HARVEST IT: SOURDOUGH STARTER HARVEST IT

Get a Rise Out of Sourdough
The yeasty way to a truly good loaf. BY ERIC SMILLIE

My heart sank as I stared at the dark, deflated crust, hardly the loaf I had hoped to bake using wild yeast from a home-fermented starter. I needed help. I found clarity in Laura McNall, a baker for 22 years with the Cheese Board Collective, a worker-owned cheese shop and bakery in Berkeley, Calif., that uses more than a dozen 14-pound buckets of sourdough starter every day. “When you’re dealing with fermentation,” consoles McNall, “it’s alive and it’s got a life of its own … Sometimes it doesn’t work out.” Eventually, however, it did. Now my only problem is keeping my tangy sourdough loaves out of the hands of my ravenous roommates.