But for the last few decades, modern diets have villainized the baked

good. And bread has been taking a hit over the years.

Total U.S. sales have been stagnant since 2015, showing little to no

growth leading up to 2020.

And on average, Americans spent less money on bread in 2017 than they did

just four years earlier.

Not to mention the fact that some of the country's biggest bread

manufacturers are complaining about the rising costs of key ingredients in

an industry where small players battle low margins and excess capacity.

The bread business has to consolidate Sara Lee and Wonderbread, two of the

biggest names in bread.

Both were bought out by publicly traded flour foods in 2012 and 2013,

respectively. And another big problem for bread.

It's facing increased scrutiny for some of its extra ingredients.

Things like chemical dough conditioner's, preservatives, added sugar and

GMO's. Those additives helped manufacturers produce a loaf in less time,

prolong a shelf life and keep the bread soft.

But bread is making a comeback.

Well, specifically, this preservative free artisan, tangy flavored

sourdough bread sourdough was made with just two ingredients, whereas a

loaf of Wonderbread has over 20 ingredients.

Another big difference sourdough can take up to seven days to make from

scratch versus just a few hours to make commercial bread.

There's also a price difference.

From 2015 to 2019.

sourdough bread sales have seen significant growth.

Sourdough is also growing more popular at restaurants in 2019, it was on

14.3 percent of restaurant menus, up from 11.6

percent ten years earlier. Even DIYers are getting in on the sourdough

craze. Now sending days baking bread is the cool thing to do.

Instagram is full of DIY self-taught bakers making their own sourdough.

Even coders out in Silicon Valley are blogging about the fermentation

graphs of their sourdough starters.

And perhaps most importantly, health evangelists are praising the benefits

of adding sourdough bread into your diet.

Between sourdough is almost cult like following on social media and a more

health focused consumer base looking for better food options; s ourdough

bread is more popular than ever.

According to a survey, almost nine out of 10 people know about sourdough

and another seven out of 10 have tried it.

In the U.S. alone, sourdough is a multibillion dollar market between 2014

and 2018. Sourdough's market value in America jumped from 229.7

million dollars to 2.4

billion dollars. The question now?

Is the sourdough market destined to keep rising?

Or is it just another fad destined to fade away?

Sourdough was made with just two basic ingredients flour and water.

You mix them together. Leave it at room temperature over time and feed the

same amount of flour and water for a few days.

That m ixture when exposed to the elements eventually starts to bubble and

that bubbling is actually a chemical change called fermentation.

What's happening is that microbes from the surrounding environment are

essentially colonizing the dough t hen growing and dividing.

Basically turning it into a medley of flour, water, bacteria and wild

yeast, which is a single celled fungi.

The bubbling mixture is called a sourdough starter, and you could think of

it as a living thing. All that bacteria is generating lactic acid and the

yeast is actively feeding off starches in flour.

It pumps the resulting carbon dioxide and ethanol into the dough.

The carbon dioxide expands the gluten network in the dough, while the acid

in alcohol is what gives sourdough its sour taste.

It also digests this gluten network and allows the enzymes present in the

flour to do their job, like cutting the starches into edible pieces of

sugar for the yeast.

Though sourdough, whose origin story has been contested over the years,

the first written record of sourdough dates back around 4000 B.C.

in ancient Egypt.

The first written evidence on sourdough is from the pyramids,

and there are hieroglyphs showing people making beer and bread in the same

hieroglyphs. So this is crossover fermentation.

The sourdough starter was discovered when a mixture of flour and water was

exposed to the elements over time.

The mixture began to bubble and rise, a process we now know is called

fermentation. Rather than throw out the odd smelling and expanding

mixture. The mystery cook decided a baker anyway.

The result? A large round, spongy loaf of bread that we now call

sourdough. Since ancient Egypt, this method of bread making was passed

down from civilization to civilization, from ancient Rome to ancient

Greece all the way to the American Yukon gold rush.

Using a sourdough starter was pretty much the only way of making bread for

thousands of years.

But things started to change for sourdough during the later half of the

19th century. Now, as the population kind of changed and we went towards

cities, we always had to feed a population on an industrialized scale, so

we had the creation of an industrialized bread system.

It wasn't until the mid 19th century that scientists caught on to the

microbiology behind what makes bread rise.

Once they knew about wild yeast and how it works, a race set off to figure

out how to make it available to the masses.

Brothers Charles and Maximilian Fleischmann were one of the first to bring

commercial use to the market on a large scale when they unveiled their

product to 10 million people at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in

1876.

The only problem it was perishable and would go bad after two weeks in the

fridge. It wasn't until World War II that the bread business was totally

revolutionized. As the wall came in, we readily the American

side. They contacted the Fleischmann brothers, who were the people who

originally discovered that you could turn yeast into a tablet.

And in the 1940s, the push was produced fast bread for

soldiers. The Fleischmann Company improved on its original yeast product

by creating the first ever active dry yeast.

It didn't require refrigeration and could be easily activated with warm

water. Fleischman's active dry yeast was a game changer to the commercial

bread business as well.

After the war ended, active drug use was brought to the retail market and

the mass production of bread in the US took off, which was bad news for

the slow-bake sourdough bread.

Out went the use of sourdough starters in came in what we see today, large

commercial bakeries filling grocery stores with ready made pre sliced

bread wrapped in cellophane that could last for weeks.

By 1944, 85 percent of the bread that was made in the United States came

from large commercial bakeries, according to a survey conducted at that

time. From the 1950s up through today, bread companies have continued to

add extra ingredients to its products in order to make bread faster than

ever and to prolong its shelf life.

But the same chemical additives that helped industrialize spread quickly

and cheaply brought on a laundry list of health concerns for shoppers.

Well, why not post World War II anymore, We're in a very, very different

situation.

And so this very fast plastic kind of bread,

which was really, I guess done out to the well-meaning sort of aim, is

actually causing issues across the globe with people's health, wellness,

blood sugar management, calorific management and the amount of

nutrition they get from their base food.

2000 was the year of peak grain when the average American 137.6

pounds of grain in a year, mostly in the form of breads and other baked

goods. According to the USDA, per capita consumption of flour was 146

pounds per person in 2000.

In 2018, it had fallen to 132 pounds.

It's all been downhill from there.

The timing dovetails with the rise of low fat and low carb diets in the

90s and early 2000s.

This decline has also come as more and more Americans are diagnosed with

an allergy to gluten.

Remember gluten? It's the protein that plays a key role in helping dough

to rise. The number of Americans following the gluten free diet triple

from 2013 to 2018, according to Sundale Research and gluten free products

appear to be virtually everywhere.

Nearly 30 percent consumers are now buying foods with gluten free labels,

and sales of gluten free foods reach 17 billion dollars in 2018, more than

double the amount spent in 2011.

All this may seem like a doomsday scenario for sourdough bread, but

sourdough is actually proving to be one option for bread lovers who want

to eat the real thing without facing nearly as many side effects as its

commercial bread rivals.

So why is that? sourdough is typically more nutritious than regular bread.

It's easier to digest and is a potential better option for blood sugar

control. The reason it all comes down to the active drugs versus sourdough

starter. What makes the sourdough starter so special are all the

micro-organisms derived from the fermentation process.

Commercial bread misses out on that.

It uses an active dry yeast which simulates the chemical process that

makes bread rise. However, it lacks the naturally occurring fungi and

bacteria that sourdough bread has.

Here's why that matters. Sourdough slow fermentation process makes a lot

easier for our bodies to absorb important nutrients.

All of those micro-organisms and sourdough also promote gut metabolic

health. Sourdough also doesn't lead to blood sugar spikes and crashes.

It actually slows down the speed at which glucose is released into the

bloodstream, which is a great thing for diabetics who have to watch their

insulin levels. Sourdough has another big thing going for it.

Store-bought bread has been put under intense scrutiny for the extra

ingredients manufacturers add in order to extend shelf life.

These include everything from extra gluten, fat, reducing agents,

emulsifiers enzymes and preservatives.

Some U.S. commercial breads, along with a lot of other foods found in

grocery stores, were slammed for using the same chemical ingredient found

in yoga mats. When I first discovered making sourdough bread, I realized

even the best bread I was giving my family wasn't real bread.

It had 38 ingredients in it and should just be flour, water, salt and

yeast. And I make a lot of it and we eat a lot of it.

And we're not getting fat from it and we're not getting sick from it.

And my friends that have thought they had gluten issues had no problem

with it. And it wasn't that it was gluten, it was that we were eating

chemicals and fake processed food.

Sourdough's surge in popularity isn't just linked to health conscious

consumers. It's actually developed a cult like following on social media

and has drawn attention from a new wave of DIY bakers.

In 2019, one of the founders of Microsoft's Xbox, Seamus Blackley,

resurrected a sourdough starter dating back over 4000 years to ancient

Egypt. Blackley used dormant yeast and bacteria from ancient Egyptian

pots. He mixed those samples with the sourdough starter he made, creating

this sourdough loaf with its origins dating back to ancient Egypt.

Blackley isn't alone in his affinity for delving into the science behind

sourdough. Silicon Valley coders are charting out their fermentation of

their starter cultures to try to understand the inner workings of all of

its microbes. Since sourdough starters all contain living microorganisms,

it requires constant attention, like all living things.

If a startup is probably taking care of it can last for years, decades and

sometimes generations.

N one of us has something that is old, you know, if you have something

that's a hundred years old, it's almost certainly an heirloom that was

given to you. It's a set of earrings that came from your great grandmother

or some vase that came from the old country but it's not something alive .

Imagine having something alive that's a hundred years old.

So the stories that come with starters, I think are valuable.

I think part of recapturing of culture.

Maintaining your own sourdough starter isn't an easy business.

It requires constant feeding to ensure that the same starter can be used

over and over again. Feeding a starter looks like this.

It's just simply adding a little bit of flour and water to the mixture.

And over time, it becomes like taking care of a new family pet.

There's a whole schedule.

It's like a pet. It's like, you know, you don't just get a goldfish and

then leave town for three months.

It's like you need to feed this thing.

Like this is this is mine right here.

And this is one of two.

And when I take off, I'm you know, I'm a comedian.

When I'm on the road, I'm constantly thinking, like, who's going to feed

it? That's where unique sourdough business like Matias Jakobsen's comes

into play. Jakobsen has been baking sourdough for nearly eight years, and

for five years Jakobsen has been operating The Sourdough Inn in Brooklyn.

He takes care of people starters while they're on vacation, feeding them