Near wild leaven

The ninth month of the year is when the Real Bread Campaign goes on a mission to help everyone discover that: life’s sweeter with sourdough!

The simple aim of Sourdough September is to encourage more people to buy genuine sourdough Real Bread from a local, independent bakery, or bake their own at home.

Real Bread Campaign coordinator Chris Young says: “Recently, people everywhere have started finding out what many Real Bread bakers have always known: life’s sweeter with sourdough! For anyone who hasn’t taken the opportunity to try the genuine article yet, there’s no better time than now.”

Across thirty days of sharing food, facts and fun, Real Bread bakeries, baking schools, mills and food festivals around the UK and beyond will be running sourdough classes, tastings, feasts and more. Highlights include:

• The chance to win a place on a two day Wild Yeast and Sourdough course with Campaign ambassador Emmanuel Hadjiandreou, courtesy of The School of Artisan Food
• Champions in Hobbs House Bakery’s quest to find #KingOfTheSourdough will win a class with Campaign ambassador (and Fabulous Baking Brother) Tom Herbert.
• Sourjoe September at Joe’s Bakery in Bristol, with tastings, classes, Q&A sessions and a new loaf launched.
• The Loaf in Crich, Derbyshire, is creating nine new sourdough Real Breads during the month.
• Brick House in Peckham is running Sourdough Starter for 10, giving away a pot of starter and one of their award-winning loaves every week.
• Paul Brennan in Cardiff will be giving away loaves from his wood-fired microbakery’s oven to the first 32 neighbours who email to ask for one.

Supporters and friends of the Campaign will also be helping to demystify sourdough, particularly warning people of stodgy pseudough marketed as the real thing. These high-speed, industrial imitators are boosted by baker’s yeast, sometimes laden with artificial additives and even if advertised as ‘freshly baked’ could have been made elsewhere and merely rebaked in a retailer’s ‘loaf-tanning salon’.  The Campaign calls for an Honest Crust Act to protect shoppers from being misled.

People can find details of more events, facts and FAQs about sourdough, information on the potential benefits of eating genuine sourdough, a list of Real Bread baking schools, the Real Bread Finder map directory of around 650 small, local bakeries around the UK, and how to join the Campaign at: www.realbreadcampaign.org

**ENDS**

For more information please contact Chris Young: chris [at] sustainweb.org or 0203 5596 777​
www.realbreadcampaign.org       twitter.com/realbread     facebook.com/realbreadcampaign

Notes

 

Part of the charity Sustain: The alliance for better food and farming, the Real Bread Campaign finds and shares ways to make bread better for us, better for our communities and better for the planet.

 

The Campaign defines Real Bread simply as made without the use of processing aids or any other artificial additives, and welcomes everyone to join to support its work. 

Sourdough
Genuine sourdough bread is leavened using only a live starter culture, produced by mixing flour and water to nurture yeasts and lactic acid bacteria that occur naturally on the surface of cereal grains, and therefore in the flour. As well as resulting in a greater depth and complexity of flavour, aroma, and texture than using commercial baker’s yeast, some studies have found long fermentation with a sourdough starter culture to have a range of dietary benefits. The Real Bread Campaign calls for more research into these.

• The Real Bread Campaign’s sourdough page
• Some sourdough research

More sourdough facts

Sourdough…

• …bread’s origins are unknown. The oldest existing records that appear to show leavened bread making are from Egypt, with estimated dates around 5000 years ago…though nobody’s certain.
• …cultures are easy to start at home in a matter of days using just wholemeal flour (thriving with yeasts and lactic acid bacteria that live all around us, notably on the surface of cereal grains) and water.
• …bakers use various terms to refer to their cultures, including starter, chef, levain and mother.
• …is not yeast free! Labelling it as such could fall foul of consumer protection laws.
• …cultures are all different, some containing Saccharomyces cerevisiae, aka baker’s or brewer’s yeast, the same species (though almost certainly a different strain) as commercial yeast.
• …doesn’t have to taste sour. Skilled bakers control the conditions in which their starters are cultured, and doughs are made, to ensure that the levels of sour, vinegary acetic acid produced don’t overwhelm the subtler lactic acid.
• …cultures evolve over time. A ‘150 year old’ starter might not contain the descendants, or even same species, of bacteria and yeasts it did as recently as a few years ago.
• …has been shown to reduce the glycaemic index (GI) of bread http://bit.ly/11i1OTc

Other Real Bread Campaign initiatives include:

• Rising Up: our report on the therapeutic, social and employment opportunities Real Bread making offers to people living with mental health issues and facing a range of other challenges:  http://bit.ly/1hODaG6
• Together We Rise: the project based on the recommendations of Rising Up to help thousands of people to benefit: http://bit.ly/NVGPoi
• Knead to Know: the Real Bread starter To date, more than 4000 people have benefitted from the Campaign’s guide to setting up a successful Community Supported Bakery or home-based microbakery, which is now published by Grub Street: http://bit.ly/1fftqUu
• The Real Bread Finder is the only online directory dedicated to helping people find where to buy Real Bread locally in now used by around 650 bakeries. Free for bakers to add, and people to seek, local places to buy Real Bread: http://bit.ly/1k1JV5Q
• The Real Bread Loaf Mark is helping more than 140 bakers to give, and countless shoppers to get, an at-a-glance assurance that: ‘this is Real Bread!’ http://bit.ly/1kCuiAd
• An Honest Crust Act is what we need!  Part-baked/rebaked loaves sold as ‘fresh’, added enzymes not appearing on labels, in-store ‘bakery’ loaves without ingredients lists at all, wholegrain loaves diluted with soya flour and purified gluten powder, no legal definition of ‘wholegrain’, ‘sourdough’, ‘artisan’, or even ‘bread’. Without properly enforced regulations around loaf labelling and marketing, how can shoppers make fully-informed food choices?

Support The Campaign’s mutually-supportive national network helps bakers, and everyone else who cares about the state of bread in Britain, to connect with each other to ask for and share ideas and information to help the rise of Real Bread. People can choose from four accessible levels of support, from individuals to large companies, to help fund the Campaign’s charitable work.