If there’s one thing any sandwich connoisseur knows, it’s that there are few sandwiches that aren’t made better by the addition of sourdough bread. Bacon Lettuce Tomato sandwiches? Always better with the bite and tang of sourdough. Burgers? Oh yes, replacing a humdrum old hamburger bun with a butter-grilled sourdough bread pushes them to the next level. Tuna salad sandwiches? If there was anything that can make this already delicious sandwich better, it’s tuna salad. So is it any wonder that Sourdough Bread has its own day of celebration dedicated to it? We didn’t think so either!
History of Sourdough Bread Day
The History of Sourdough Bread is surprisingly long. Sourdough bread is created from dough that has a mixture of the normal yeasts in symbiosis with a Lactobacillus culture. This culture gives the bread a slightly sour tang that makes it far superior to all other bread (well… if you ask us) and even provides the bread with a longer shelf-life. What’s surprising isn’t that sourdough bread isn’t a standard in everyone’s pantry, but that it was actually one of (if not the first) forms of leavening in human history.
In fact, in some forms of bread, you have to use sourdough for it to work. Rye bread has a remarkably low gluten count, making brewer’s yeast simply impractical for helping it rise. Sourdough, on the other hand, happens to work perfectly in this type of bread. See, we told you tuna went perfect with sourdough bread, that’s why tuna and rye is so amazing! In America, one of the most famous sources of Sourdough is San Francisco, where French Bakers brought the leavening to Northern California to feed those hunting down that precious gold.
So how did Sourdough fall from being the favorite leavening agent for bread everywhere? Well, wheat-based breads don’t need the special properties of sourdough leavening, and it was gradually replaced by barm, a result of beer making, and then eventually by purpose grown yeasts. Sourdough Bread Day reminds us of the origins of the most important staple of our diet, and to remember that it still makes the most delicious bread out there.
How to celebrate Sourdough Bread Day
The simplest way to celebrate Sourdough Bread Day is just to make it’s various forms the staple of your bread diet that day. Start your day with sourdough bagels (and you thought bagels couldn’t get any better), and then prepare your lunch with sourdough bread on your sandwich instead of regular bread. For dinner, you can serve a rich savory stew in a hollowed out sourdough ‘cannonball’, a loaf that’s baked round rather than a like a standard loaf of bread. Then for a real surprise, have a sourdough chocolate cake for dinner. That’s right! Sourdough can be part of every meal you have on Sourdough Bread Day!
