Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
It's Time to Talk Sourdough, featuring Amber Eisler
Mon, 12 May 2025
It’s finally time. Today, we’re discussing a topic that produces a lot of confusion, passion, and toast: sourdough. King Arthur’s very own Director of Baking Education Amber Eisler is here to share her considerable expertise. Amber baked in our bakery for five years and has taught at the Baking School for over 15 years, so needless to say, she knows her stuff. First, she and David chat about some of the biggest unexpected pain points bakers run into while making sourdough and how to solve them. Then, Amber sticks around to join Jessica and David for Ask the Bakers, answering your burning sourdough questions. We also have a special treat, a dispatch from our audience sharing the names of their sourdough starters. And, as always, Jessica and David finish up with a spicy (or in this case, sour) Jess-opinion and the recipes they’re baking this week. More on Amber’s Sourdough for Beginners On-Demand Class and the Baking School Visit our Sourdough Savvy shop page for our favorite tools and ingredients Learn more about the Big Book of Bread Amber’s Sourdough Sandwich Bread recipe Super Fudgy Sourdough Brownies recipe What David’s baking this week: English Digestive Biscuits recipe Record your question for our Ask the Bakers segment here!
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and guest of this sourdough podcast episode?
From King Arthur Baking Company, this is Things Bakers Know. I'm David Tamarkin, King Arthur's editorial director.
And I'm Jessica Badalana, staff editor at King Arthur Baking. And today we're talking about a topic that elicits a lot of passion and curiosity, as well as frustration, hope, and toast. We're talking about sourdough, specifically the state of sourdough right now.
Before we get anywhere, I think we need to establish what our starters names are, Jessica. So can you please tell us what you've named your sourdough starter?
Last October, I buckled my sourdough starter into the car and I brought it to our studio in New Hampshire because we were photographing the big book of bread and we wanted to show starter at different stages. So we wanted to show one that was tragically neglected and I volunteered to let mine be the tragically underfed. So I just ignored it for months leading up to this shoot.
And then at the end of the shoot, my colleague, Melanie Wanders, who was the co-author of the book, was like, nope, start over. So she gave me some of her starter. And there's a piece of masking tape on it. And it's called Jessica's Jazzy Starter 2.0. But that's, yeah, Jessica's Jazzy Starter.
Well, what was the name of the starter that you buckled in? It wasn't named. Oh, you just didn't name it. I know.
I just never named it. I don't name cars. I don't name sourdough starters.
It's the name of your dog.
Well, it's interesting that you say that because my childhood cat growing up was named White Cat. And it was the daughter of another cat that we'd had whose name was? Black Cat.
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Chapter 2: What are the origins and popularity trends of sourdough baking?
I love that. And I think that is why this topic today, I mean, it's such a huge topic, right? Like we're just going to scratch the surface because there are so many different, you know, aspects to sourdough baking. But I think one thing we know is that it's still very popular. Extremely popular and for good reason.
Though it's been around for thousands of years, I feel like it really took the pandemic for sourdough to enter mainstream culture in the way that it did. I think that was a period of time when every person you knew, and maybe a lot of our listeners too, started a sourdough culture at home and started baking sourdough bread. It was like, you know, gold rush, but for sourdough.
And I had been saying sort of derisively that I didn't have a sourdough starter during the pandemic. I never baked sourdough bread. And then recently I found a photo that I posted to Instagram saying, That was of a melted container of sourdough starter. This was like April of 2020. And in fact, I did have a sourdough starter and I put it in my oven to keep it warm or coddle it.
I turned my oven on and I melted the plastic quart container that it was in. But I had blocked out the memory of ever having a sourdough starter during the pandemic, ever baking bread with it.
Exactly.
I blacked it out.
It was buried trauma. But others fared a lot better than I did. And you see it now because people are still baking tons of sourdough bread at home.
Yeah, it was not a blip. It's kept on going. Last spring, in fact, we found ourselves in what we were calling internally here at King Arthur, the second sourdough boom, because we looked at Google Trends on our own site traffic that the interest in sourdough was at the same level as the pandemic.
So it really seems like year after year, sourdough is only growing and it's becoming more and more mainstream when it used to be something niche.
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