(CN) — A trip to San Francisco in late April marked the first time I’d ventured out of my house in more than a month for anything besides core provisions.
I live in Santa Cruz, so going to San Francisco under ordinary circumstances is a fairly mundane excursion. But the novel coronavirus pandemic has distorted all sorts of routine aspects of life into strange and at times unsettling adventures, and my weekday trip to the city by the bay was no different.
What made this voyage particularly strange and unsettling was that from everything I’d read while constantly anxiety-scrolling through my social media feed, San Francisco residents seemed to be desperately trying to escape the city and repair to the house-and-yard setup I am lucky enough to enjoy in the Monterey Bay.
So I felt a little foolish while heading north on I-280 as the iconic San Francisco skyline jutted out in front of the bay and bent my vehicle around a blind curve. Particularly foolish as my mission on this fateful Friday entailed finding an ancient sourdough starter that a friendly woman had encased in a jelly jar and strung up in a tree in Glen Canyon Park just for me.
Sounds strange, but San Francisco had seen a surge of sourdough starters strung up in trees, telephone poles and other places so strangers could exchange a mixture of flour and water containing a colony of microorganisms so essential to the sourdough breadmaking process.
Stuck indoors, the denizens of San Francisco — like many around the world — were scrambling for a way to pass the time, productively or otherwise.
For those with a culinary bent, the shutdown policies were a perfect time to try something new, like baking sourdough bread.
“It’s a good distraction,” said Liza Pannozzo, a San Francisco resident, over the phone that Friday morning.
Pannozzo and I were trying to hash out directions to the tree where she had left a portion of her sourdough starter tied up.
“Tying up yeast in a tree might sound strange, but I’ve gotten a lot of good reaction to it,” Pannozzo said.
When she first started tying up the starters in jars in late March, they would last for a couple of days. But now, as neighbors have come to expect their appearance around the weekends, they last for a couple of hours at the most.
This trend started with Bernal Heights resident David Reber, who started asking neighbors if they would be interested in making sourdough bread given the need to reduce trips to the grocery store and the scarcity of certain provisions.
The reaction was overwhelmingly positive, so Reber started tacking up portions of a starter he called Godrick on the telephone poles all around the neighborhood. They didn’t last long.
Baking sourdough bread is different than traditional breadmaking because the starter’s fermentation doesn’t require cultivated baker’s yeast and has better keeping qualities and less gluten as a result.
Many also prefer the slightly sour taste of the bread. From the standpoint of health, sourdough has an advantage over its baked brethren in that it is generally rated as richer in naturally occurring acids with a longer fermentation process that aids digestion and reduces the amount of glucose in the bread.
Bakers can make their own sourdough starters by combining water and flour, but the process takes days and often results in a starter that is less vigorous than the one already established.
Therefore, obtaining a “descendant” of someone else’s starter is a tried and true and oft-used shortcut.
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