27 April 2020

Grow your own sourdough starter

cheese and bread collage

The Fermentology 101-seminar series about the culture, history and science behind the foods we all have at home is now a couple of weeks old. The virtual seminar started off with the first two episodes being about Sourdough and it has proven to be a great success. The seminar series is free to join and is a partnership between the Department of Applied Ecology at NC State University, the NC State University Libraries and the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics at University of Copenhagen.

Love and Sourdough

Love is the word that most people connects with their sourdough. Last week’s seminar was about Why do people care about Sourdough and historian Matthew Booker talked about how he has analysed questionnaires from people using sourdough. In this process Matthew made a word cloud and the one word that most people use to describe their sourdough story is Love. Hence, Matthew believes that the reason why people care so much about their sourdough is because it connects people and tells the story about how it is passed on from generation to generation. You can watch the seminar here: https://youtu.be/sne-NWCi6YY.

video screenshot
Matthew Booker's resulting word cloud from analysing peoples answers to why they care about sourdough.

Grow you own Sourdough for Science

The Wild Sourdough project is based at the Rob Dunn lab at NC state University and it is engaging people around the world to grow their own sourdough starter and help scientist by making simple measurements. Their facebook group: Wild Sourdough for Science has grown from 40 to over a 1000 member in just one week and most of these members seem to be growing their own sourdough starters for science.

Most people hired by Danish universities are still working from home due to Covid-19 and so are most people hired at the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics. Therefore, we would like to encourage you to join the Wild Sourdough project and grow your own sourdough starter as have some of us. All you need to do is follow a simple recipe, add water and floor of your own choice and take a few simple measurements after 14 days of growing your starter. See the instructions for growing your own starter here: http://robdunnlab.com/projects/wildsourdough/.

You can follow our sourdough starter progress on the center Instagram page.

sour dough starter kit
This is the sourdough starter experiment at day 3 of one of the employees at Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics.

Next episode

The next seminar is on Thursday April 30th at 4 pm EST/ 10 pm Danish time and is about: The Evolutionary History of Bread and Beer Yeast.

You can sign up for the next many episodes by filling in this form and read about the next seminars here: https://cals.ncsu.edu/applied-ecology/news/fermentology-mini-seminars/.