When Rhonda Flatberg died in 2018, her best friend passed Flatberg’s sourdough starter to a mutual friend, Melissa Griffiths. Flatberg and her friends had shared the fermented culture of flour and water for some 27 years, so the novice kneader felt she needed to keep it alive.

“I couldn't let it die because it was like a little piece of her,” Griffiths says.

The starter, which filled half a pint jar, sat untended in Griffiths’ refrigerator for almost 18 months. She felt guilty whenever she saw it until she decided to “feed” it. Twice a day for 10 days, she mixed in around three tablespoons of fresh flour and water, transforming the black mass of dormant microbes into a bubbling bacteria culture. By 2020, she published a cookbook, “Sourdough Made Easy” — unintentionally well timed for the Covid-19 pandemic, when home-fermentation became so popular that the United States faced a national yeast shortage. TikTok and YouTube videos showed new bakers on white-collar Zoom calls, simultaneously feeding their sourdough starters with names like “Breadley Cooper” and “Yeast Witherspoon.”

But by the end of 2024, when a Deskbird survey shows 90% of companies with office spaces will require workers to return in-person, many home fermenters will no longer have time for the recommended five sets of stretching and folding per loaf.

Griffiths, whose sourdough cookbook and Instagram videos for maintaining a starter garnered her 117,000 Instagram followers, kneads each loaf for only 10 minutes on the day of baking. She says online personalities make fermentation seem more “fussy” than it is, with some working their dough in the car between errands.

“I felt like I was on this hamster wheel, like, ‘Gotta keep it fed. Gotta keep it going. Gotta keep it rising.’ And that wasn't the case,” Griffiths says.

A complex (carbohydrate) history

Fermentation has a long, largely undocumented history. Its origin is often traced to ancient Egypt, where it is believed to have been accidentally discovered when natural yeast from the air and the baker’s hands met fresh dough.

Together, yeast and lactic acid bacteria activate enzymes to break flour starch into sugar, producing carbon dioxide, which gives the bread its airy texture and subtle tang. Every environment and baker has different bacteria due to varying humidity, temperature and a person's age, gender, diet and lifestyle. These microbes combine to give each starter a unique flavor.

Bakers feed their starter by adding flour to the mixture and discarding or giving away part of it, so the enzymes can eat through new starch while staying a manageable size. This means sharing is baked into fermentation. Griffiths had mailed Rhonda’s starter — around two and a half tablespoons dehydrated and blended, packaged in a Ziploc bag — to hundreds of her followers, including her neighbor, Tracy Kvamme, who was willing to try a second foray with sourdough. Her first starter grew so fast that she baked every day to keep up. When it became around a gallon in size and sat on her counter for so long that it developed a “foul” smell, she threw it out.

She says Griffiths taught her to refrigerate her starter to slow its growth (Kvamme has two in case one dies: Betty and Al, after Paul Simon’s “You Can Call me Al”) and to only feed it fresh flour twice before baking. The complexity is in her hands.

“It just depends on where you are and how much time that you want to spend playing in dough,” Kvamme says.

Julie Kaufmann Lloyd, a sourdough baking enthusiast who also ferments kefir and yogurt, says her husband's family still uses a 70-year-old starter. Her late mother-in-law’s brother acquired it in Wyoming, but it was originally from Alaska.

Kaufmann Lloyd would make sourdough waffles for her children with this starter, but it died after her kids moved out and she stopped cooking sweet breakfasts, she says.

She now uses a culture she got in 2018 after completing a two-day San Francisco Baking Institute sourdough class. She makes six to 12 loaves of bread each weekend, distributing all but one to neighbors, friends and family. She calls her sourdough “a nice touch point” with people she likes.

Kaufmann Lloyd works from home, but bread is her weekend hobby. While it takes a day to rise and bake, the hands-on labor is only a couple of minutes per hour.

“It takes as long as golf, but it's way cheaper and way more engaging,” Kaufmann Lloyd says.

Functional food

In recent years, Kim Kardashian, Generation Z content creators and Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman have trumpeted the miracles of fermented foods. Kombucha — a carbonated tea made with sugar and SCOBY, which is an acronym for a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast — was known as the “elixir of life” in ancient China, where it is thought to have originated.

But new studies affirm the beverage’s health benefits as a “functional food,” says Rachel DuMez-Kornegay, a genetics and molecular biology Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina who led a study of how kombucha affects microscopic worms.

“It's not just the calories or the nutritional content of the tea," she says. "It's the fact that there's probiotics, there's live microbes that are meant to have benefits when consumed that make something like kombucha a functional food versus just drinking tea with no microbes in it.”

These living organisms help create a resilient gut microbiome, which some scientists call the “second brain” for its role in linking digestion, mood health and thought processes — think, “gut reaction.”

Sourdough is more digestible because fermentation breaks down some flour gluten. Fermented breads also have more nutrients, like fiber, than their nonfermented counterparts, but studies do not consistently link sourdough to health benefits.

Michaël Durand-Dubief, a scientist who led a 2022 review of sourdough health studies that was published in the peer-reviewed journal Advances in Nutrition, says he is “not convinced” sourdough is healthier than other breads, but more standardized research is needed to draw a conclusion.

‘Yoga for your hands’

Still, besides being delicious (“everyone loves hot bread”), Griffiths’ sourdough has been functional in another sense.

In 2019, after Griffiths got a partial toe amputation to deal with a bone infection, she had to elevate her foot to avoid throbbing pain. But the need to tend to her sourdough forced her out of bed, so she would prop her heel on the kitchen counter as she fed, stretched and folded her dough.

For Kaufmann Lloyd, baking bread is like “yoga for your hands.” Manipulating the dough grounds her, and she enjoys watching it become a smooth, puffy ball from its start as a “sticky mess,” she says.

When she travels, her starter waits in the refrigerator. The microbes take longer to “revive” than in a typical week, but they have survived three weeks without being fed. Other home bakers have friends “babysit” their starters.

Like Kaufmann Lloyd, Griffiths says fermented foods do not need to be a chore. For over a year, she produced 40 to 60 loaves of sourdough each week for a local bakery. Now, she makes four loaves per week: two for her family and two to distribute around her Utah town.

Even when some hobbyists must return to work in-person, dedicated home fermenters who knead their dough plan to maintain their pastime, not loaf around.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Melissa Griffiths