Category: sourdough

With a blog name like Go Eat Your Bread with Joy, it only makes sense to have a bread category–sometimes overlapping with the Recipes category, sometimes extending beyond it. And, because sourdough bread offers health benefits, time-honored tradition and all the joy of artistic pursuits, it’s the kind of bread most featured on this site. Here in this Sourdough category, you can find all things sourdough, from inspiring Instagrammers scoring bread to a roundup of tools to buy to start baking. To follow along with more bread-baking obsession, connect with Go Eat Your Bread with Joy on Instagram–or, if you have an idea for a topic to cover or a suggestion about a post, contact Shanna Mallon today.

How to Make Sourdough Starter Last Indefinitely: A Guide to Dehydrating

If you want to know how to make sourdough starter last indefinitely, the secret’s dehydration. Any time you want, you can press the pause button on your bread baking. Just put your starter on hold! So to help you set your starter on autopilot, here’s a recently tested step-by-step dehydration guide.

How to make your #sourdough starter last indefinitely / Go Eat Your Bread with Joy

[editor’s note: this post was updated in April 2019 based on more testing! updated instructions in below post.]

Talk to people about sourdough starters, and expect someone to scare you. “It’s like a pet or a child!” “You’re going to kill it!” “What will happen when you travel for work or pleasure, or you’re in the hospital, or you face some unexpected tragedy in life?”

You’ll hear your starter needs constant care. Someone will say to find a loyal friend you can count on to treat it as his or her own. But all this counsel is unnecessary because here’s the truth: you can take a break from maintaining your sourdough starter any time you want.

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St. Louis Sourdough Is on the Rise

Move over, San Francisco, there’s another sourdough city in the game. Located right in the heart of the Midwest, St. Louis, Missouri is a location booming with bakeries that offer naturally leavened bread. Distinguished by their short ingredient lists and long fermentation times, these loaves of St. Louis sourdough make a great case for bread bakers (or anyone!) to schedule a road trip to Missouri sometime soon.

st louis sourdough - a weekend sampling
Road trip idea in middle America: spend a weekend in St. Louis, sampling all the sourdough bread

When most people think St. Louis, they think Cardinals, the Arch, maybe the award-winning zoo. For bread lovers, however, there’s an even more exciting claim to fame, and it’s gaining momentum. In the last 12 months, not one, not two, but four different bread bakeries have opened, all with one thing in common: they specialize in naturally leavened goods.

St. Louis Sourdough: this town is loaded with naturally leavened eateries!

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Healthier Chicken and Waffles Recipe

If there’s anything better than fried chicken, it’s fried chicken on a waffle. (Am I right?) Comfort food meets comfort food in this soul food classic. So here’s a look at a lightened-up, healthier chicken and waffle recipe. Treat yourself to a bit of American history with this dish!

A Healthier Chicken and Waffles Recipe

Here in Nashville, waffles are about as ubiquitous as hot chicken, at least according to an article in The Tennessean last year. Read More

How to Bake Long-Fermented Sourdough Bread

Long-fermented sourdough bread is sort of the gold standard of natural leavening. Particularly if you’re interested in the health benefits from sourdough, you will care that a long fermentation means more time to break down phytic acid as well as the bran of the grain for digestibility. Min Kim of the beautiful Instagram account Min’s Kitchen created her recipe with this in mind. Available online, it requires no kneading, is largely hands off and yet offers all the benefits of a long-fermented sourdough bread.

naturally leavened long fermented sourdough bread

Traditional foods teacher Min Kim first became interested in true sourdough bread when trying to help her daughter deal with repeated sinus infections. After having her daughter remove all grains and try the GAPS diet for gut healing, her family began to slowly reintroduce only properly prepared grains. Understanding that the traditional method of making long-fermented sourdough bread meant making bread easier to digest, she started baking it herself.Read More

Start Sourdough Baking with Artisan Sourdough Made Simple

Want to bake sourdough? Artisan Sourdough Made Simple by Emilie Raffa is the book to buy. Back in May, when I wrote that gathering tools and finding a beginner recipe is all you need to start baking sourdough, what I meant was a beginner recipe like the ones Emilie’s written. Approachable, streamlined and effective, these recipes make sourdough as simple as light kneading and an overnight ferment.

Artisan Sourdough Made Simple

If you enjoy artisan bread but think baking it yourself is impossible, there’s good news. It’s not. You can bake beautiful sourdough bread! Say hello to Artisan Sourdough Made Simple by Emilie Raffa. Read More

Deep Dish Sourdough Pizza (a Kid-Friendly Dinner)

All the love to the lazy recipe from the archives, but this deep dish sourdough pizza is the new Friday favorite. It’s simple enough to involve the kids in dinner prep–yet naturally leavened to boot.

deep dish sourdough pizza / go eat your bread with joy

A tradition that started back in an early 2018 snowstorm is still going strong, now, in July’s blazing temps. Maybe that’s because Friday night pizza means a mental break from meal planning. In January, it began with this lazy recipe adapted from Genius Kitchen: a foolproof option that takes maybe 15 minutes to pull together, yields a hefty cracker crust and holds up confidently beneath mounds of meat, veggies and cheese. But, after months (!) of that happy dinner each week, along came sourdough. Life’s never been the same–and that includes pizza night.Read More