San Francisco’s famous sourdough was once gross

regular yeast dough also works that way, it doesn't need to be "sour" dough for the yeast culture to munch on the new dough food, so that evidence alone is not definitive.

It's how you'd have started things but then you selectively grow less sour yeast strains until you have what you want for bread/beer.

That's not my read. Just that sourdough was not typical of American baking at the time (mid-19th century):

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.

From TFA.

Whether or not sourdough was prevalent or not relative to barm (often a synonym for sourdough) isn't clear.

Google's Ngram Viewer is ... interesting if not especially clear. "Barm" is the leading term from the 1600s through the early 19th century, where "sourdough" becomes the dominant term around 1920:

<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=barm%2Csourdou...>

(I'm not confident that "barm" refers strictly to leaven, and sampling some of the 17th century results shows ... numerous Dutch and German texts....)

Correct.

Sourdough is wild yeast (usually Saccharomyces exiguous) and lactobacillaceae. Today's commercial yeast is usually Saccharomyces cerevisiae (instant, active dry, .

The leaven you talking about is called "mother dough", basically a chunk of dough from previous baking.

I find the article wanting.

To make sourdough starter one needs water, flour, and time. That is it.

I personally like sourdough a lot but still only order it when at a diner or brunch.

It's definitely eaten east of the Mississippi, so I don't think it's that.

I grew up on the east coast; sourdough is normal and tasty to me. I doubt there is any real coastal trend. San Francisco is known for sourdough bread, but it wasn't invented and spread from there.

It may be an acquired taste especially stronger versions. But it's most of what I eat and what I usually make at home.

That can be said of literally any food. For instance, I hate chocolate. And upon learning that, people will sometimes tell me, "oh, you must be thinking of /American/ chocolate. You'll like /real/ chocolate". Nope. I've humored enough people and sampled various combinations of cacao, milk, dark, Belgian, Swiss, and so on. I don't like chocolate.

Came here to say that, it's way too sour. Sourdough is okayish when done well but I prefer yeast 100% of the time.

This is one of my most missed foods after moving away from the Bay Area.

Going to the Safeway deli and getting a Dutch crunch sandwich...I'm hungry now.

In the UK we have "Tiger Bread", which is my favourite type of bread. I wonder how that differs to Dutch Crunch.

Dutch Crunch is also popular in the Seattle area.

It's a great way to exfoliate the roof of your mouth.

It's definitely a unique flavor. My wife makes some that have these darker wet pockets of 'extra sour' that I love. Kid finds it absolutely gross, and I can see why completely. Just like Vegemite, and anchovies. I love them, but admit the flavor is...odd.

Baguette is traditionally a sourdough. Specifically, a liquid dough levain.

This whole article seems strange because "sour-" the root doesn't exactly mean "sour" the taste. It's from "sauer" which implied any aerobic ferment or oxidation, since the old name of oxygen (and still in German) is sauerstoff.

Yes, ferments often produce telltale organic acids, but the takeaway is that sourdough isn't called sour because of the flavor, but because it implies that it's derived from an existing culture and not a fresh ferment, like Jack Daniel's Tennessee "sour mash" whiskey, which notably does not taste "sour".

This makes sense - in my Slavic language, what English language typically calls bread, is not really bread but it is closer to baguette then to the bread. We consider bread something like sourdough or equivalent style made with yeast. Typically from rye (if you are closer to Germany), mix or just wheat (if you are closer to Hungary/south).

As a German (Frankonian to be precise which even for Germany has an especially rich culture of bread) I find what Americans call "bread" quite gross. Most tastes are acquired and the low quality and culinary culture in regards to bread always astounds me when traveling anywhere outside Germany except Italy (they know how to make good white bread like Ciabatta) and maybe Indian naan and similar Asian variations, though that's something completely different to Western bread.

I was an east coaster and I could not stand the lack of sourdough.

> as an east coaster i can’t really stand sourdough

Lol what does which coast you live on have to do with how you appreciate sourdough or not?

Bimbo even bought San Luis Sourdough (made down in San Luis Obispo), which used to be excellent. 'Used to be' being the key phrase.

Luckily, someone who had worked there started Brian's Own, which is very good.

> I appear to be distinctly in the minority, but sourdough is the usual bread I buy and eat

where do you live? on the US west coast it can be difficult to not buy sourdough, it's usually all they have.

source: I don't want to buy sourdough

I find slow overnight fermentation with industrial yeast can be pretty decent when you don’t have the time to keep a starter going and just want to bake some bread once in awhile. Big fan of no knead method.

I am from the bay area so maybe I acquired the taste early, but I love a good strong sourdough personally. I think a big part of what people enjoy eating is culturally inherited. If you've been told all your life that good bread should be sweet, you're likely to regard a different less sweet loaf with suspicion or derision. Certain cultures relish in eat things that may seem pungent or unlikable to outsiders. I didn't initially enjoy kimchi, but after some time having it around here and there I've come to love the unique intense flavor.

The standard for bread is so low in the United States, anything with taste is amazing!

In the SF Bay Area, "French bread" and "sourdough" are near synonyms, or at least were prior to the reasonably recent culinary bloom (1990s / aughts). Though of course there are sweet French loaves and baguettes, and non-baguette sourdoughs.

General / wider availability of true sour loaves outside California was exceedingly rare as of the 1980s, and I'd tend to believe well into the early aughts.

2020 et seq blew the lid off the Dutch oven, so to speak, though Tartine Bakery and others were cultivating the field / getting ... started ... before. Tartine itself was founded in 2002, according to Wikipedia.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartine>

Google's Ngram Viewer shows a doubling of occurrences of "sourdough bread" in print from 2007--2019, roughly, with a long slow climb from ~1960 and a sharp inflection in 2007. That ... roughly ... matches my own recollection.

<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sourdough+brea...>