It makes our hearts glow to share our house-made sourdough breads, sweet pastries, coffees and cafe items with our community.
We are now selling our decades-old Arizmendi Sourdough Starter with instructions included, so you can create great-tasting sourdough at home!
To dive a little deeper into what makes our sourdough breads so special, we interviewed one of our own experienced bakers to share a little bit about bread making with you!
Interview With A Baker
What is sourdough bread?
Sourdough bread is the most simple kind of bread in that it truly is just flour, water, and salt. The fun thing about it is that the sourdough starter makes everything happen within it.
So what is sourdough starter?
Starter is a mix of flour and water. The ratio can vary depending on what kind of bread one makes. It is made without commercial yeast–it draws on the natural bacteria in the air and the environment around it, and even on your hands when you make it. It is self-sustaining, so once it has life, as long as you feed it, it will continue to live. Feeding it means adding more flour and water to it, either before it gets used or after to replenish it.
What happens to the flour and water to make it active?
You begin with equal flour and water, mix them into a paste, and leave it loosely covered. The next day, you would come back and add more. Over the course of the week, the starter will pull the natural bacteria from the air, fermenting the starches within the flour and breaking them down and making them food for the natural bacteria, and the starter becomes sour.
How do you turn starter into bread?
Starter is essentially unseasoned dough. When you have a starter that is active, meaning it’s nice and bubbly and smells sour, you’re ready to make dough. To that, you add more starter, flour and water, and salt. Salt is a yeast inhibitor, and you want to add it to have control over how much the dough rises. You would knead the dough to develop gluten until it is stretchy and elastic. From there, creativity comes into play. I personally think with sourdough, a longer, colder fermentation like refrigerating the dough for a while is a good way to get a good sourdough flavor. Yeast eventually dies, so having a colder fermentation extends the amount of life that yeast has.
And then do you bake it?
Yeah, portion into the size one wants. Sourdough can be pretty forgiving, but I recommend an attempt at shaping it!
What is unique about Arizmendi sourdough?
The Bay Area is known for having unique wild yeast in the air, and San Francisco is special because of that. All of the Arizmendi locations use sourdough starter from the original Cheeseboard starter, so they’re decades old.
We hope this inspires you to continue your own baking journey or to stop by to taste our sourdough! Whether you pre-order online or stop by spontaneously for a grab-n-go, we're looking forward to seeing you!
Arizmendi Bakers