Starter for 10

Overheard in an artisan bakery in the heart of the glorious Gower – shopper asks teenage assistant: “How old is you mother?” Response: “Our mother is 15 years old, but her mother is 25.”

Welcome to the world of sourdough bread in Sourdough September. Nothing to do with child mothers or child labour or indeed, arguably, intellectual property. Definitely a cultural intangible asset, though.

Sourdough bread has been a part of human history for thousands of years – a loaf dating to 3700 BCE was found in Switzerland, but the use of naturally occurring yeasts in bread making probably goes back even further, to the dawn of the agricultural age 10,000 years earlier.

It’s only in the last 150 years that risen bread has been made any other way; at first with brewer’s yeast or balm which became widely available after the industrialization of brewing, and then by purpose cultured yeast introduced in the 1870s…

Anyway, enough history – you want more, go to Wikipedia.

Sourdough September was launched by the Real Bread Campaign in 2013 (yes, it’s 10 this year), with the aim of getting people across the UK to try at the very least buying genuine sourdough bread (as opposed to what the RBC calls ‘sourfaux’) or making their own.

So a couple of the Inngot team (Martin Croft, PR & comms manager) and Amanda Foley (services and support executive) have accepted the challenge of making their own sourdough starters and eventually (hopefully!) an edible loaf. We’re about 36 hours into the lifetime of our starters – Amanda’s is shown here.

And yes, we know making sourdough bread was big during lockdown, but who cares? Sourdough is forever. If you keep feeding it…

We’ll be letting you know our progress every Friday.