BOH/FOH 9: Bread

In this episode we discuss a bit about the history of bread and bread making, the return of Artisan bread in the 80’s and a look at what’s been learned and how it’s applied today. 

Brittney's Bread 

My Sourdough Journey: From Pandemic Dream to Fresh-Baked Reality

How It Started

My sourdough journey actually began during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Like so many others, I found myself unexpectedly laid off from work.

I wanted to learn something completely new and fell in love with the idea of making artisan sourdough bread from scratch.

Going All In

Before I ever baked a loaf, I invested in all the tools I thought I'd need:

Banneton proofing basket

Silicone bread sling

Dough whisk

Bread scoring lame and extra blades

Dough cutter

Plastic dough scraper

Cleaning brush

Bread flour and supplies

I was completely ready to become a sourdough baker.

The First Attempt

I started developing my sourdough starter in my tiny 300-square-foot apartment.

Unfortunately...

A living sourdough starter has a very distinct aroma.

In such a small space, there was no escaping the smell.

It simply wasn't practical.

So I packed everything away and put the dream on hold.

A Fresh Start in 2025

Everything changed when I moved into a larger home in 2025.

While unpacking, I rediscovered the unopened tools I'd purchased years earlier.

It felt like the perfect sign to finally begin again.

This time, I was determined to see it through.

Bringing My Starter to Life

I created my starter using only:

Bread flour

Spring water

Every day I discarded, fed, and waited.

Then one morning...

It happened.

My starter more than doubled in size.

It was alive.

It was bubbly.

It smelled beautifully fermented.

That was the moment I knew I was finally ready to bake my very first loaf.

My Go-To Sourdough Recipe

Ingredients

100 g active sourdough starter

350 g warm spring water

500 g bread flour

10–12 g flaky salt

Mix the Dough

Combine all ingredients.

Use a dough whisk until a shaggy dough forms.

Cover with a dish towel or shower cap.

Rest for one hour.

Stretch and Folds

After the one-hour rest:

Perform three rounds of stretch and folds.

First stretch and fold

Wait 30 minutes

Second stretch and fold

Wait 30 minutes

Third stretch and fold

These folds build strength without kneading.

Bulk Fermentation

After the final stretch and fold:

Cover the dough.

Leave it at room temperature.

Allow it to rise until it has doubled in size.

This can take anywhere from 8-14 hours depending on factors such as room temperature and starter strength 

Patience is everything during this stage.

Shaping the Dough

Once doubled:

Turn the dough onto a lightly floured surface.

Gently stretch it into a rectangle.

Fold the top third down.

Fold the bottom third up.

Starting from the open end, roll the dough into a tight ball.

To seal the seam:

Roll the dough gently back and forth with your hands in a candy cane motion until the bottom is smooth and sealed.

Cold Proof

Generously flour the banneton with rice flour.

Place the dough seam-side up into the basket.

Cover.

Refrigerate for 8–12 hours.

The overnight cold proof develops incredible flavor and makes scoring much easier.

Baking Day

Preheat

Place your ceramic-lined cast iron Dutch oven and lid into the oven.

Preheat to 500°F.

Prepare the Dough

Remove the banneton from the refrigerator.

Remove the cover.

Place the silicone bread sling over the open side of the basket.

Carefully flip the dough onto your work surface.

Slowly peel away the banneton.

Score

Using a bread lame:

Make at least one confident, deep score from one side of the loaf to the other.

This allows the bread to expand while baking.

Bake

Once the oven reaches 500°F:

Lower the temperature to 450°F.

Carefully remove the hot Dutch oven.

Transfer the dough using the silicone sling.

Cover with the lid.

Bake for 22 minutes and 22 seconds.

Then:

Remove the lid.

Lower the oven temperature to 425°F.

Continue baking for about 20 more minutes, or until the crust reaches your preferred color and crispness.

The Hardest Part

When the loaf comes out of the oven:

Resist the urge to cut into it.

Allow it to cool for at least one hour.

It will still be warm, but cooling allows the crumb to finish setting, giving you the perfect texture inside.

What Sourdough Has Taught Me

Good things take time.

Tiny daily habits create incredible results.

You can't rush fermentation—or life.

Sometimes dreams have to wait for the right season.

Four years after buying all the tools, I finally baked the bread I had imagined back in 2020.

Every loaf reminds me that patience, persistence, and a little flour and water can create something truly beautiful.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_04 0:05

Welcome to Bofo Episode 9, entitled Bread. Bofo is a podcast for folks in the hospitality industry on both sides of the path, featuring stories both inspiring and the occasionally disappointing. The intention behind the recordings are to celebrate those working in the trenches, elucidate on some interesting human behavior in restaurants, which there's plenty of, and celebrating what makes the industry exciting and sometimes terrifying. Flour, water, and fungus. Now, about five or six thousand years ago, some fellow homo sapiens likely left out a pile of gruel for a while later finding it all puffy. When cooked with fire, leavened bread was discovered. It's a big win, as they say. Now, these days, bread is often an afterthought in dining. It's often unceremoniously given away at chain restaurants and rarely produced an house. This episode is meant to give voice to those that take bread seriously. We'll let the great Harold McGee lay some groundwork here. All right, we have an excerpt from On Food and Cooking The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. For the interest of time, the evolution of bread.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

The grains of millions of microchemicals of themselves, the other baked loaves, the people who make the bread and eat. What does it be influenced in time for these refined and enriched versions of basic substance? Bread has become a product that's frequently defined by these high-rising breadweeds. In the 20th century, we managed to take refined and enriched it to the extreme. Now have industrial bread with little flavor or texture left in it. It takes more sugar than flour. In the last couple decades, bread lovers have led to the discovery of simple flexified bread.

SPEAKER_04 2:02

In the 1800s, bread making became more commonplace on a small artisanal scale. West Coast breadmakers harnessed wild eats to produce sourdough. With refrigeration becoming available to bakeries in the late 1800s, sourdough bread became widely available. Bread making at home was time consuming and done largely for necessity. While mechanization and chemistry made for more availability at much lower prices, bread was still seen as a luxury item. Companies like Wonder Bread branded their product as one of prosperity and modernity, making it a household staple. Then came the hippies, eschewing such symbols, opting to return to the arduous process of artisan bread making. That brings us up to the early 80s, and I'll let our first guest, Steve Sullivan of Acme Bread, explain.

SPEAKER_02 3:00

Steve Sullivan's my name, and I'm uh president and co-founder of the Acme Bread Company.

SPEAKER_04 3:07

Now, in your About Us like section, it says that you became obsessed with bread making after reading English bread and yeast cookery. What was it about that text that really got you thinking about bread?

SPEAKER_02 3:20

When I first moved to Berkeley, I was working at Shape and East restaurant, and Elizabeth David was one of kind of the guiding inspiration lights, I guess if you will, for the people at the core of creating the menus and making the food at Shape and East, which was not me because I was a busser and a dishwasher. It was kind of a group effort every night and everybody was involved in every way. And so when I went on my so so, you know, I I had some of her cookbooks and she was just a phenomenal writer. And in terms of being a visionary, she was writing about traveling through Italy eating a perfect salad of uh sliced tomatoes, olive oil, and torn-up basil leaves when American food writers in the 50s were writing about, you know, molded aspic uh, you know, jello mold. That's a fabulous centerpiece for your for your party. You know, that people for a long time have belittled or made fun of British food, but Elizabeth David was not the reason for that. And she, you know, she was just an incredible writer and uh an incredible spirit. I went on this trip to Europe, and when I was uh when I got sort of tired of bicycling around in France by myself in the rain, I went to visit some people that I knew that were working in London, uh where it was also raining, but uh I knew people, uh Jeremiah Tower, the chef, and Richard Olney, uh the American expatriate chef and food and wine writer, were working on a series of cookbooks in London, and so I went to hang out with them for a while, and they had what had just been published, which was Elizabeth David's uh English bread and yeast cookery, and it wasn't something that was out in America yet, so I bought it while I was there. They they were doing these cookbooks that Time Life was publishing that was like step-by-step photography of recipes published in volumes that were each dedicated to a particular type of food. So they had this huge library of cookbooks assembled in the in the building that was being used to produce these these uh these these cookbooks. So anyway, I took the took the book with me on the rest of my trip and uh when I went back to France I just kind of started reading the book. And it's uh a really long book and it has hundreds and hundreds of pages of cultural, technical, historical, cultural, technical, and historical information before you ever get to recipes, which was fine because I was riding around on a bicycle and didn't have a an oven. And I just got really interested in bread baking from from reading uh from reading the book, and eventually when I got back from my trip, I just started baking bread every day.

SPEAKER_04 6:24

So, you know, there's the bread revolution, which you know happened in the 80s, which you were a big part of. At the time, did it I mean, because the way you're speaking about the the change in how cookbooks are written and what's starting to get attention, did you feel that it was some sort of revolution or was it just kind of business as usual?

SPEAKER_02 6:41

It depends what you mean. Uh at Chapanese at the time, revolution was business as usual.

SPEAKER_04 6:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:47

This was, you know, coming out of the 1960s with a bunch of people who had been involved in the free speech movement and were had and were consciously setting out to, you know, to to upend the what had become the paradigm of uh industrial food and uh and formulaic dining, and replace it with groups of people getting together with intentionality, making the best food they could out of ingredients that could be had locally and serving it to people who were paying attention as opposed to, you know, you know, uh so revolution was business as usual at Chez Penny's, and it was a very exciting place to work. And for me, uh I had been a busboy there and had sort of observed the decline over several years of the quality of the bread that was available to the restaurant. When I first started, the restaurant bought uh baguettes from uh I believe it was called the Venetian Bakery, which was one of the last bakeries in North Beach in a basement using a big stone oven. Uh and they were really good. And then when that place went out of business, the restaurant started, you know, went through a succession of suppliers, some of which were small bakeries that started locally, but then and the bread would be kind of interesting, but then it would get crappy when you know when they when they expanded and got mechanized or or whatever. I loved bread and I had been sort of like actively engaged with the decline, the the kind of final decline, you know. I mean, basically industrial bread was the norm at Chapanese, it felt like we had this one little vestige of handcrafted bread made by people who were serious about making it. And then when that disappeared, it was disappointing and sad. And so to me it felt like I mean at first I just got kind of obsessed with the process, but then uh as I started bringing my crappy bread and then my tolerable bread and then my slightly better bread in, you know, to to the people that I worked with for, you know, sort of like their take on it, it just got exciting as as uh as the the prospect of making bread for stores and restaurants that couldn't get good bread, because that was kind of my community. I was, you know, in the restaurant world, even though I was here s ostensibly to go to school, uh that was what I had really settled into was being part of this part of this little this little building where where we tried our best every day to make and and and serve people great food.

SPEAKER_04 9:34

Also, what I read on it was just kind of operations and facing production limits. And the sense I got was that prior to some of the larger bakeries, you know, the they just the whole or there wasn't wholesale bread, and the bread that was available could be pretty inconsistent. And once you get to a certain point where you need a bunch of bread or someone to go wholesale, that's a big leap to take and probably take some time and treasure to to accomplish. Was it always uh top of mind to kind of to to grow in a measured way?

SPEAKER_02 10:06

We've never in our lives, we i in our in our in the course of our business, uh business's evolution, growth has never been a goal. Growth of any sort really has never been a goal. It's I mean our goal was to make really good bread for our community, you know, and and to try to make and to try to to try to bring people what they asked for, you know, make make really good bread and prov and bring it to people who ask for it. And so our only our growth, it's been significant, but it's not been as significant, certainly, as it could have been, and it's not been as significant as you know some other bakeries that have you know started small and spread out. But it's been significant, uh, but that's always been strictly in response to demand. At a certain point, it began to seem like we felt like we had at some point in the mid-80s become sort of like the bakery of no, you know, like no, we can't make any more bread, no, we can't bring bread to you. Uh and we consciously at a certain point decided, well, we should we should try and see what it would take to to say yes. And uh for a while that meant expansion, and now it doesn't, because there's so much good good bread available that there's no need for us to expand because we've you know we feel like our the size of our company is kind of in balance with uh the demand for the bread we make, and since growth has never been like a goal, and since we've never had investors like pressing us to expand and produce some kind of pot of gold. When Susie and I, my wife and I opened the bakery, we borrowed money from uh my little brothers, from my parents, from my grandparents, uh the Vietnamese family that cleaned that did the cleaning in the middle of the night at Shape and East lent us a few thousand dollars. We just borrowed Lindsay Schear, the pastry chef at Shape and East, uh Marion Cunningham. You know, just people lent us a few thousand dollars because they really liked the idea of what we were gonna do. And since my wife was involved, they figured there was at least one responsible person involved. Uh which, you know, if it had been just me on my own, probably I you know, I was not as responsible. So people lent us money, and then as as we've grown, we've always we haven't taken investors in the sense that we've basically from early on there were people kind of walking in with checkbooks, and we decided that if we were gonna ever expand, it wouldn't be that way. It would be with bakers, preferably from within the company. So everybody who's a managing shareholder here is somebody who has worked at the bakery for a long time. Uh in some cases, people that had a little bit of money to invest when we were expanding the company, like the the two big expansions that we did, the new managing shareholders from within the staff put in like 10% of the money, and the company put in 90% of the money. So we've never had uh what you'd call investors who were you know demanding results. Everybody who's uh a shareholder in the company uh works in the company.

SPEAKER_04 13:28

I don't know what kind of disaster you walked in today, or not disaster, but you know uh what piece of equipment you're working on or trying to get working properly. But I did want to ask about uh the Spanish brick oven that you guys uh which I believe still operates, is that correct?

SPEAKER_02 13:43

Yeah. Uh-huh. Are you familiar at all with Berkeley?

SPEAKER_04 13:47

A little bit, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:48

Okay. I go to shows there. Uh and it was it was supposed to be our big wholesale bakery. Uh, and it's at the corner of Cedar and San Pablo in West Berkeley. And we had two little ovens there when we started. And at the time when we were realizing that expansion to meet demand was starting to seem inevitable, we started we we also were realizing that there was a lot better heavy-duty traditional bread baking equipment available in other places than in the United States. So we we tried to figure out uh, you know, I I I went around the country and visited some people, some friends, some people I knew of that had uh wood burning ovens and brick ovens and uh had heavy, you know, heavy-duty bread baking equipment, and we went to some European equipment trade shows, and so we tried to a happy medium between the ab uh you know between equipment that would allow us to make bread uh uh the way we wanted to make it, but that would also not be too inefficient. So we s the the the Spanish oven that we settled on was kind of a version of that. Uh it's it's kind of like a 19th century high-tech design. It's uh it's five meters in diameter, and so in the past, if you wanted to have an oven that was five meters deep, or in, you know, before before the before this kind of technology was uh was developed uh in I think the early 19th century, if you wanted to have a five meter deep oven, you had to have five meters clear in front of it because you had to have a five-meter long handle to reach the peel to load and unload the bread all the way to the back of the oven, right? So this was kind of uh a a semi-mechanical solution to that quandary by making the oven round and having the baking surface uh rotate so that you could just load bread to the middle of the oven and then turn this hand this this wheel that was connected to like a heavy-duty mechanical linkage that would rotate the the floor of the oven a little bit, and then you could load more bread next to it, more bread next to it. So it was kind of like a you know, sort like I said, sort of a 19th century high-tech design. So it was in our second bakery when we expanded from our smaller location uh uh on San Pablo Avenue to a larger facil uh and added a larger facility in West Berkeley that we got that oven. When we were considering it, because some people recomm some people that we knew in the in the in the trade had recommended that we consider it. When we considered it, I went and visited uh of all places in Texas uh a guy, a French guy who had this little chain of bakeries, I can't remember what the name of it was, uh, and he used them in his bakery, and I saw that they were they were pretty cool. So again, and he was making it work.

SPEAKER_04 17:11

So I think when I was doing restaurant stuff, I was a partner in a in in a couple restaurants. I I always thought it was really important. We always kind of reverse engineered omission statement, right? Like a series of principles, which is not the way you should do it, obviously. The principles that you guys follow is you know make great bread, uh great service, and then a lot of you know taking care of your employees and taking care of your community. You know, that's stuff that doesn't always make the articles or doesn't always get a ton of acknowledgement, you know, you could put on your website. But um, you guys have gone draw a tree from each one of those things, and there's so much um work that you guys are doing. Can you speak to to the work that you do outside outside the bakery and outside of wholesale?

SPEAKER_02 17:57

And things just crop up and if we can do it, we do it. I mean it's not it's not a compliment. It's not it's not like some some some companies have like a real focused and organized initiative. And we don't really. Uh we just, you know, if if if something makes sense, like the bakers against racism, crop this thing cropped up and we participated in it in the organized version of it, and then then we just decided, hey, we're gonna just do this every week. And so we have this bake sale every week. But it wasn't part of an initiative. It was like this thing came up, somebody asked if we wanted to participate, we liked it, we liked the idea, uh, and we decided to make a commitment to it. We're not that we're not that organized. We just like try and do the right thing as the as options as options appear. We try and you know choose the right option from among those that are available to us.

SPEAKER_04 18:55

Thank you so much, Steve. Have a good day.

SPEAKER_02 18:57

Take care, bye-bye, you're welcome.

SPEAKER_04 19:00

Next up is a story of attempting to bring the passion of bread making into a brick and mortar bakery with Dan Stefan. Um so I'm gonna start with Steve and then fold into you because you're gonna kind of I think address some of the things that he was talking about in starting a bakery, right?

SPEAKER_01 19:20

Um is Dana Stefan. I am a previous home baker, turned into an actual baker that was uh co-owner of Niche Bread Company. Um, and now I am uh working in the tech world alongside following my fitness passions.

SPEAKER_04 19:41

Do you do you remember like the moment that you're like, I want to make bread? Not that I like bread, but that I want to try this myself. Do you remember where and when that that occurred?

SPEAKER_01 19:54

Yeah, absolutely. Um it's a you know, it's it really sticks out in my mind. I've always had a really big relationship with food and especially with bread. Like going back to you know, my childhood, bread was always something that we had on the table. When I moved to San Francisco originally, you know, I fell in like love with artisan sourdough bread that you know San Francisco offered. It was like right when the huge toast, four-dollar toast movement really kicked off. And um, when I moved back to Sacramento, you know, unfortunately, like at that time, there wasn't really anywhere that was offering like sourdough bread like I had found in San Francisco. And so one year for Thanksgiving, my mom and I always put on uh a big Thanksgiving meal. Her and I like sit down, plan the menu, do all the shopping, do all the cooking, etc. Typically, like you know, Thanksgiving, we do just rolls, you know, like a Parker House style roll. And um one year, and I think this was, I mean, let's see, probably nine years ago. Um, yeah, nine years ago about, I was told, I was like, hey, I actually want to try to make sourdough bread for for Thanksgiving. And she, you know, was open to it, but she was very hesitant. And so I took it upon myself. I bought the uh tartine uh cookbook and I started, I read it front to back and um started making my own starter and you know, followed it step by step and and made my first two loaves of bread for Thanksgiving. Looking back, like yeah, they didn't look like anything what you would consider like artisan-style sourdough bread, but they tasted good and people enjoyed it. Um, and that really kicked off the moment for me of like seeing something from start to finish of that process and the stealing the dough and you know, making sure the starter is ready to go, really opened my eyes of like, okay, I've done it now once, like how do I get better at this? And then that kind of kicked off my baking journey.

SPEAKER_04 21:54

How long did you workshop stuff at home to the point where you got confidence? Enough to even consider selling it to somebody.

SPEAKER_01 22:03

After I baked those initial loaves, I think I did post them on like my social media at the time, and people were like, you know, started inquiring about it immediately. And I'm like, oh no, no, this isn't like something I'm like willing to sell or like anywhere close to that. And so I started to workshop it quite a bit. And like I, you know, I'd bake two loaves at a time and like I would take notes of like what worked well, what didn't. And after, you know, a couple months, I finally got to a point of you know, people continually reaching out, like, hey, can we buy some loaf? Like, can we buy a loaf from you? And I would always tell them no. Um, I got comfortable enough to be like, you know what, like let's give it a go. And um, so I would say it probably took about six to seven months of like the trial and error and and really getting comfortable to a place where I was okay selling to someone and and putting my name behind it. So once I started, you know, selling my loafs, um, I kind of just did the out of my house kind of uh, we called it like the back alley bread pickup. Like it was loaded out of bake out of my house, and I was living in a place where it had a back alley, and people would just pull up. I'd come out, give them the bread, and and uh they would give me the money, and it was, you know, kind of like a kind of it looks like a drug deal, to be honest. But then I got contacted by a restaurant um that was opening in in El Dorado Hills called Moto, and they were gonna plan on doing the bread program. Um, and my good buddy Marcus at the time was their uh chef de cuisine, executive six chef. He, you know, put my name in the put my name in the hat to you know run the bread program. And so I I planned on doing that, and then we opened the restaurant and we had a bread program going there. I knew I wanted to do something more at that point, and I had started looking online a little bit more, like from Craigslist and things like that, of just other opportunities, and I expanded my search to San Francisco and I saw that Tartine was hiring. I ended up reaching out, um, I set up a stage with them, and I went down for my stage, spent the day with the team, and then left, drove back home to Sacramento and didn't hear something from them for a day. And and so I just reached back out and I thanked the team for allowing me to come down and and be in their space and like learn from them for that day. And uh they actually reached back out almost immediately and they're like, hey, we would love to have you part of the team. And so I took the opportunity to drop everything and and start working at Tartene, um, which was a huge deal for me. Um, obviously, many people know like Tartine was you know a big name in in the San Francisco bread game, and then you know, not just San Francisco, but then expanding over to you know throughout the US and and country. And I ended up commuting for about two weeks from Sacramento to San Francisco every day to work at Tartene and got to a point where I was like, I can't commute anymore, so I'm gonna move. And so I ended up finding a place in San Francisco and moving, and uh was at Tartine for I think just over six months.

SPEAKER_04 25:05

What sort of gravity brought you back to Sacramento?

SPEAKER_01 25:09

Being in uh San Francisco at Tartine for about six months. My good buddy who I mentioned earlier, Marcus, we had all started, him and another buddy of ours had started doing a pop-up uh a while back. And we had always talked about like maybe opening and doing something more with that. Marcus ended up finding a place in in downtown Sacramento, uh, an available um a spot. And he contacted me and was like, hey, like I want to pick your brain about something. And so we met up for dinner and he kind of presented an opportunity um of what he wanted to do. And he was like, I want you to really have this moment of opening niche. Sacramento is, you know, obviously my home. It was uh, you know, Marcus was living there at the time and still is, and um, it just seemed like the right place to do it, and and there was nothing like what we wanted to do and what we planned out to do uh in Sacramento at the time. And so it was a good opportunity. So I moved back and um Marc and I spent you know quite a bit of time attempting to open what was gonna be niche, and uh unfortunately uh it didn't come to fruition the way that we had uh originally planned.

SPEAKER_04 26:20

Can you just you know distill down what your concept was? Like what what did you write on a napkin kind of a thing? What was the plan?

SPEAKER_01 26:28

Yeah. Yeah, so it was very much like European style. I think Marx and I both were influenced and really intrigued by like European, like Scandinavian style dishes and cooking and the way they like really simplified it to ingredients and technique. It looked so simple on the plate, but in the background there was a million things going on. And so it was originally gonna be coffee shop pastries bread in the morning, and then we would flip it kind of in the afternoon to be more wine and small plates. We were gonna do uh a rotating special of like uh flatbread for lunch and uh salads and just simple meals and then be closed for dinner. Like we we both knew we didn't want to do dinner initially, like right away, like maybe down the line, but right off the bat, we knew we wanted to do breakfast and lunch, and then you know be closed by you know three o'clock every day.

SPEAKER_04 27:23

I have a specific question about mothers. When did you establish the mother that you were using for niche?

SPEAKER_01 27:30

That was the original one that I had used when I made my first loaf of bread and carried it through you know, moves to San Francisco, um back to Sacramento. You know, it was a couple years old by the time we were getting ready to open niche.

SPEAKER_04 27:45

Um, I have very limited knowledge about bread, but what I've explained to some people is like the reason that you know uh San Francisco makes the best sourdough is because of the microbes in the air, right? Um and so that's a very specific flavor that comes from that. And you can live in other places, you know, use the same recipe and then get a totally different result.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

Sourdough bread is just such a beautiful product, and like once you learn how to make it, you just have such an appreciation for it where it's like it's not that we like I don't want to go support other bakeries, but it's just like it's hard to justify when you know you can go make it at home just maybe as well as someone else, you know, and it's just like your personal pride.

SPEAKER_04 28:28

All right. Well, I want to thank you um for taking time to do this.

SPEAKER_01 28:32

And now I appreciate you reaching out, man, and then giving me the opportunity to talk about this, man. It's great.

SPEAKER_04 28:37

Sure, yeah. Um, all right, man. Well, thank you. And now we hear from my sister Brittany about getting bit by the fungus bug.

SPEAKER_03 28:48

Wait, that doesn't sound like Yes, my name is Brittany Donahue. I am actually a recruiter, but I am an at-home sourdough bread to baker in my off time.

SPEAKER_04 29:05

What made you want to? I mean, first you obviously enjoy bread, you must, but what made you want to actually make it at home? What was like kind of the reason? Was there like a eureka moment where you're like, I'm gonna do this?

SPEAKER_03 29:19

I equate it to gardening. I like to grow things and see the fruits of my taking care of them and nourishing them through the process. And so when a beautiful flower or plant forms, uh, I think that is the same thing as uh sourdough. My starter is my baby, and from there I can make tiny adjustments and produce a product that I'm excited about.

SPEAKER_04 29:50

Okay, a lot of people acknowledge kind of like a troubleshooting period. The first time I ever had bread that you made, it was really, really good. It seems like he kind of hit it off from the start. Is that true?

SPEAKER_03 30:01

Or were there some well if you ask my father, who is has received the most loaves of my bread, he uh kind of has a metric of what which loaves he thought were the best. So he would say that my third loaf uh was the best loaf. Uh I personally feel that they've all been pretty good. It was more uh the trial and error with the starter that that tripped me up a little bit in the beginning. It wasn't the baking.

SPEAKER_04 30:32

Can you just walk through the process of what it is and what it means and how you would create a starter?

SPEAKER_03 30:39

Yes. Uh well, I actually began uh trying to curate a starter during the pandemic. Uh but because I lived in a 300 square foot apartment, uh, the living sourdough starter had a very distinct aroma. So I decided to not do that. And then when I moved in 2025, I found all the supplies that I purchased during the pandemic, and I uh decided to start again. Uh so basically what it is is uh spring water and uh bread flour that you put in a jar covered on the counter, room temperature, uh, and it begins to form its own life and starts to become active and double, sometimes even triple in size within the jar, uh, and is very bubbly, and that's when you know that it's ready to be um incorporated into a loaf and baked with.

SPEAKER_04 31:45

When you're making the bread, it's just a small uh amount of the starter that you put in to a much larger amount of what more flour and more water. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_03 31:56

Correct. It's a hundred grams of the active starter and then 350 grams of spring water that's room temperature, uh, 500 grams of bread flour and then 10 to 12 grams of salt. Uh you combine those ingredients, uh use a dough whisk so um that you form a shaggy kind of dough, uh, and then I cover it on the counter and leave it for about an hour so that it can rest. After the hour, then I perform uh three rounds of stretch and folds, which is something that builds strength without having to knead it. So every 30 minutes I would uh uncover it again and stretch and fold after the last or third stretch and fold, then I would leave it on the counter or covered. This is the bulk fermentation uh period where I want it to go from I want it to double in size basically. Uh day of baking, I will preheat the oven. I put my um Dutch oven with the lid in the oven at 500 degrees. Umce the oven reaches 500, then I lower the temperature to 450, remove the Dutch oven and put the dough with the sling in the Dutch oven, cover it with the lid, and I bake it with the lid on at 450 for 22 minutes and 22 seconds, just because I it's easy to push the 22 22 when I'm pushing the timer. Uh once that's done, I uh remove the lid, lower the oven temperature even more to 425 and bake for about 20 more minutes until it reaches its preferred color and crispness.

SPEAKER_04 33:44

All right. Did you write that down?

unknown 33:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 33:47

Did you have notes?

SPEAKER_03 33:49

Yeah, I took notes. I'm gonna send them to you too, so that you can really really enjoy them.

SPEAKER_04 33:55

Now, uh did you come up with a name for your for your starter?

SPEAKER_03 33:59

No. I still haven't named it.

SPEAKER_04 34:01

I think I think I got it. The perfect name uh would be yeast infection.

SPEAKER_03 34:09

I actually really like that. It's nice. That speaks to my um bathroom humor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's it.

SPEAKER_04 34:18

As mentioned in the interview, my sister was kindly enough to offer a written recipe and procedure, which I have added to the description of this podcast. There were also some details that didn't make the edit, so take a look there if you're planning on starting a new hobby. As always, send any feedback to us at bofo at gmail.com. It's bo h foh at gmail.com. Uh for this episode, one lucky subscriber will receive a copy of English Bread and Yeast Cookery by Elizabeth David. Make sure to check your spam, it's all need your address to send it to you. Next up, we'll have episode 10, an interview with Chef Brock McDonald entitled Episode 10. Wait a minute. Thanks for listening, and remember, no knives in the dishwasher. All right, Murph. We're done. You could shut her down. No, no, you can just wonder.