And another thing!
My neighbor used to work in a local bakery. Not a high-end gourmet-type
establishment, mind you, just an average small-town bakery where they sell
donuts, bagels, cakes, cookies, rolls, and bread. We were chatting one
day, and the conversation somehow turned to bread, and I asked him if he
had ever done much with sourdough. I lamented that I had never been able
to get a really sour sourdough using a home-made starter. He looked at me
blankly, then asked me what a starter was. I replied that the traditional
way sourdough is made is to keep a bit of dough around and natural yeast
and bacteria will grow in it, producing various organic acids which impart
a characteristic sour taste, and that periodically, a portion of the
starter culture is mixed with the usual ingredients, eventually resulting
in sourdough bread. That was evidently news to him. He said that in the
bakery he used to work in, they made sourdough bread from ingredients which
came in a big bag labeled something like "sourdough mix." He said they
just dumped it in their Paul Bunyan-sized KitchenAid, dumped in some cold
water, and fired it up, then went on to explain that big commercial mixers
generate quite a lot of heat when kneading bread and you had to be careful
not to over-knead the dough, or you'd kill the yeast.
I suppose it doesn't really matter how the particular combination of
metabolic byproducts which give sourdough bread its sour, cheezy taste get
there, or whether they're actually produced by fermentation, or added by
humans, but I wonder how much of what passes for sourdough bread from
commercial bakeries is really just white bread to which a little fumaric
acid has been added, and if that might explain why a really sour sourdough
is difficult to produce the traditional way.
Obviously there are many fine bakeries making sourdough bread the
traditional way, and I don't mean to call anyone's integrity into question,
but my conversation with my neighbor made me wonder how common the practice
I described is.
Anyone care to comment? I won't tell a soul!
Quinn
Laguna Niguel, Calif, USA