The Meaning of Sourdough
The Meaning of Sourdough
If the best foods evoke a place, sourdough goes one better—it is a place, the miasmatic essence of the place it was made. To start a batch, you simply mix flour and water in a jar then leave it out for a few days to be colonized by the local microbial population. Does that mean I can tell bread leavened by Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis from the local sourdough here in Toronto? Hardly. But I still like the idea.
For Canadians, sourdough is inextricably linked with the northern wilderness of the Yukon. It was the staple food of prospectors in the Klondike gold rush, and anyone who survived a winter in the territory was dubbed a “sourdough.” The most famous book of poetry ever published in Canada (sorry, Margaret Atwood) is Robert Service’s Songs of a Sourdough, featuring “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”
So what does this have to do with breakfast? My parents brought a package of authentic Yukon sourdough starter back from a northern trip last year. My wife and I made some pancakes with it. She loved the pancakes; I loved what they represented. You can keep sourdough starter alive if you use it every week or so, so that’s what we’ve done, for almost a year and a half now. We make pancakes once a week, usually on a weekend, but switching the routine around depending on our respective work schedules to find a morning where we can linger a bit. It takes some advance planning — you have to take the starter out of the fridge the night before, and add some flour and water to get it going. It’s like having a low-maintenance (and delicious) pet.
I’m not actually a sourdough myself—my only trip to the Yukon, a two-week canoe trip down the Snake River, was in the middle of summer. But once a week, this little ritual makes me feel connected to some semi-mythic ideal of Canadian wilderness. And it also forces my wife and me to slow down and enjoy breakfast in a way we rarely do anymore. You really can’t eat pancakes in front of the computer, thank god. They take two hands.