2 ms·

Someone once told me that bread making is like managing a bacteria zoo. You use sugar and flour to feed them and use salt to control their growth.

• Tor3 3y ago
  Well.. common style bread making uses yeast, and no bacteria are involved, for the most part. And yeast also likes sugar and flour. The salt doesn't make any difference at all in my experience, as far as growth is concerned, it's purely to get the exact right taste you want. To actually impact growth I believe it would make the bread too salty to eat. Sourdough bread making is different in that you're feeding a kind of symbiotic relationship of lactic acid bacteria and natural (non-industrial yeast), and you try to get the balance of your sourdough starter right (too much bacteria - it gets sour. You don't actually want sourdough bread to be sour, except for maybe a slight hint of it. Too little - you don't get a nice bread). And there's also a risk that other unwanted bacteria start growing and destroys the taste you're looking for. So yes, for sourdough you'll have to take care of your sourdough starter. It's not that it's terribly tricky. And you can e.g. flatten it and dry it completely and keep it that way, and re-start it later. Nice if you're flying to elsewhere, for example (something I did). But even here I don't know anyone who adds salt to the starter, you add salt when you make bread, and that's purely for taste (in my household salt was forgotten several times.. everything works out exactly the same, you don't notice until you try tasting the bread..!)