Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding for Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by the Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

More information is available at bemidjiairport.org [Music] Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm Producer/ Director Randy Cadwell.

Those that bake think it's a bit mystical, add water, sugar, flour, and wait for the magic to happen.

The magic is the starter that makes sourdough bread There's six sourdough loaves that are going to come out of the oven.

They've been baking for about 40 minutes.

And they are beautiful.

Oh some people pay good money to get this noise.

So sourdough it's a mixture of flour and water that has been allowed to ferment and then there's the yeast in the air that works on the sugars in the flour and then the fermentation creates bubbles and gas and acids, lactic acids.

It ends up making something that's alive, that will feed on the flour that you give it.

We understand that in the air there are yeasts, right, they're bugs in the air and it's the same for cheese, it's the same for wine, and those what you do by having this wet environment with the sugars in the flour, you create the proper environment to capture those yeasts.

So this spends most of its time in the cooler and then when I know that I'm going to use it I bring it out and I feed it.

And depending on the temperature, in the summer it goes really quickly because 90° and there's lots of humidity.

Right now it's more like 60° so it takes more time but then I feed it always the same amount of water and flour it becomes active.

It's alive, it's awake, you fed it, it's going up, it's on its way up.

Then you can use it to make bread.

If it goes down it's kind of tired and then you got to feed it again.

Sourdough went on for a long, long time, the Egyptians accredited with inventing it or having the accident where someone forgot wet dough somewhere and, you know, oh, then all a sudden you had a bread that was leavened.

It's not difficult but you have to pay attention, you got to keep it going.

Some people are very, very strict and talk very serious and you got to feed it every day.

You don't have to feed it every day but you have to keep it in a cooler in a cool place and then make sure you revive it when you need it.

Yeah we had the sourdough here, it was mixed in the morning, and it was used to start a new batch of baguettes, sourdough baguettes.

And every ingredient was here, water, bread flour, a little bit of AP flour and then the starter and it was mixed and it's been sitting for about 45 minutes without the salt and salt wants to absorb water so we're giving the chance the flour and the water to just get to know each other and become friends.

And then the salt is going to come in and salt is important because it also it slows down the rise and it also brings better taste.

I follow a recipe but I always add a little bit more starter because I'm always worried that the starter is not going to be strong enough, so I believe in the magic but I try to help it a little bit.

Originally it's going to be different, right.

I mean everybody talks about the bread in San Francisco and on the East Coast they have the same thing, you know, where so the coastal it's got the flora I mean the bugs in the air are a little bit different.

Here we're in Bemidji, we've got the woods, we don't have the salt in the air the way they would have so it's going to be a little bit the bread's going to be a little bit different.

And you're not playing with too many elements but even though it's very few elements, there's great variety.

I'm going to have you do a lot of things, you'll get a lot of the things you will do.

Some of it I will demonstrate because we can't we have 15 people so it's not one-on-one and then there are things that are kind of dangerous like ovens that are at 500° so I'll burn myself for you.

Put it on here and then cut it two and a half.

Two and a half ounces.

So if you're willing to put in, to pay attention, put in the work, you're going to have the success.

Look at that.

And I remember, it was back in the '90s, I was in France, and I stopped in this bakery and the bread was amazing and I asked the baker I asked the people in the store if I could talk to the baker and he came up, usually the bakery is beneath the store, so he came up and he was making sourdough but really gentle and the flavor was just very gentle and he was a little bit he kept silence in front of me and he said you know can you believe there's no chemicals in there, you know, there's just this the yeast that I've captured, and they're doing their work and I have this bread here and it's a little bit of said it's a little bit magic isn't it?

So when it's fresh it's nice and it's just the crust just crackles and that's really fun and then you know at the end of the week you can dip it into your soup and then it makes the soup more filling.

Over time it's passed on and it's certainly passed on around the world.

Well, logging by the year 1900 has evolved into a huge business, there's a huge demand for logs, and by 1900 there's about 20,000 men working in the woods in about 300 camps, so it takes a tremendous amount of food to keep these guys going.

The camps have to be run very efficiently, the men are working from dawn until dusk so the cook has to be very organized and the foreman of any given camp wants to have the best cook in the Northwoods because the best cook will attract the best workers.

Every camp is going to have beans, potatoes, prunes, but it's baked goods that sets a good camp cook apart and the men are kept happy by cakes and biscuits and donuts and cookies and pies and bread and all those sorts of things at every meal in great quantities.

Well, sourdough bread in its purest form, as you probably know, is flour and water and salt and then it is fermented and you want to put it in a warm place either above the stove or we do have a proofing cabinet here that has a couple of kerosene lamps to keep that one little space warm.

Kept it going in camp you put in a cool place when you're not using it and you bring it out and you put it above the stove and feed it when you are using it.

So these are our wood stoves, wood cookstoves made for camps.

J&S Camp Range they say on them and I believe that these came out of one of the Riley Camps and they were made bigger and heavier than you might have on the farm and then the J&S is Joesting and Schilling.

They're cast iron stoves and you may recognize the Joesting company because now 100 years or so later they are casting high school rings.

The Joesting Company in St Paul.

We got the wood box there, the clean out down here, and then of course this big oven.

And when we're baking bread, sourdough bread, we don't use a little pan like you use in a little oven but a pan such as this.

You can fit six loaves of bread in and then that goes in there, second pan 12 loaves, two ovens 24 loaves of bread every day, and there's no leftovers.

Breakfast is going to be sowbelly and spuds, it's going to be sweat pads, it's going to be wind timbers, it's going to be logging berries and if you don't have any idea what that is they're going to make pancakes, they're going to make potatoes and salt pork, they're going to have prunes, they're going to have beans.

And so the night before is when you set the sourdough for those pancakes to rise.

So every day 24 loaves of bread, about 30 pies every day, and those pies are cut into three pieces so every man gets a big piece of pie every day and then there is donuts which of course are deep fried.

There is biscuits which are called sinkers.

There's sticky buns, there's cookies.

It's the food that makes the difference and the the camp with the best cook is going to have the the best workers, they're the best worker retention.

I'm Julie Mulek and I own Old Soul Sourdough.

I'm a cottage baker which means I bake out of my home and I'm able to sell directly to people without being inspected through the state of Minnesota and I just make sourdough breads and sourdough cookies.

So I don't use any commercial yeast, I only use the natural yeast found in a sourdough starter.

Got like this floral scent, it's kind of sweet, some people say it's, you know, sourdough can smell very well sour or kind of like alcohol almost cuz of the fermentation but I think this one has a very nice floral scent and it's a little bit darker than some starters you can see.

I don't add rye or anything to it although I've thought about it, I just use it's a creamy white heritage wheat from the local organic heritage farm in Moorhead and I love it.

It smells so good I mean it makes me excited.

I don't think it smells like alcohol I think it smells just good and ready to bake with so.

Well I make different flavors of sourdough bread I have my traditional country loaf which is just the flour, water, salt, basic white recipe and then I make different flavors like parmesan garlic, jalapeno cheddar, rosemary garlic, a heritage wheat one, and then I make a sourdough brown butter chocolate chip cookie.

I've learned that basically just incorporating my dough with this and I let it mix roughly for about 4 minutes after it's Incorporated is enough time, it's all it needs so.

I used to over mix it and I didn't realize I was over mixing it for a while.

See I'm still learning, so.

After I had my fourth daughter I really wanted to find a healthier way to bake for my family so I began researching different flours and methods and all these kinds of different things that could maybe contribute to a healthier way or, you know, bring a healthier product to the table and I had discovered sourdough starter through a close friend of mine.

She had given me a starter and she tried explaining the whole process to me and even though I was a, you know, longtime baker I didn't understand it at all.

I was confused at the fact that you could use flour and water and no commercial yeast to make items.

So she gave me a sourdough starter that I killed within the week and I didn't think much of it but came to the conclusion that she was kind of right sourdough is a healthy way to bake because of the way that the natural yeast acts with the flour and how it affects our bodies and everything like that.

So that was just my starter with my autolyse which is just the flour and water mixture.

This is just my regular country loaf.

I learned that over time some people actually really do like that kind of sour taste from the bread and there's a couple of ways that you can achieve that with the sourdough starter.

One is if you let the starter kind of go a few days and build up what's called a hooch on top and then you can mix that hooch in, feed your starter, and then once it's doubled can bake with that and that will help the bread become more sour or you can do overnight fermentations in the fridge up to a week really if you want and the longer that you ferment your bread overnight at a control temperature of like 30° that will also produce a stronger sour flavor.

It's kind of weird to think about but once you start learning about fermentation in the human diet and how we used to do things before everything was kind of readily available fermentation was a huge part of our diets.

I mean that's why people would make the sauerkraut and other, you know, that's how we would preserve so many things is through that fermentation and so when people really say that they desire that sour loaf of bread it's because that's been a natural part of our diet since, you know, probably the beginning of time.

A lot of people buy from me because they can't do it themselves or they don't want to do it during the summer, right, so they don't want to heat their house in the summer so they buy from me.

Lots of people that tried the sourdough thing and didn't work out for them but they want sourdough bread will buy from me and there's been people that buy from me that ask me questions and then they start making their own sourdough bread and that's fine, you know, and I'm happy to have been maybe an anchor in helping them achieve a better product through some of my small tips and tricks.

For me I just find the warmest place in my house and I have electric baseboard heaters everywhere so actually in my office, which is just right next to my kitchen, which is a very small space I can control the temperature on that so I try and keep that about 72° sometimes a little bit warmer, and then in the summer I use that without the heater in it if I have to because the natural sunlight comes in and keeps that room naturally warm.

So I keep it in an enclosed space so that's personally how I'm able to kind of control the temperature to the best of my ability and then when I'm mixing in with it otherwise, so after it's already risen, so I feed it at night, and then overnight it rises.

After it's risen I take it out and when I use it in my kitchen I'm either controlling the temperature of my kitchen, if I can't do that I just put all of my dough bins inside of my office which is a controlled temperature.

In the summer I don't have to do that because naturally it's pretty warm in my house but in the winter I do find that it's very helpful to have that control, that controlled area, otherwise it would be a little bit more finicky.

But my favorite time to bake is in the spring and the fall when the temperature sits real close between 68 and 72° in my home.

What's so great about doing it at home, if you have the availability, the room, and the patience to do any fermentation in your house, every time you open the door new bacteria is introduced to your house so it's constantly changing.

And then on top of, you know, everyone's talking about gluten, if you're talking about just health in general, like gut health has been a huge thing lately, too, well the best thing for your gut is a prebiotic or probiotic, right.

Feeding it those different varieties of bacteria, so the more variety of bacteria you can introduce into your body the better, so doing things on your own in your own home like I said all of that is a huge, I mean it's huge for health.

And commercial yeast is basically the byproduct of brewing beer and so when you're done brewing beer the yeast, the brewer's yeast, is on top and they would scrape that off and they found that if you put that into bread it would increase or decrease the time of rise from bread.

So instead of taking a whole day for bread to rise ,which sourdough really can take much longer time to rise, they could get it in 3 hours.

So when that was discovered we kind of went away from using the natural yeast because why wouldn't you use something that is extremely fast.

However in that process of trying to speed up that we actually lost a lot of things, like the nutrition behind the sourdough bread and lots of other things that we don't quite understand until well trial and error.

So if you're eating a loaf of bread that doesn't have sourdough, it hasn't been fermented for a long time, your body can't process that bread without certain nutrients, so it's going to kind of take those nutrients out of your body.

So instead of bread being healthy and feeding you it's actually kind of starting to take some stuff away from you like zinc, magnesium, calcium and iron.

I mean there's a huge magnesium deficiency in the United States, I know that for a fact, but probably other countries as well and I do think some of the blame is the way that our diets have changed significantly over the last 100 or more years.

But when you eat something like sourdough it starts to break down and release those anti-nutrients which just makes it a healthier bread.

It's one of those things where I use the natural flours as natural as I can get it and I use the natural yeast and with those two things it resonates so deeply with people, they get happy eating bread again they get excited about it and they want more of it, they crave it, where people go I finished that loaf in a day and I kind of laugh like oh that's not a bad thing right but they go I don't eat bread like this normally so it's kind of funny to hear that and I've heard this so many times over and over and over again.

People love coming back for more.

So every time I hear stories like that it just reminds me that what I started doing here is right and it's just meant to be and I love helping people eat bread again in like the way that it should be enjoyed.

Bread resonates with us so deeply like there's a reason that why when we eat a good piece of bread it's exciting and it's fun.

It brings people together because in times so we talk about however long the humans have been alive for it's been thousands and thousands of years right they always had bread so it resonates so deeply with us like in our ancestry and our genes that when we eat a good loaf of bread it's just kind of like exciting.

You know in droughts there was bread, in famine we still had bread cuz wheat was one of those things that lasted a very long time.

There's joy in the process of it really and that's something that I've had a hard time kind of swallowing, hard time trying to do, but it's always one of those things where I've tried branching off and doing different things I've always come back to bread.

Really, what you're playing with is the flour, the yeast or the starter, salt and then water.

1, 2, 3, 4 right and then you got heat and that magic and spirituality you can see that, you know, I mean bread people talk about bread and, you know, our daily bread and, you know, just it's all over and the value of bread in life and as we talk about it it's also a symbol of wealth right.

When in English you talk about dough right I make a lot of dough.

In French wheat, so the word ble, wheat is a slang word for money.

It always brings people together and I say that all the time bread brings people together I don't care how you, what you put on it, any type of bread brings people together.

Yeah, it's the basic of our food, it's just that's what feeds us.

Thank you for watching Common Ground.

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Production funding for Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by the Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.

More information is available at bemidjiairport.org Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.