It’s Covid-19. Everyone is stuck at home, masks are always on, boredom peaks, people are desperate for an activity. The obvious answer: sourdough. 

Sourdough took over the internet during quarantine, and people began using it to everything from pretzels to pizza to pancakes. While this practice was more popular during the years of Covid, the internet is beginning to see a resurgence in the sourdough craze, with even more unique flavor combinations and recipes. NVD teacher Aidan Conboy started using sourdough during the Covid years. 

“My sister started making sourdough in 2020 so she brought me a sourdough starter in 2022, and I started in 2022,” Conboy said. 

NVD teacher Alexis Goebel started even earlier “in March of 2020 along with all [her] baking and pastry students.” 

Quarantine had people resorting to sourdough because it was easy to make. The starter lasts as long as you take care of it, and people needed something to occupy themselves with while they were stuck at home. 

“One of the reasons I was personally doing it was that packaged yeast (what you typically use to bake bread) was impossible to find,” Goebel said. “Nobody wanted to go to the grocery store for fear of getting sick, but everyone wanted bread . . . thus the sourdough revolution began.” 

Either for necessity or fun, sourdough was an outlet for culinary students, and was a “fun project to do with them during a really stressful time,” Goebel said.

“I just love the taste of it,” sophomore Samantha Shaw said. “I think both the taste and baking process is so unique.” 

This has been a common opinion for many sourdough users since its original fame. Since sourdough has been around for some time, the sense that you always need to make bread with it has been instilled into many people, but bread isn’t the only option. 

“You can make so many different things with it, more than just bread,” Conboy said. “It’s very versatile and can go into so many different things.” 

Sourdough is often a preferred alternative to bread for its versatility. Instead of fast acting yeast used in most breads, sourdough uses a natural starter with long fermentation, creating the chewy texture and tangy flavor. The texture also allows for more diverse things to be made. 

“There’s cake, cookies, bread, pizza dough, cornbread, a habanero loaf [among many others]” Conboy said. 

Conboy further expressed his enthusiasm by explaining that every Friday is an opportunity to make his favorite sourdough based treat: pizza dough. 

“Friday night is always pizza night, it’s like my superbowl,” Conboy said.  

Again, sourdough’s longer fermentation process makes it so that the tangier flavor and chewier texture come through. The longer process to break down gluten simultaneously makes it easier on the stomach, and is often preferred to regular bread. Goebel added that sometimes the classics are unbeatable with her favorite sourdough treats. 

“I love a good boule and had great success with the ‘discard’ making crackers,” Goebel said. 

Shaw agreed with Goebel, and prefers to just use the sourdough to make a regular loaf. 

“I’m trying to perfect my sourdough loaves before I start to make other things, but I keep seeing recipes for other things online,” Shaw said. “I saw a recipe with sourdough cinnamon buns, they looked so good.” 

This brings up sourdough’s notorious issue, which is being hard to work with. Despite its great presentation, when first dealing with it, there are some obvious learning curves that are elaborated upon. 

It is difficult specifically in a culinary classroom because “time and temperature of the room are ‘ingredients’ and our rotating schedule makes sourdough in school almost impossible,” Goebel said. 

Sourdough might have to be limited to an at home activity, as Goebel has not yet “figured out how to do it in class.” At home though, Conboy found that taking care of the actual sourdough starter proved to be challenging, especially at first. 

“You have to feed it flour and water or it dies, and learn the timing of folding and prepping so you don’t get a dense circle of raw dough,” Conboy said. “You have to watch it like it’s a baby.”

One missed feeding wouldn’t reset progress on the sourdough starter, but the overall recommendation is to feed it everyday. Not feeding it could cause it to rise less, and develop something called a “hooch,” which is a dark liquid on top that one could simply discard. 

Other people don’t experience exact “failures,” but sometimes the inconsistency of sourdough results in lacking features. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever actually failed to make a sourdough loaf, I just think sometimes they don’t taste sour enough for some reason,” Shaw said. “I’ve seen everyone on the internet make their sourdough in a unique way, you might see someone make a perfect loaf but then you try the same process and yours doesn’t look as perfect.”  

Given how the initial spread of the Covid sourdough craze was through the internet, it tracks that the internet continues to influence sourdough users today. 

“[For me, it’s] Instagram reels,” Conboy said. “When I’m scrolling through and someone’s making a recipe, I’ll immediately save and go try it.” 

Other platforms such as Reddit, Tiktok and Youtube are used to get inspiration for new flavors, things to make, or help with the learning curve. 

“[Social media] demystified a lot and I think I would have struggled without the Reddit sourdough forum,” Goebel said. 

Recent discoveries of sourdough have also been made through social media platforms. Shaw specifically, saw her initial discovery of sourdough come out of its re-emergence on social media in February of this year. 

“I first learned about sourdough from Tik Tok, I saw so many creators making it and it just looked so good, eventually I decided that I would make it myself,” Shaw said. “Sourdough has brought people together, seen by the formation of a community over social media where everyone gets to talk about their own experiences and recipes.” 

Social media provides opportunities for people to give advice and communicate about their sourdough fails and triumphs.The continued sharing of these different flavors and sourdough techniques has influenced people worldwide to join the craze and start using sourdough as an outlet for their creativity, or just a fun hobby to build into traditions too. Recently, the internet has seen a rise in flavor combinations in sourdough. There has been confetti, s’mores, scallion pancake, and even pickle. 

“I just love baking sourdough, it’s the one thing I can do with cooking. I’m a very bad cook but I could bake a good sourdough,” Shaw said.