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In Belgium, in a refrigerator room, live more than 110 pots of flour, water and magic.
At least that's how you can sometimes think of sourdough leavens, cultures of bacteria and yeasts that bakers mix with dough instead of commercial yeast to produce a bread of delicious complexity, with acidity pungent or unctuous cream, according to the recipe.
Appetizers are prepared by leaving an inviting suspension of flour and water on a counter and waiting for the microbes to colonize it, making it frothy and tart. But most bakers do not have a DNA sequencer to see exactly where they live, which often gives them a different look, smell and taste. To start, where do the microbes come from? L & # 39; air? Flour? The microbiome of the baker?
Even though an appetizer, refreshed with flour and water and pbaded from person to person for over a hundred years, is really the same thing in the end as it was in the beginning, is an open question .
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Fortunately, biologists and bakers are beginning to explore the mysteries of leaven. To discover from the inside a very interesting experience, Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley, the original team of Gastropod, a podcast on culture and science of food, were made in Belgium with two microbial ecologists in Belgium, at the Sourdough library. Karl de Smedt. (You can listen to the resulting gastropod episode here.)
Housed in a room of the Puratos Company, where De Smedt runs the Center for Bread Flavor, the library began to take its current form when a Syrian baker of traditional chickpea biscuits asked De Smedt if he would help to to document and preserve its entry, says Twilley. The bakery's sons were interested in the transition from traditional sourdough leaven to commercial sourdough. He hoped that de Smedt would prevent the starter from disappearing.
The library expands as De Smedt brings together other remarkable creators, ensuring that they are fed exactly the same flour as they do at home, in order to preserve their unique character.
When Twilley and Graber enter the library for the first time, De Smedt counts down "Three … two … one …" and opens the door. "It was really like a treasure room in a museum," said Twilley. Behind the windows of the refrigerators were lit jars and a glittering projection of leaves on the ceiling.
The bakers were there to make bread with their appetizers, using exactly the same recipe, and see if the breads had a different taste.
If the library reflects an effort to collect and retain unusual entries, the experience that Puratos and Smedt helped coordinate was an effort to understand how they were doing so. In Belgium, with De Smedt, who is also director of communication and training at Puratos, and the podcasters were 12 bakers from around the world. The bakers were present because Anne Madden and Rob Dunn, microbial ecologists from North Carolina State University, had sent them the same flour with the same instructions to prepare a sourdough.
They had brought with them their specially concocted entries so that scientists could take samples to find out which microbes were present, if they were different from one starter to another and if these microbes were also present on the hands of the bakers and in the flour of origin. The bakers were there to make bread with their appetizers, using exactly the same recipe, and see if the breads had a different taste.
The results of the Belgian experience are being revised before publication. But Madden recently shared some details of what they found. First of all, the entries are not all identical, although they are made in the same way with the same ingredients.
There were more than 350 strains of microorganisms among the starters, and most of them had yeasts from the Saccharomyces kind, the same group that belongs to the common baker's yeast. But we were dominated by completely different yeasts, genera Naumovozyma and Kazachstania. Another recent research group project – called the Global Sourdough Project, which examines the effects of geography on the composition of different types of starters – has shown that yeasts are a distinctive trait of Australian starters, Madden explains.
Second, when the researchers cleaned up the baker, washed his hands, and grew the resulting microbes, they found that the microbiomes in the baker's hands were a little different from those of the others. They looked more like the microbial composition of leaven leavens, suggesting that perhaps the constant quenching of their hands in an acidic bread dough had influenced the survival of the fittest on bakers' hands and produced another group of tiny people. (Do not get me wrong, your body and food are playgrounds for natural selection, as are the large-scale habitats we're used to thinking about.)
We select the microbes that do what we want and that give us a pleasant taste, giving an evolutionary advantage to those we like.
Perhaps more interestingly, almost all the microbes found in the entrees were also in the hands of the bakers or in the flour. Thirty-three out of more than 350 had not been, suggesting that the common belief that starter microbes are wild and drifting in the air is less likely than microbes already present in flour. and those in the hands of bakers who grow bread. Still, Madden notes, it is difficult to establish causality with the current data. The direction in which the microbes flow, from the hands to the launcher or in the opposite direction, is unclear.
What is clear is that sourdough leavens and the bread they make are human manipulations of the evolution of microbial communities. We channel the growth of particular members of these communities by raising or lowering the temperature of our dough, feeding the starters more or less frequently and providing them with different kinds of flour. We select the microbes that do what we want and that give us a pleasant taste, giving an evolutionary advantage to those we like.
In all these illuminated jars and in kitchens around the world, the selection is at work, bringing us a delicious bread.
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