When you open your TikTok “For You” page, it might feel like you’ve entered a time warp back to 2020, when, during the most uncertain days of the pandemic, many folks began baking their own naturally leavened bread as a sort of emotional survival mechanism. Today, although the threat of COVID-19 feels less immediate for many of us and there are no yeast or flour shortages, sourdough is once again having a moment in the sun.
I first noticed this phenomenon on social media a couple of months ago, when my (already food-dominated) FYP became littered with videos of people pulling intricately scored loaves out of ripping hot ovens and showing off their “crumb shots.” Some home bakers, like creator Zoe Barrie, have painstakingly kept their starters alive ever since 2020, and are now fully devoted to the sourdough lifestyle.
But for others, it’s a flex, one that signifies you’ve got the time and ability to spend upwards of two days on a single loaf of bread. It’s a trend that reflects broader aspects of our culture, from economic uncertainty to the scourge of “tradwifery,” a trend in which young women pursue a more “traditional” (read: conservative) lifestyle. Food prices are up, and as such, it’s not surprising that people are looking to find ways to cut costs at the grocery store. Many estimates place the cost of a homemade sourdough loaf at less than $2, which is a massive difference from the $10 (or more!) that I might expect to pay at the farmer’s market. Professional bakers certainly deserve to be paid for their work, but my own labor really isn’t worth much when I would otherwise just be watching another rerun of the Real Housewives of New York.
For many folks, the renewed interest in sourdough is health-related. Some are going even further than baking their own bread: They’re milling their own flour from whole wheat berries, too. Freshly milled flours are not bleached or stripped of essential nutrients during processing, which is appealing to folks who are trying to get more fiber and vitamins into their diet. There also seems to be some evidence that sourdough is easier to digest than typical white bread, and the yeasts and bacteria that help the bread rise are also beneficial for the gut, feeding into the current fixation with gut health. The fact that a giant bag of wheat berries is less expensive than wheat flour doesn’t hurt, either.
It didn’t take long for me to get sucked into the hypnotic videos of people stirring their bubbling starters or shaping jiggly rounds of dough. I didn’t even try to bake sourdough in 2020 — I was having a hard enough time keeping myself alive, much less some jar of flour and yeast on my counter. But the slow, methodical process of mixing, shaping, and obsessively staring at my starter, wondering if it’s healthy enough, now feels like a welcome escape from doomscrolling on my phone. Considering that basically everything going on in the world right now is terrible, it’s pretty obvious why people are looking to slow hobbies that pry our eyes away from our screens.
I started by ordering a small bag of dehydrated starter, lovingly nurtured for more than 60 years by a now-elderly woman in San Francisco, for $4 on Etsy. For the past month or so, I have spent an inordinate time thinking about, and baking, sourdough bread. And fortunately, TikTok has no shortage of content to further my current obsession. I have bought (and spilled) so much flour, scrubbed countless crusty jars, and baked more than my fair share of failed loaves. I’ve saved a ridiculous number of recipes for crackers and cookies and crepes that (mostly) use up the never-ending supply of sourdough discard that is always in my kitchen. I have become, regrettably, a Bread Bro.
And yet, my brain feels calmer than it has in months. There’s an incredibly meditative appeal to the sourdough process. Once you’ve done the math — my least favorite part — and stirred together a rough dough, everything else just flows. I have come to enjoy the repetitive motion of kneading, a task I avoided almost altogether when I was only baking with commercial yeasts. I am, finally, leaving the dough alone during the fermentation process instead of fretting endlessly about its rise, and my bread is much better for it. Patience, it turns out, is a virtue.
Because you’re dealing with variable factors like humidity and the arbitrary whims of the baking gods, sourdough is not a process that will bend to your will. Even control freaks will be humbled by sourdough’s unpredictability, and that’s a good thing. You can do everything “right,” and your loaf might still collapse into a dense, misshapen mess in the oven. But even if your bread is ugly and a little burned on the bottom, it will probably still taste pretty damn good. Realizing that even if you “fail,” you have still succeeded, is a beautiful thing.
Although TikTok kicked off my current hyper-fixation, I find myself staring at my phone less. And, when I do, I’m often looking at bread stuff, not refreshing my email for the 4,246th time or polluting my brain with whatever’s happening on Twitter. Instead, I’m staring into a mixing bowl, looking closely at the intricate network of bubbles that will eventually create a tender, bouncy crumb in my loaves. I find myself spending a lot of time sniffing my starter jars, searching for smells that indicate whether the little dudes who keep them going are happy (sweet, yeasty, banana-y) or hungry (nostril-searing vinegar, acetone). This feels like an improvement. Making bread might not make me a better person, but it is, at least for now, making me a less-stressed-out person.
It is entirely possible that, six months from now, I will have abandoned my #sourdoughjourney and moved on to some other hobby. I could be making rugs shaped like fruit or trying my hand at pottery this time next year, who knows. But even if I don’t end up cranking out three loaves a week forever, I’ll always know that I can stir together a little flour and water, wait a few days, and end up with delicious bread. This knowledge seems like it will be especially handy in the hypothetical zombie apocalypse — assuming that I can get access to a steady supply of unbleached flour and filtered water.
Natalie Nelson is an illustrator, picture book maker, and collage artist based in Atlanta, Georgia.
