A $60 loaf in Soho has put sourdough back in the news. For a home baker who feeds her own starter every week, it also raises the question of where all these cultures came from in the first place.
The rye bread that Martin Auer sells on Lafayette Street, in Soho, has come a long way to get there. The recipe started with a farmer’s wife in Austria, who taught it to Auer’s father decades ago; the family bakery that adopted it was founded in Graz in 1936 and now has 43 branches, most of them in and around that city. Auer took over the business in 2011, becoming the third generation of his family to run it, and he has built much of it around rye bread despite being allergic to rye flour. “A yeast-free, pure rye loaf made from natural sourdough deserves a stage — and we are building that stage in New York,” he said in a recent interview. The stage turned out to be Rye, a bakery with an open workshop where customers can watch the dough being shaped and baked, and then buy a loaf that weighs about 3.3 pounds and costs an astonishing — even by New York standards — $60. The flour is organic and imported from Austria, and the sourdough culture, brought over from Austria as well, is more than 50 years old, according to Auer.
Within days of the bakery’s opening, People, Fox News, and Bloomberg had all written about the loaf, and Ella Kahan, who reviews New York food on TikTok as ChewYorkCity, ordered six slices with assorted toppings and captioned the video “$60 RYE BREAD in SoHo?! I think we have lost the plot.”
“First of all, it’s a lot of bread,” Tim Auer, Martin’s son and the bakery’s co-owner, told People. “It’s about 3.3 pounds, and we not only sell the whole loaf for $60, but we also sell half a loaf or a quarter of the loaf for either $30 or $15.”
The Auers’ culture is only the latest in a long line of starters carried great distances by people who needed bread wherever they were going. When Seattle newspapers announced gold in the Klondike on July 17, 1897, about 70,000 prospectors headed north, roughly half of them buying their supplies in Seattle, and many of them carried sourdough starter in pouches around their necks or tucked into their sleeping bags for warmth; the crusty veterans who made it back from the Yukon were called sourdoughs. John Muir described the practice as “a handful from each batch being saved and put away in the mouth of the flour sack to inoculate the next,” and in San Francisco, where the earlier gold rush had helped make sourdough the city’s signature bread, Louise Boudin is said to have rescued her family bakery’s starter in a bucket during the 1906 earthquake, according to Paste.
My own starter splits its time between the refrigerator and the counter, sandwiched between the dish rack and the last bits of the week’s loaves it’s about to replace. It came to me out of the thin air in my Studio City kitchen, years after pandemic sourdough was a thing, and I suddenly found myself with nothing better to do one weekend. I embarked on the process — growing a starter from scratch — with low expectations. The bacteria die-off phase that every recipe told me was expected, lasted for days and shook me to my crusty core. For weeks I kept feeding and discarding the starter, too afraid to try baking a loaf. But when I did, the first one was a perfection I’ve been chasing ever since, baking with the thriving little mason jar of goo nearly every week.
“You need to ferment the rye sourdough,” Tim Auer told People. “You need to feed it every day. That takes about 24 hours before you can use it again.” A starter is a colony of wild yeast and bacteria living in flour and water, and it swells and sinks on a schedule set by the temperature of the room, the flour it is given, and the hour it was last fed; the dough made from it rises over hours rather than minutes, gets folded and turned and left alone, and then often spends a night in the refrigerator before it meets the oven. It’s more math than I expected and somewhere in the middle of all that, the calendar that runs the rest of my life, with its deadlines and edits and unanswered emails, yields to one measured in rises and folds.
The most careful timekeepers in this line of work are probably in St. Vith, a small town in eastern Belgium, where the bakery-ingredients company Puratos opened a Center for Bread Flavour in 2008 and, five years later, a sourdough library inside it. When Atlas Obscura visited in 2018, the library held 105 starters in refrigerators, each one numbered and refreshed every two months with flour that its original baker sends each year, with frozen backups kept at minus 80°C. Starter No. 102, known as Levain James, came from the chefs behind “Modernist Cuisine”; three others were collected that year along the old Klondike route, in Seattle, Alaska, and Canada; and a Swiss starter and a Mexican one turned out to share the same wild yeast, a puzzle that may have something to do with the high altitudes where both were made.
Karl De Smedt, whom Atlas Obscura called the world’s first sourdough librarian, keeps the collection under what he described as “a very strict protocol,” though he is realistic about the limits of his records. “If someone tells me I have a 500-year-old sourdough, I have to believe them,” he said. By 2020 the collection had grown to 125 starters and he had encountered one in Whitehorse, Canada, that a woman traced back to her great-great-grandfather during the gold rush, “dating back to 1896.”
The Puratos center has also been the setting for a small experiment on the people who do the feeding. In 2018, the ecologists Rob Dunn and Anne Madden brought 15 sourdough bakers from around the world to St. Vith, gave each of them the same ingredients, and swabbed their hands before the baking began. The microbes on the bakers’ hands looked more like the microbes in sourdough than like those on ordinary human hands. “Our data suggests that something about baking seems to be changing the hands of the people who do the baking,” Dunn told NPR. To anyone who has spent years scraping down the sides of the same jar of starter, it’s a reassuring affirmation: we are bread people.
Plenty of Americans started their first jar in the spring of 2020. Demand at King Arthur Baking Company rose so sharply that it introduced a new 3-pound bag of flour to go with its usual sizes. “People went into shutdown and started baking,” co-CEO Karen Colberg told Forbes. “It became a pastime, a hobby, an escape.” Some of those starters are still going six years later, and a good number, I suspect, ended up forgotten behind the condiments once the commutes came back. The work asks for very little at any given moment and a great deal over time; a feeding takes a couple of minutes and a set of folds takes less, but none of it can be skipped, really, although TikTok is full of hackers that will tell you otherwise. Though, they are the same lot of experts shaping modern sourdough culture by defiling their dough with jars of rainbow sprinkles or gobs of packaged, processed cheese under the banner of “inclusions”. My daughter’s latest obsession is one made with matcha and freeze dried strawberries.
Kate Fletcher, the sustainable fashion researcher, applied sourdough’s laborious logic to clothing nearly two decades ago. “The concept of slow fashion borrows heavily from the Slow Food Movement,” she wrote in The Ecologist in 2007. Founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy in 1986, Slow Food links the pleasures of food “with awareness and responsibility,” she noted. Fast fashion, in her account, treats time as one more cost to be squeezed out of production. “Slow fashion, with the shift from quantity to quality, takes the pressure off time,” she wrote. It tracks for the sourdough die-hards, too. They’re just as likely to be growing their own vegetables as thrifting instead of buying fast fashion.
“It’s all about the craft and our appreciation for craftsmanship, and for doing something that is inherently simple exceptionally well,” Tim Auer told People of the Soho bakery. “My grandfather started specializing in sourdough rye bread over 50 years ago, so obviously that means a lot as well.” He added, “We really wanted to create a place for people to slow down and to have an experience, to not only taste the bread, but also see it, and smell it, and hear it essentially being baked.”
In Seattle, George De Pasquale, who founded Essential Baking Company in 1994, uses a starter said to date to the Klondike years in most of the 16 million loaves the bakery turns out annually. He got it from a salesman. “The guy who was selling me cleaning chemicals said, ‘You know, I have a starter that has been in my family a long time,'” De Pasquale told MyNorthwest. The salesman’s version was that a baker cooking for an Alaska caravan had “kept the starter in the bottom of his sleeping bag.”
“Completely unverifiable story but very romantic,” he said.
Related on Ethos:
