There is a place called the Sourdough Institute. Who knew? I didn’t. It’s in Belgium, which for some reason seems apropos. It had its start in 2008 as the Center for Bread Flavours, and it includes the Sourdough Library, which opened in 2013 and is home to nearly 140 different sourdough samples of various ages and origins. The whole business is a component of a not-for-profit initiative on the part of a global company called Puratos to preserve bread heritage. Puratos, founded in 1919, offers food ingredients and services—with a focus on the baking, patisserie, and chocolate sectors—to companies in over 100 countries

Again, who knew?

Prior to the ready availability of commercial yeast in the latter part of the nineteenth century (thank you, Charles Fleischmann), if you wanted leavened bread you had to rely on the wild yeast and bacteria floating about in your kitchen, a chemical agent like baking soda or baking powder, brewers yeast, or an existing batch of starter.

Where might that come from?

In a kitchen in a house on New Road, just outside of Wellsboro, on a chunk of land called Mama Goose Homestead, Rachel Nance (Preble) and her business partner, Clay Webster, use a sourdough starter called Black Death to make a few hundred loaves of bread each week. Rachel explains she got B.D. through a “sourdough connoisseur who searches the world for rare, historic cultures.” According to sourdough lore, and there is plenty on various social media sites, along with numerous opportunities to purchase all kinds of starters, Black Death originated in Bavaria some 300 to 400 years ago, around the time of the actual Black Death, and has purportedly been fed and cared for by one family for lo these many centuries.

Further back, there is evidence of bread baking in Babylon from around 4000 BC. Pliny the Elder wrote about Roman bread being leavened with sourdough—this was about 70 AD. It’s a good thing he didn’t wait, because Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. Sometime a couple thousand years later, someone salvaged a carbonized loaf of bread from what was one of the destroyed cities, Herculaneum. The loaf was analyzed and determined to be made with sourdough.

The Egyptians painted scenes of bread making on the walls of their tombs. In 2019, Seamus Blackley, the man credited with inventing the Xbox, partnered with a couple of like-minded bread lovers to make sourdough bread using dormant yeast extracted from an Egyptian bread-baking pot (check it out at atlasobscura.com/articles/what-bread-did-ancient-egyptians-eat). That starter could be 5,000 years old.

Determining a sourdough starter’s age is not an exact science, however. As Dr. Karl De Smedt, curator of the Sourdough Library (sourdoughinstitute.com), points out, “you can’t carbon date sourdough starter.” It’s probably enough to just say it’s old. Black Death has, as one online site notes, “historic European lineage.” Who wouldn’t want to eat bread with that kind of pedigree?

Rachel’s been successfully minding her own batch of Black Death for about five years. “I had tended to a starter my brother had, but I killed it,” she confesses.

The bread making was trial and error for a time, she continues, until she discovered the autolyse process.

“That cracked the code for me,” she says. Autolyse is part of something called long fermentation, and is basically just mixing the flour, water, and starter first, letting it sit for thirty minutes, then adding the salt, and then allowing it to rest instead of hurrying it along.

“All of our bread is long-fermented, which means it’s given time to develop slowly,” Rachel says. “That process improves flavor, texture, and digestibility…it’s how bread was traditionally made, and it makes a real difference. Long fermentation helps break down gluten and phytic acid, which is why many people find traditional sourdough easier to digest than commercial bread.”

From start to end it’s about a two-day process. Rachel and Clay take about a quarter of a cup of starter, add water and flour (they buy King Arthur brand flour in fifty-pound bags), and let it sit for about twelve hours. It will double in volume.

“Then we take almost all of it out and mix it in a five-gallon bucket with more flour and water, and it sits another twelve hours,” she says. That mixture then goes into another larger container with more flour and water, and they mix, and mix, and mix some more. It’s a great arm workout, both agree. Then they add the salt, mix that in, and start stretching and folding the dough. That builds up the gluten structure, Rachel notes. Finally it goes into loaf pans, then into the fridge for twelve hours to cold proof (if you were making bread with commercial yeast, you’d do the proofing at room temperature or in a warm spot).

“That enhances the flavor and breaks down the gluten,” Rachel says.

At long last, it’s time for the oven. Clay, who for this round of baking is the one schlepping the trays of loaves up a set of steep steps from where they’ve been proofing downstairs (that’s also a pretty good workout, they both agree), sets the pans on the counter top and explains the double loaf pan method they’re using. Each loaf pan gets a foil pan topper for about half of its baking time. That captures the steam, he says, and “gets more spring” in each loaf.

The aroma of baking bread is intoxicating. The loaves coming out of the oven are beautiful—artfully scored, golden brown, oozing history, love, and place. Because sourdough starter is unique to where it lives, “the return of sourdough brings back ‘terroir’ to bread,” as Dr. De Smedt says.

Mama Goose Homestead is a work in progress—like sourdough, it calls for tending and nurturing, it relies on community collaborations and connections, and it’s connected to the land.

“Clay runs Lo-Fi Farms [it’s just over the hill, off Route 287 on the way to Morris], and as we were both building small, values-driven businesses, he stepped in to help keep Mama Goose moving—baking, building systems, and supporting the vision,” Rachel says. “That’s really what this has become: a community-held project. The personal chapters behind Mama Goose are layered, but the heart of the story is really about resilience, home, and choosing to build something enduring for my children and my community.”

Find Mama Goose Homestead’s products in the Wellsboro area at stores and restaurants including The Happy Raven, Pag-Omar Farm Market, Brown’s Produce, The Roost, Hume’s Blooms, and online through Delivered Fresh, a local delivery service for local food.

Discover more at mamagoosehomestead.com, and find their bread and other products in the Wellsboro area at the farmstand at the bottom of the driveway, at stores and restaurants including The Happy Raven, Pag-Omar Farm Market, Brown’s Produce, The Roost, Hume’s Blooms, and online through Delivered Fresh, a local delivery service for local food.