For three years,  my wife has insisted that we eat sourdough bread. That was no problem for me, I liked the taste and was happy to hunt for loaves where ever we bought groceries. But for us, the best discovery was Abigail’s Oven REAL™ Sourdough Bread at the Farmers’ Market made with what they called “3 Perfect” ingredients: flour, water, and salt.

But at the grocers, we quickly discovered that the word “sourdough” on the bag did not mean the bread would be made with real sourdough.  I guess bakers can print ‘sourdough’ on a label if they can make it taste like the real thing. But, as Susie Mesure, in the Independent, warns it just dupes customers into “into buying fake versions of the real thing, with potentially serious health consequences,”

When you look at a commercial “sourdough” ingredient list like the one to the lower right, it might make you wonder. It sure did my wife and me and in fact, the list of added ingredients and preservatives is so shocking for people like us who are trying to find natural foods that we just gave up.

Would you rather eat this extensive bread chemistry experiment or just three simple ingredients: flour, water, and salt in your sourdough?

“With only three ingredients — flour, water, salt — real sourdough bread is plain and simple, just how bread should be.”

Farmdrop

We could not even find a “sourdough start” listed among the ingredients on most commercial loaves we examined and nearly all soured their bread with vinegar. Then at our local farmers market, we stumbled on Abigail’s sourdough. It was just what the doctor ordered, or so to speak. Her ingredients included a start, flour, water, and salt. That seemed perfect to us.

We dropped by every Saturday thinking the bread would not keep. (Little did we know that her “3 perfect ingredients” and sourdough start preserved the bread for weeks at a time.)

Then Martha, one of the bakers told us that it keeps for weeks and freezes well too. So I started to stock up, but as the season ended I lamented the size of my freezer to Martha. Laughing she told me that our local health food store carried their sourdough bread.

Most times when we arrived at the store there was a handsome display and we tried every kind. Enjoying them all, Abigail’s Country Loaf was the winner as far as my wife was concerned. It just agreed with her.

Getting the bread regularly, however, proved to be a real challenge. Many times the store would sell out before we stopped in. Finally, we started buying six loaves at a time and freezing five whenever we could.

Then one day I surfed the web to find their home page and discovered a class they were offering at the Spanish Fork store. I signed up and everything has changed for me from there.

Martha Levie, who is Abigail’s mother, taught the class at Abigail’s Oven in Spanish Fork, Utah. There she shared some interesting health benefits of the San Francisco start she uses. Mixing just four cups of water with eight cups of flour, she dove in with her hands mixing and chatting with us. Then she let it rest for half an hour. After the rest, she sprinkled in a tablespoon of Real Salt and a bit more water and mixed again folding the dough over itself a few times. She did this folding two more times at half-hour intervals. It truely was made with just flour, water, and salt.

Then it was time to wait for the magic of the sourdough to do its thing. Naturally, she did not have us wait for 8 hours but had other dough proofed and ready. She split the dough in two, shaped each loaf, told us about using parchment in dutch ovens with some water in a very hot (465° F/240°C) oven. She closed by giving us each our own sourdough start and sent us home with a recipe and a challenge to bake.

I took the challenge that evening just four hours after feeding the start she had given us. Within a day I had made a loaf that looked a little like what Martha had taught us during class and it tasted nearly as good as hers.