Complex Numbers

Yeast to West

Speaking of food, I continue to see people raving about sourdough, which apparently a lot of people played with when they were stuck at home over the past couple of years. Me, I just continued buying bread from the bakery as nature intended. Every time I've tried to bake bread, bad things happened.

Anyway, this article isn't about pandemic sourdough bakers; it goes back a bit further than that.

San Francisco’s Famous Sourdough Was Once Really Gross  
Gold miners made themselves sick on smelly, hard loaves.

Long before it became a viral food trend or social-media sensation, American sourdough was surprisingly gross.

So, more like the other meaning of "viral."

San Franciscans proudly trace their city’s iconic bread back to the Gold Rush of 1849.

That's fair, but it should be noted that before people knew what yeast actually was, almost all bread was "sourdough." I think some was made with repurposed beer yeast, but the origins of sourdough extend way before San Francisco was a thing.

The men who flocked to Northern California in search of gold made bread in their wilderness camps not with store-bought yeast, but with their own supply of sour, fermented dough.

Yeah, I could be wrong, but I don't think there was a lot of store-bought yeast there at that time.

Letters, diaries, and newspaper articles written by and about the 49ers, lumberjacks, and pioneers of the American West are full of complaints about horrible and inedible sourdough. Could bad bread really have inspired San Francisco’s most beloved loaf?

Or it could be gold miners protecting their hoard. "Don't come out here. The weather is shit, people are camping everywhere, and the bread sucks." You know, a bit like San Francisco today.

In 1849, when gold miners began arriving in San Francisco, most Americans didn’t bake or eat sourdough bread. American bakers typically leavened their bread with “barm” (a yeast derived from beer brewing) or one of several relatively new commercial yeast products.

Yeah, see? Look, I comment on these things as I go, and it's nice to turn out to be mostly right.

Hm, I wonder... why, yes, that is the origin of the mostly British word barmy.  

These commercial yeasts were easy to work with, didn’t require constant maintenance, and produced reliable results. They also produced bread that appealed to American taste buds.

American taste buds suck. They think Budweiser is beer, pasteurized process cheese food is cheese, and Wonder Bread is bread.

Most 19th-century Americans preferred bread that was sweet rather than sour. According to one 1882 advice book for housekeepers, the “ideal loaf” was “light, spongy, with a crispness and sweet pleasant taste.” Sour bread was a sign of failure. As a result, bread recipes from the period used commercial yeasts along with considerable amounts of sugar or other sweeteners to speed up fermentation and avoid an overly sour flavor.

The ideal bread is a French baguette with a crispy crust. Period.

Sourdough required only flour, water, and fresh air. A sourdough “start” needed care, attention, and regular feedings but offered an inexhaustible, self-perpetuating supply of leavening agent, even in the wilderness.

Some brewers make beer with wild yeast, too. The results are all over the place. Some of them are also described as "sour."

Bread was baked under difficult circumstances—outdoors, over a campfire or hot coals, and sometimes in the same flat pan used for panning for gold—leading to inconsistent and unsanitary results.

But they could have sold it as artisanal sourdough with flaked gold.

Sourdough baked by pioneers wasn’t just gross and unappetizing; it could also make you sick.

Well, duh. Not all the microorganisms floating around are beneficial.

Across the American West, sourdough was considered a food for unmarried men who didn’t know how to cook.

As opposed to married men who didn't know how to cook.

So it’s worth asking: If sourdough bread baked by miners was so terrible, how did it become one of San Francisco’s most beloved foods?

It all came down to the success of the city’s French and Italian bakeries.

Yep. That'll fix it, alright.

By the second half of the 20th century, tourism boards in San Francisco were placing the 49ers at the center of the city’s history, idealizing life on the frontier and playing up links between the Gold Rush and the City by the Bay. San Francisco bakeries joined in, crafting stories about partnerships between bakers and miners and attempting to market the bread nationwide.

And once again, we see that no matter how disgusting something may be, if you market it right, it'll become popular.