Bread has been a staple on the
human diet for thousands of years. But for the last few decades,
modern diets have villainized the baked good. And bread has been taking
a hit over the years. Total U.S. sales have been stagnant
since 2015, showing little to no growth leading up to 2020. And on average, Americans spent less money
on bread in 2017 than they did just four years earlier. Not to mention the fact that
some of the country's biggest bread manufacturers are complaining about the rising
costs of key ingredients in an industry where small players battle
low margins and excess capacity. The bread business has to consolidate Sara
Lee and Wonderbread, two of the biggest names in bread. Both were bought out by publicly traded
flour foods in 2012 and 2013, respectively. And another big
problem for bread. It's facing increased scrutiny for
some of its extra ingredients. Things like chemical dough conditioner's,
preservatives, added sugar and GMO's. Those additives helped manufacturers produce
a loaf in less time, prolong a shelf life and
keep the bread soft. But bread is making a comeback. Well, specifically, this preservative
free artisan, tangy flavored sourdough bread sourdough was made with
just two ingredients, whereas a loaf of Wonderbread has
over 20 ingredients. Another big difference sourdough can take up
to seven days to make from scratch versus just a few
hours to make commercial bread. There's also a price difference. From 2015 to 2019. sourdough bread sales have
seen significant growth. Sourdough is also growing more popular at
restaurants in 2019, it was on 14.3 percent of restaurant
menus, up from 11.6 percent ten years earlier. Even DIYers
are getting in on the sourdough craze. Now sending days baking bread
is the cool thing to do. Instagram is full of DIY self-taught
bakers making their own sourdough. Even coders out in Silicon Valley
are blogging about the fermentation graphs of their sourdough starters. And perhaps most importantly, health
evangelists are praising the benefits of adding sourdough bread
into your diet. Between sourdough is almost cult like following
on social media and a more health focused consumer base looking for
better food options; s ourdough bread is more popular than ever. According to a survey, almost nine out
of 10 people know about sourdough and another seven out of
10 have tried it. In the U.S. alone, sourdough is
a multibillion dollar market between 2014 and 2018. Sourdough's market value
in America jumped from 229.7 million dollars to 2.4 billion dollars. The question now? Is the sourdough market
destined to keep rising? Or is it just another
fad destined to fade away? Sourdough was made with just two
basic ingredients flour and water. You mix them together. Leave it at
room temperature over time and feed the same amount of flour and
water for a few days. That m ixture when exposed to the
elements eventually starts to bubble and that bubbling is actually a
chemical change called fermentation. What's happening is that microbes
from the surrounding environment are essentially colonizing the dough t
hen growing and dividing. Basically turning it into a medley
of flour, water, bacteria and wild yeast, which is a
single celled fungi. The bubbling mixture is called a sourdough
starter, and you could think of it as a living thing. All that
bacteria is generating lactic acid and the yeast is actively feeding
off starches in flour. It pumps the resulting carbon dioxide
and ethanol into the dough. The carbon dioxide expands the gluten network
in the dough, while the acid in alcohol is what gives
sourdough its sour taste. It also digests this gluten network and
allows the enzymes present in the flour to do their job, like cutting
the starches into edible pieces of sugar for the yeast. Though sourdough, whose origin story has
been contested over the years, the first written record of sourdough
dates back around 4000 B.C. in ancient Egypt. The first written evidence on
sourdough is from the pyramids, and there are hieroglyphs showing people making
beer and bread in the same hieroglyphs. So this
is crossover fermentation. The sourdough starter was discovered when a
mixture of flour and water was exposed to the elements over time. The mixture began to bubble and rise,
a process we now know is called fermentation. Rather than throw out
the odd smelling and expanding mixture. The mystery cook
decided a baker anyway. The result? A large round, spongy loaf
of bread that we now call sourdough. Since ancient Egypt, this method
of bread making was passed down from civilization to civilization,
from ancient Rome to ancient Greece all the way to
the American Yukon gold rush. Using a sourdough starter was pretty much
the only way of making bread for thousands of years. But things started to change for sourdough
during the later half of the 19th century. Now, as the population kind
of changed and we went towards cities, we always had to feed a
population on an industrialized scale, so we had the creation of
an industrialized bread system. It wasn't until the mid 19th century
that scientists caught on to the microbiology behind what
makes bread rise. Once they knew about wild yeast and how
it works, a race set off to figure out how to make it
available to the masses. Brothers Charles and Maximilian Fleischmann were
one of the first to bring commercial use to the market on a
large scale when they unveiled their product to 10 million people at
the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. The only problem it was perishable and would
go bad after two weeks in the fridge. It wasn't until World War II
that the bread business was totally revolutionized. As the wall came
in, we readily the American side. They contacted the Fleischmann brothers,
who were the people who originally discovered that you could
turn yeast into a tablet. And in the 1940s, the push
was produced fast bread for soldiers. The Fleischmann Company improved
on its original yeast product by creating the first
ever active dry yeast. It didn't require refrigeration and could
be easily activated with warm water. Fleischman's active dry yeast was
a game changer to the commercial bread business as well. After the war ended, active drug use
was brought to the retail market and the mass production of bread in the US
took off, which was bad news for the slow-bake sourdough bread. Out went the use of sourdough starters in
came in what we see today, large commercial bakeries filling grocery stores
with ready made pre sliced bread wrapped in cellophane that
could last for weeks. By 1944, 85 percent of the bread that
was made in the United States came from large commercial bakeries, according to
a survey conducted at that time. From the 1950s up through
today, bread companies have continued to add extra ingredients to its products in
order to make bread faster than ever and to prolong its shelf life. But the same chemical additives
that helped industrialize spread quickly and cheaply brought on a laundry
list of health concerns for shoppers. Well, why not post World War II
anymore, We're in a very, very different situation. And so this very fast
plastic kind of bread, which was really, I guess done out
to the well-meaning sort of aim, is actually causing issues across the
globe with people's health, wellness, blood sugar management, calorific management
and the amount of nutrition they get from
their base food. 2000 was the year of peak
grain when the average American 137.6 pounds of grain in a year, mostly in
the form of breads and other baked goods. According to the USDA, per
capita consumption of flour was 146 pounds per person in 2000. In 2018, it had fallen to 132 pounds. It's all been downhill from there. The timing dovetails with the rise of low
fat and low carb diets in the 90s and early 2000s. This decline has also come as more
and more Americans are diagnosed with an allergy to gluten. Remember gluten? It's the protein that plays
a key role in helping dough to rise. The number of Americans
following the gluten free diet triple from 2013 to 2018, according to
Sundale Research and gluten free products appear to be virtually everywhere. Nearly 30 percent consumers are now
buying foods with gluten free labels, and sales of gluten free foods reach
17 billion dollars in 2018, more than double the amount spent in 2011. All this may seem like a
doomsday scenario for sourdough bread, but sourdough is actually proving to be one
option for bread lovers who want to eat the real thing without facing
nearly as many side effects as its commercial bread rivals. So why is that? sourdough is
typically more nutritious than regular bread. It's easier to digest and is a
potential better option for blood sugar control. The reason it all comes down
to the active drugs versus sourdough starter. What makes the sourdough starter
so special are all the micro-organisms derived from
the fermentation process. Commercial bread misses out on that. It uses an active dry yeast
which simulates the chemical process that makes bread rise. However, it lacks
the naturally occurring fungi and bacteria that sourdough bread has. Here's why that matters. Sourdough slow
fermentation process makes a lot easier for our bodies
to absorb important nutrients. All of those micro-organisms and
sourdough also promote gut metabolic health. Sourdough also doesn't lead to
blood sugar spikes and crashes. It actually slows down the speed at
which glucose is released into the bloodstream, which is a great thing for
diabetics who have to watch their insulin levels. Sourdough has another
big thing going for it. Store-bought bread has been put under
intense scrutiny for the extra ingredients manufacturers add in order
to extend shelf life. These include everything from extra
gluten, fat, reducing agents, emulsifiers enzymes
and preservatives. Some U.S. commercial breads, along with a
lot of other foods found in grocery stores, were slammed for using
the same chemical ingredient found in yoga mats. When I first
discovered making sourdough bread, I realized even the best bread I was
giving my family wasn't real bread. It had 38 ingredients in it and
should just be flour, water, salt and yeast. And I make a lot of it
and we eat a lot of it. And we're not getting fat from it
and we're not getting sick from it. And my friends that have thought they
had gluten issues had no problem with it. And it wasn't that it was
gluten, it was that we were eating chemicals and fake processed food. Sourdough's surge in popularity isn't
just linked to health conscious consumers. It's actually developed a cult
like following on social media and has drawn attention from a
new wave of DIY bakers. In 2019, one of the founders
of Microsoft's Xbox, Seamus Blackley, resurrected a sourdough starter dating back
over 4000 years to ancient Egypt. Blackley used dormant yeast
and bacteria from ancient Egyptian pots. He mixed those samples with
the sourdough starter he made, creating this sourdough loaf with its origins
dating back to ancient Egypt. Blackley isn't alone in his affinity
for delving into the science behind sourdough. Silicon Valley coders are
charting out their fermentation of their starter cultures to try to understand
the inner workings of all of its microbes. Since sourdough starters
all contain living microorganisms, it requires constant attention,
like all living things. If a startup is probably taking care of
it can last for years, decades and sometimes generations. N one of us has something that is
old, you know, if you have something that's a hundred years old, it's
almost certainly an heirloom that was given to you. It's a set of
earrings that came from your great grandmother or some vase that came from the old
country but it's not something alive . Imagine having something alive that's
a hundred years old. So the stories that come with
starters, I think are valuable. I think part of
recapturing of culture. Maintaining your own sourdough starter
isn't an easy business. It requires constant feeding to ensure that
the same starter can be used over and over again. Feeding
a starter looks like this. It's just simply adding a little bit
of flour and water to the mixture. And over time, it becomes like taking
care of a new family pet. There's a whole schedule. It's like a pet. It's like, you know,
you don't just get a goldfish and then leave town for three months. It's like you need
to feed this thing. Like this is this is mine right here. And this is one of two. And when I take off, I'm
you know, I'm a comedian. When I'm on the road, I'm constantly
thinking, like, who's going to feed it? That's where unique sourdough
business like Matias Jakobsen's comes into play. Jakobsen has been baking
sourdough for nearly eight years, and for five years Jakobsen has been
operating The Sourdough Inn in Brooklyn. He takes care of people starters
while they're on vacation, feeding them with flour and water a
few times a week. The questions I ask as part of the
check-in process, like I want to know how how they currently feed it. And, you know, just so I understand
what they're trying to do with it. So they told me like they would prefer
to just feed it, you know, around every five days and generally
keep it in the fridge. And this one is a very, very low
maintenance in terms of what it means generally that the sourdoughs have had had
not been any kind of peculiar requests. And then other than that, I
think it's like meeting as people that are passionate about something. So I always ask about people, you
know, how they started making sourdough and why. According to his website, Jakobsen
charges $15 per week for hotel services and also runs a training
and rehabilitation service that revives a starter for about $60 per session. The idea for sourdough Hotel in
Brooklyn actually originated from a sourdough hotel that
started in Sweden. There is a sourdough hotel in
Stockholm and Scandinavia has a generally advanced bread culture. So in Stockholm, obviously there was
this sourdough Hotel and they were teasing and well, because you bake bread Matias,
you need to be the one to start a Brooklyn sourdough hotel. You really you really need
to do that in Sweden. Some bakers could bring
their starters to R.C. Chocolat. It's a bakery based in
Stockholm that charges their guests 100 Swedish krona or roughly $10 per week
for each of their starters as of February 19th 2020. And about a 1,000 miles southwest of
Stockholm, there is another place for several starters are looked after
and handled with extreme care. And it's in the world's
only sourdough starter library. The collection last week was 115. But now we have up to 125. So I will. So these are the fridges and they
are filled w ith the different s ourdoughs. This is Karl De Smedt . He's the head baker of Puratos and
he runs the first and only sourdough starter library. And then here
we have number 43, which was actually my very first sour
do I saw in my life. Back in 2013, the company Puratos
launch its sourdough Library in Saint Vith, Belgium. The library develops,
researches and preserves the biodiversity of different sourdough
starters for the future. And while they're just 125 starters in
the library's walls, there are over 1,600 starters registered in the company's
digital library from all around the world. Each new starter that arrives to
the library is sent to a lab for analysis, a process that can cost
anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 dollars to analyze a single starter. So every sourdough that we get into
the library is sent to a university with whom we work together. That can be in Italy
and France and Spain. And there the sourdough is actually placed
on petri dishes and then they grow the cultures. And as such, it takes about three
months, forty five working days on average. You can select the different
colonies on these petri dishes and grow and grow and grow them further. Then we we are actually taking
all these different microorganisms and we have these little test tubes where we
sort of isolated strain is put in there and that can be a
yeast or lactic acid bacteria. And as such, the sourdough strains
are preserved for the future. In the library, there are some
starters that date back centuries. The baker who gave me it is said that
it must be from 1886, more or less. Then we have this one,
which is number one hundred. That's a sourdough that we have from
a bakery in the centre of Tokyo. And that was a sourdough that
has been developed by Mr. Kimura, and he was one of the
last samurai, and he converted himself into a baker, and one of his friends was
making saké based on rice, and so he converted his sourdough into rice. And so this is now the only rice
sourdough we have in the library and it dates back to 1875. And then this one is
from Ioane Christensen in Whitehall's. And she was the first mayor
of Whitehall's and senator of Yukon. And this sourdough dates back to
1896 when her great grandfather was participating in the
Klondike Goldrush. So why spend thousands just to
analyze starters several decades old, Karl says the research that they're providing
actually helps the bakers of today and the future. Through DNA analysis, t
hey are identified. And as such, we have discovered now
more than 900, 950 different strains already from two from six genus of
yeast and six genus of lactic acid bacteria. Since its discovery, sourdough
has been a key fixture across different cultures and
countries around the world. Bread has been a staple food for the
last 5000 years and it will probably be the staple food for the next
5000 years, maybe more, because it is a fantastic product that can be set
in the middle of the table and unite all the good things. Sourdough has survived the invention of
commercial, active, dry east, no carb diets, and some analysts say sourdough
has a lot more room for growth. But with the rise of sourdough,
so too comes the rise of "sourfaux" bread. Sourfaux is a term used for retail
bread that claims to be traditional sourdough, but in fact sourfaux has
the same commercial use additives and flavoring as a cellphone
wrapped in retail bread. As impostors flood the market, some worry
it would be bad for sourdough street cred as a locally produced
artisanal premium product offering a healthy alternative to
commercial rivals. But sourdough experts like Tom
Papa aren't too worried. The reason why we're the first generation
that has all of these issues, we're heavier than ever before. We're being told that
you can't eat bread. You're being told that all
this stuff makes you sick. It's not the case. The cases that four in my lifetime we've
been eating a lot of things that we're not food. They
were food adjacent. So I really think that processes
like this, like making sourdough bread and making things, making real food is
just going to get bigger and stronger.
