Sourdough is the oldest kind of leavened bread in recorded history, and people have been eating it for thousands of years. The components of creating a sourdough starter are very simple – flour and water. Mixing them produces a live culture where yeast and bacteria ferment the sugars in flour, making byproducts that give sourdough its characteristic taste and smell. They are also what make it rise in the absence of other leavening agents.
My sourdough starter, affectionately deemed the “Fosters” starter, was passed down to me by my grandparents, who received it from my grandmother’s college roommate. It has followed me throughout my academic career across the country, from undergrad in New Mexico to graduate school in Pennsylvania to postdoctoral work in Washington.
Currently, it resides in the Midwest, where I work at The Ohio State University as a senior research associate, collaborating with researchers to characterize samples in a wide variety of fields ranging from food science to material science.
As part of one of the microscopy courses I instruct at the university, I decided to take a closer look at the microbial community in my family’s sourdough starter with the microscope I use in my day-to-day research.
Sourdough is the oldest kind of leavened bread in recorded history, and people have been eating it for thousands of years. The components of creating a sourdough starter are very simple – flour and water. Mixing them produces a live culture where yeast and bacteria ferment the sugars in flour, making byproducts that give sourdough its characteristic taste and smell. They are also what make it rise in the absence of other leavening agents.
My sourdough starter, affectionately deemed the “Fosters” starter, was passed down to me by my grandparents, who received it from my grandmother’s college roommate. It has followed me throughout my academic career across the country, from undergrad in New Mexico to graduate school in Pennsylvania to postdoctoral work in Washington.
Currently, it resides in the Midwest, where I work at The Ohio State University as a senior research associate, collaborating with researchers to characterize samples in a wide variety of fields ranging from food science to material science.
As part of one of the microscopy courses I instruct at the university, I decided to take a closer look at the microbial community in my family’s sourdough starter with the microscope I use in my day-to-day research.
Each sourdough starter has a unique mix of microbes.Daniel Veghte, CC BY-SA
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