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Making sourdough starter at UvA for your mental health
The “Make your own sourdough starter” workshop in UvA’s VOX-POP “creative space” filled up in no time. “Go into it with an open mind,” says workshop leader Tessa Straver. Folia tried it.
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“Take a moment to connect with your microbes,” Straver tells the thirty or so attendees. A moment later, “Be prepared to befriend your microbes.” Clearly, processing sourdough is about more than baking bread. Much more: Reflection and taking your time are just as important. But love for microorganisms and the archaic craft — the ancient Egyptians were already making sourdough bread — is perhaps the most crucial.
To illustrate, artist Tessa Straver has been using her sourdough starter for years. Today’s workshop instructor also has a name for it: Vita (the yeasts are alive, after all). She takes the fermented dough everywhere: Asia, Oceania, and Europe. On her travels, she prefers to keep Vita as close to her as possible (see photo above article): “It needs warmth, and your body temperature is perfect.”
Keeping it alive
Sometimes she makes bread out of it, sometimes pancakes. But she wants to keep the remaining dough alive for another hundred years. Her children can then take over the project when she can no longer do it. She invites the group to undertake something similar. “Start your own sourdough story.”
How does it work? Either way, it is a long-term process that does not end with this two-hour workshop. After two or three days, you see the sourdough starter start to bubble. But only after ten days can you make bread with it. If you want to keep the dough “alive,” as Straver does, you have to keep feeding it flour. She prefers to go to the local miller for that, but flour from the supermarket will do as well.
Corona craze
That longer period of time proved ideal for many during the corona crisis. To combat boredom. Making sourdough bread or other slow foods, such as kombucha or kimchi, even became a real craze, NU.nl noted. “In the corona days, I saw a lot of people doing it, and since then, I have found it fun, too,” says participant Clara Riedmiller (24). If she likes it, the German logic student at the UvA also plans to make kombucha soon. Although, she chuckles, “Hopefully, there won’t be too many bacteria sticking to me.”
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Eve Oostendorp (24), a psychology student at the UvA, has made fermented kefir, a dairy drink from the Caucasus, before. Now she is venturing into making a sourdough starter, because “you never really learn how bread is made if you always just buy it at the store. Besides, it makes you appreciate food more,” she explains.
Sour faces
Meanwhile, Straver passes around several sourdough starters. Some have just been “fed,” others 10 days ago. All the substances look clayey and sticky. The participants use flour and water to feed the starters. The recently fed starter already smells like bread and tastes accordingly. You can happily eat it without a grimace.
The “underfed” starter, on the other hand, leads to extremely sour faces at the table. The acidity in the room increases visibly. But afterwards, there is no sign of that. With their own homemade sourdough starter in hand, the group returns home satisfied. Would they keep it and feed it for more than a century? Looking at the happy faces, that can by no means be ruled out. Straver would be proud.
