There is a quote, attributed to Sir Winston Churchill that reads: you should never waste a good crisis.
Alongside his wisdom, Sir Winston Churchill was well known for his fondness for Champagne. Pol Roger Champagne estimates that Sir Churchill drank over 42,000 bottles of Champagne over his lifetime.
Like Sir Winston Churchill, the world we live and work in is teeming with culture and symbolism.
During rousing, wartime crises, Sir Winston imparted: “remember, gentlemen, it is not France we are fighting for, it is Champagne.”
Sourdough bread has become to a crisis-driven, Covid-2019 riddled world, what Champagne symbolized to the allied forces in wartime.
San Francisco sourdough bread recipes have traveled the world, faster than bacteria in 2020. A sourdough starter is what causes sourdough to rise, instead of using active dry yeast, sourdough bread uses a starter to rise. The sourdough starter gives bread its sour flavour and is also used as leavening. For over 5000 years, bakers have combined flour, water and patience to create leavening to make bread. After mixing flour and water, a bread-maker would wait for the mixture to ferment, and once it was sour and packed with gas, the baker would use it was a leavening, which caused the dough to rise. It takes roughly five days for yeast and bacteria to flourish in a mixture of flour and water.
Patience, and pumping carbon dioxide into dough will reward a sourdough enthusiast with over 50 million yeasts and 5 billion lactobacilli bacteria in each teaspoon of sourdough. While modern, baker’s yeast creates a monoculture of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, in Discover Magazine reported in 2003 that sourdough bread is a product of wild yeasts and bacteria.
Cape Wine Master, Dave March described yeast as the silent winemaker. In a March 2020 article, published on wine.co.za, Dave writes: “Saccharomyces (cerevisiae) and other yeast genera occur naturally on grapes, probably dozens of strains on the same grape, (and on every other surface nearby) and some wineries rely on this natural population to ferment their wines.”
While Saccharomyces cerevisiae sounds like a complicated Harry Potter spell, it is an unsung hero for the pleasurable production and enjoyment of bread and wine.
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