Being the oldest form of leavened bread, sourdough was already used at least in ancient Egypt. As many great recipes, it was probably first created accidentally when leaving out bread dough which made good microorganisms – wild yeast – develop inside of it. Those made the texture lighter and the taste better.

Before the commercial baker’s yeast was created, every bread was sourdough bread. Today, around 30-50% of the bread in Europe is still made out of sourdough.

The mixture out of wild yeast, lactic acid bacteria, flour and water is called a “starter.” The microbes inside the dough digest gluten, meaning that real sourdough is either low in gluten or even gluten-free. For our bread, we used the ancient Marc Aurelio wheat which is also lower in gluten than today’s types of wheat.

In the following video, you can see how we made our sourdough bread: 

 

Séraphine-Noëlle Reeg * studying Tourism and Sustainability at the University of Montpellier, France