Battling with My Mother

Our mother when she is happy.

What a Heat Wave Taught Us About Sourdough, Science, and Humility

For the past few days I have been fighting with my mother.

It has been exhausting. It has cost me sleep. It has consumed my thoughts. And, whether you realized it or not, many of you have experienced the effects of this battle as well.

No, not my real mother. I actually spoke with both my parents on the phone the other day and they're doing great. And it's certainly not my mother-in-law. She's wonderful too.

No, this mother isn't human.

It's our sourdough mother.

And she has been struggling.

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Our mother “Jane” in Spain with Chef Juan

A Living Legacy

Eight years ago, after our family returned home from living abroad in Ireland for the year, I mixed together organic flour and spring water and patiently nurtured a living culture of wild bacteria and yeast. Day after day I refreshed it, allowing the microorganisms naturally present in our environment to establish themselves until they formed a stable, healthy sourdough mother.

I had no idea at the time how important that simple mixture would become to me, my family and our community.

That same mother launched Rise by Brianna. It is the same mother that has leavened every loaf of bread, every pretzel, every bagel, every croissant, every cracker, every batch of pasta, every cookie, and even the roux we use for our sausage gravy and cheese sauces at the Modern Stone Age Kitchen.

Over the years we've shared this mother with hundreds of people who have taken our sourdough classes or purchased some from our counter. A few months ago she even traveled with us to Spain, where we shared her with our dear friend, Chef Juan Penzini. Today, she forms the foundation of the sourdough program at his Artisan Culinary School in Altea.

It amazes me that a handful of flour and water mixed together in my kitchen nearly a decade ago now lives in so many other kitchens around the world.

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More Than Flour and Water

Unlike commercial yeast, however, a sourdough mother isn't simply an ingredient. It's an ecosystem.

Within that jar live trillions upon trillions of bacteria and wild yeast. Each species has its own preferred environment. The bacteria produce more acid and the yeast produce carbon dioxide. Together they create an incredibly complex, living community that ultimately determines the flavor, aroma, texture, and performance of every loaf of bread we make.

Contrary to what many people believe, the yeast isn't really doing the heavy lifting. With bread it simply produces carbon dioxide, which makes the bread rise.

The bacteria are the true workhorses.

They produce the acids that develop the bread's remarkable flavor and aroma. More importantly, they transform the flour itself. Through fermentation they improve mineral bioavailability, activate naturally occurring enzymes, and help break down gluten and other compounds into forms that are easier for our bodies to utilize. It is this bacterial fermentation, not the rising of the bread, that makes true sourdough so different from bread made with commercial yeast.

That transformation doesn't happen by accident.

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Welcome to the Mom Cave

A glimpse inside our Mom Cave

Our responsibility as bakers is to create the conditions that allow those microorganisms to do what they naturally do best. Over the years we've refined our process to give our mother exactly what she needs. In fact, we've become a little obsessive.

Our baking team affectionately refers to one piece of equipment in the corner of the bakery as the "Mom Cave." The Mom Cave started life as an ordinary under-counter refrigerator. Today it has become something considerably more sophisticated. Knowing that different temperatures encourage different microbial activity, I modified the refrigerator by installing a small heater and connecting everything to a programmable thermostat. After speaking with the engineers at Auber Instruments and explaining exactly what I was trying to accomplish, they actually developed custom firmware that allowed the controller to operate the way we envisioned (to learn more about the Mom Cave check out this blog post).

Every afternoon at precisely 2:00 p.m., the heater gently warms our refreshed mother to 76°F, encouraging active fermentation throughout the afternoon and evening. Then, at 2:00 a.m., the cycle reverses. The refrigeration takes over and slowly cools the mother to 40°F, where she rests and slows the fermentation essentially to a halt until the following afternoon when what is left is refreshed and the entire process begins again.

It may sound excessive. But making consistently exceptional sourdough isn't about luck. It's about understanding biology. That same philosophy extends throughout our entire bread-making process.

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Consistency Is Not an Accident

A glimpse at our FDT Calculator

Every morning before a single batch of dough is mixed, our morning mixer measures the temperature of the bakery, the flour, and the mother. Those numbers are entered into a spreadsheet that calculates the exact temperature the mixing water needs to be so every dough leaves the mixer at precisely the same final dough temperature, regardless of whether it's twenty degrees outside in January or ninety-five degrees in July.

Over the years we've even determined the friction coefficient for each mixer and each batch size which refers to the amount of heat generated simply by mixing the dough. Different dough hydrations, different mixers, and different batch sizes all generate different amounts of heat, so every one of those variables has been carefully documented.

The goal is simple: reduce as many variables as possible. Most bakeries measure time. We measure chemistry.

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WhatsApp Bakery group chat for pH

Why We Measure pH

Throughout the day our team also monitors the pH of both our sourdough mother and our doughs. Those readings are immediately shared with the rest of the baking team through a WhatsApp group so everyone understands exactly where every batch is in the fermentation process.

The pH tells us how active our bacteria have been. As they consume the naturally occurring sugars in the flour, they produce lactic acid, causing the pH to fall. For us, one number has become especially important.

4.6

That is the threshold where many of the nutritional transformations that make sourdough so remarkable really begin to occur. Among other things, enzymes become active that begin breaking gluten into its individual amino acids. Minerals become more bioavailable. The flour itself becomes a safer, more digestible, and more nourishing food.

Every flour-containing product we make at the Modern Stone Age Kitchen, from our bread and croissants to our crackers, pasta, cookies, and gravies, passes through this transformation before it is baked.

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The Delicate Balance of Fermentation

Ironically, however, that same acidity is also our greatest challenge.

Fermentation is a balancing act.

We need the pH to drop below 4.6 because that's where many of these wonderful transformations occur. But if it remains there too long, or drops much lower, the very gluten network we've spent hours carefully developing begins to break down completely. At the same time, the increasingly acidic environment becomes hostile to the wild yeast responsible for making the bread rise.

The dough weakens. The bread becomes flat. Croissants tear during proofing. Everything suffers.

Each morning we aim for our sourdough mother to begin the day between a pH of 3.8 and 4.0. That's the sweet spot we've refined through years of observation, note-taking, and thousands upon thousands of loaves. Once the pH drops much below 3.8, most wild yeasts begin to struggle, and their ability to produce carbon dioxide declines dramatically.

Just a glimpse at all the mothers we make nightly

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When the Heat Took Over

Adding ice to our water before mixing

Normally, all of these systems work beautifully. And then last week happened. The heat was unlike anything we'd experienced in years.

Even with every air conditioner in the building working as hard as it could, they simply couldn't keep up. They were battling the ovens, the fryer, the range, the heat lamps, and the massive deck oven in the bakery. On Friday we added another challenge: our wood-fired oven for pizza night. That fire is lit around eleven o'clock in the morning and burns at full intensity until nearly seven that evening. It's built so well that it was still radiating heat into the bakery almost two days later.

It was so hot that chocolate chips sitting on the counter melted into puddles. Even the water coming from our faucets wasn't cold enough for mixing dough, forcing us to add ice simply to achieve our target dough temperatures.

Despite all of our planning and preparation, we found ourselves battling something we couldn't control. We weren't simply making bread anymore. We were fighting physics, chemistry and biology.

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Then the Power Went Out

Then, late Thursday night, just as we thought we had managed to stay ahead of the heat, the power went out.

When the electricity returned, the thermostat controlling the Mom Cave reset itself. Unfortunately, whenever it resets, it defaults to the warm cycle. Instead of cooling our mother to 40°F at two o'clock in the morning, she remained at 76°F for several more hours before our morning baker arrived.

Those few extra hours changed everything..…and we’ll continue the story next week.

Our tower of nightly mothers