By Vernika Awal

One of the most searched words during the first lockdown imposed by the pandemic was “Sourdough.” The abundance of time in hand and the unavailability of yeast in the market were two contributing factors to this trend, we believe. Necessity is the mother of invention, they say, but in this case it’s not like people invented a method, but basically just looked for cues to help them satiate their craving for bread, the time in hand and fuel a new-found hobby, in this fast paced digital world that was forced to live in the analog pace.

The ‘rise’ in sourdough

“Sourdough has been known to mankind for a very long time, till commercial yeast came around about 100 years back. Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic put a big rise on this bread and people who didn’t even know about sourdough became aware of it”, says Chef Kishi Arora, a Delhi based chef and consultant. 

The “starter” is what defines a sourdough bread - a live fermented culture of fresh flour and water. Once combined, it ferments and cultivates the wild yeast available in our environment.

The image of sourdough being this crusty, chewy, and porous bread with an unglamorous appearance is fast changing, with bakers altering the product profile by making donuts, cakes and pizzas out of sourdough. Off late one can see the shift taking place in the pizza industry in India. People are more conscious of what they eat and while earlier one would focus more on the sauces and toppings — now the focus is equally, if not more, on the pizza base too.

Sourdough pizza workshops 

In the beginning of 2020, Kasturi Sonalkar, a sourdough mentor based out of Mumbai began taking Sourdough Pizza workshops online and it remains one of her highest selling programmes till date. 

“We think the main reason is that pizzas are favourite amongst children and that is why every parent wants to learn how to make this healthy for their children by making it from scratch at home. Since sourdough undergoes longer hours of fermentation, the output also becomes easy on the gut”, Sonalkar shares.  

The travelling ‘mother’

Not just home-chefs and home-bakers, but now there are restaurants that have consciously shifted to sourdough pizza bases. These commercial establishments go as far as sourcing the “mother” of the starter from other countries. For instance, Si Nonna’s – a Mumbai based pizzeria imports its starter, which is 500 years old, from the Galliano family in Naples, Italy. The starter doesn’t just become a base to the culture, but also holds generational history in it which is being carried on around the world. It is believed that the older the starter, the better the product. A good starter is crucial because sourdough enhances the flavour of the pizza and also aids in the rise of the dough.

The evolution

I ask Chef Kishi Arora about her thoughts on the evolution of breads in India and she says, “the older generation in India preferred the sweet milk bread that would just melt in the mouth and then came the brown bread which was marketed as a healthy substitute, then came multigrain and now sourdough. So the evolution is happening on the basis of what is trending, what is tastier and healthier.” 

Sourdough, indeed, has made inroads into our lives in India and that definitely is good news for advocates of fermented foods being healthy for us.