Someone called Goa-based home baker and sourdough bread expert Sujit Sumitran ‘the bread whisperer from Goa’. Amused, he uses it as a hashtag for sourdough posts on Instagram. As he talks about making bread, of scoby (Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast) breaking down simple and complex sugars of starch, of making sourdough starter from scratch, one realises the term ‘alchemist’ also fits.
He baked his first bread, using commercial yeast, when he had crossed 50. His wife Sudha brought a ‘machine that bakes bread’ into his life. After obsessively baking bread for a year, which he says was “basically changing the machine’s settings, without control over the bread... just pushing a few buttons and the machine does everything,” he realised it was time to conquer the ‘final frontier’ — sourdough bread.
For a year, he used commercial yeast until somebody from Nevada sent him two dehydrated sourdough starters — the San Francisco and the Ischia. Used to the ease of commercial yeast, he found sourdough difficult and frustrating, but also more educational.
He says, “Commercially yeasted bread gets done in five-six hours, while sourdough takes up to 18-20 hours, from start to finish.” The slow fermentation, and the work of the starter, makes digestion easy and keeps its glycemic index low.
The key to good bread
Kochi, Kerala, 29/09/2018: Bread carving done by Goa-based bread whisperer Sujit Sumitran. Photo : Thulasi Kakkat
The starter holds the key to a good boule of sourdough. A starter is the cultivation of wild yeast in a form that can be used for baking, wild yeast is present in all flour. Starters are shared in dehydrated form, some can be bought online, and stored frozen. These are of varying vintages: the oldest that Sujit has, the Bavarian Black Death, dates back to 1633. These are also tagged geographically; among the historical starters are Californian Gold Rush and Oregon Trail.
The idea of keeping a starter “alive” is romantic. But Sujit interjects, “It is a moot question whether the contents of my Bavarian Black Death are the same as that of the original culture…Nobody knows.” Microbiologists are divided over whether the starter retains the features of the original if it is fed flour from another region since micro-flora vary region to region.
At one point he had seven starters, out of which he intended to bake bread to test if the flavours of each differed. Initially excited by the micro-biodiversity of the starters, he decided to trim his collection to three. He didn’t get around to baking bread out of the seven cultures but he did land an opportunity to be part of another, similar experiment.
It all starts here
He was recently invited by Belgium-based Puratos Sourdough Library, at the Centre for Bread Flavour, with 14 other sourdough bakers from across the world to be part of an experiment.
Puratos sent each baker test tubes and flour with a schedule by which they had to feed their starters the flour, put it in the test tubes, freeze and take them to Belgium.
“All 15 of us baked bread with the same flour composition, the only difference was that we used our own starters. We did a sensory test to figure out the differences. After three slices you can’t find any difference, they seem fairly similar. The bread was to be sent to professional tasters, who may find differences.”
