’s totally normal like Americans vs Europeans on the topic of peanut butter or are the sourdough dislikers just far more excited to comment:
- yamazakiwi 4y agoI personally like sourdough a lot but still only order it when at a diner or brunch.
- shadowofneptune 4y agoIt's definitely eaten east of the Mississippi, so I don't think it's that.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoI grew up on the east coast; sourdough is normal and tasty to me. I doubt there is any real coastal trend. San Francisco is known for sourdough bread, but it wasn't invented and spread from there.
- gwbas1c 4y agoIt's very hard to find in Massachusetts grocery stores. I go out of my way to Trader Joe's to get it. When I lived in California every grocery store had piles of it. The "Sourdough" that my normal grocery store sells isn't sourdough at all. It's shaped like Wonderbread, has the same texture as Wonderbread, and a slightly different flavor. I got into Sourdough because it had the least amount of sugar compared to all of the other breads. When I tasted it for the first time, I was hooked.
- dredmorbius 4y agoIt's ... not terribly surprising that field-baked bread by nonprofessional bakers, mostly miners, operating with limited supplies and highly variable conditions would be of uneven quality. The fact that professional European bakers arrived at the same time, with the still-extant Boudin baker being founded in San Francisco in 1849, and serving large numbers of customers, seems far more relevant to both the reputation and tradition. Sourdough itself and the starter that sustains it is remarkably robust stuff, as both history and my own experimentation has demonstrated. The California gold rush isn't the only one to have a sourdough tradition, with the Klondike Gold Rush (Alaska) of 1896--1899 having a similar ... culture. Memorialised in the poetry collection Songs of a Sourdough by Robert W. Service (1907) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_a_Sourdough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_a_Sourdough>.
- saltcured 4y agoI remember being taught a very different folk theory of sourdough in CA as a child in the early 1980s. I wasn't told about the Gold Rush era specifically. But, we did learn about sourdough starters being used by the pioneers as a portable method to take breadmaking out on the trail. What I was taught is that it was due to the Mediterranean climate meaning that southern French and Italian immigrants easily replicated their native baking cultures here. Much like the CA wine industry that blew up later.
- ofrzeta 4y ago> Miners frequently experimented with their dough to try to reduce its sourness. This works by increasing the ratio of lactic acid to acidic acid. The less acidic acid the less sour the bread. This can be achieved with more water (firmer preferments are more sour) and higher temperatures.