How to Make Sourdough Bread

By Karen Keb
Published on October 3, 2011
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Karen Keb
A sourdough loaf can turn a ho-hum sandwich into a culinary masterpiece.

My love for sourdough and learning how to make sourdough bread began suddenly one day while out hunting in antique stores. A shop owner in Paxico, Kansas, said she had just gotten in a truckload of old cookbooks she’d scored at an estate sale, and she suggested I might want to have a look. Might I? She had no idea who she was dealing with!

Recipes for Making Sourdough Bread:
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No-Knead Sourdough Bread Recipe

For the next couple of hours I pored through the stacks, and when I pulled out a smallish, red book from 1976 called Alaska Sourdough: The Real Stuff by A Real Alaskan by Ruth Allman (Alaska Northwest Publishing Co., Anchorage), I held it up in a “Eureka!” moment. This charming, handwritten book (literally handwritten by the author, and mass-produced by the publisher) spoke to me on many levels. My grandfather was an Alaska Native, and after spending time on “the last frontier,” I came to cherish both the Native culture and that rugged pioneer spirit. Also, being a fervent baker, I had wanted to investigate sourdough for some time. All of that, together with my love for “real food,” converged, and I started on my sourdough odyssey.  

How to Make Sourdough Bread

One of Webster’s definitions for a “sourdough” is “a prospector or settler in the Western United States or Canada, especially one living alone: so called because their staple was sourdough bread.” Sourdough, the food, is a fermented dough and traditional pioneer food of mining camps and chuck wagons, and for those living on the trail. It was known as the best food for energy because of its protein content – according to Ruth Allman, laboratory tests have shown sourdough contains the greatest amount of protein for its weight and size of any comparable food. 

Sourdough was common in pioneer days because yeast was extremely hard to come by, and when it was available, it was almost always “dead” from exposure to extreme conditions. Dead yeast resulted in baking failures that were a grievous waste of vital supplies. Sourdough became the standard because it could be controlled and kept alive, and it was always dependable.  

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