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The article implies that sourdough is relatively new.

Wasn't sourdough the only way to make bread for most of human history?

Even in the Bible, "leaven" was dough that was already undergoing fermentation, that they would bury in new dough. (Luke 13:21, Galatians 5:9)

That's not my read. Just that sourdough was not typical of American baking at the time (mid-19th century):

In 1849, when gold miners began arriving in San Francisco, most Americans didn’t bake or eat sourdough bread. American bakers typically leavened their bread with “barm” (a yeast derived from beer brewing) or one of several relatively new commercial yeast products.

From TFA.

Whether or not sourdough was prevalent or not relative to barm (often a synonym for sourdough) isn't clear.

Google's Ngram Viewer is ... interesting if not especially clear. "Barm" is the leading term from the 1600s through the early 19th century, where "sourdough" becomes the dominant term around 1920:

<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=barm%2Csourdou...>

(I'm not confident that "barm" refers strictly to leaven, and sampling some of the 17th century results shows ... numerous Dutch and German texts....)

Correct.

Sourdough is wild yeast (usually Saccharomyces exiguous) and lactobacillaceae. Today's commercial yeast is usually Saccharomyces cerevisiae (instant, active dry, .

The leaven you talking about is called "mother dough", basically a chunk of dough from previous baking.

I find the article wanting.

To make sourdough starter one needs water, flour, and time. That is it.

It's how you'd have started things but then you selectively grow less sour yeast strains until you have what you want for bread/beer.
regular yeast dough also works that way, it doesn't need to be "sour" dough for the yeast culture to munch on the new dough food, so that evidence alone is not definitive.
The sour note comes from the lactobacillaceae and develops with a long (usually cold-retarded) ferments, not the yeast itself.

A short warm ferment provides very little of the signature sour taste. A prolonged (2--3 day) cold ferment can be quite sharp.

And a pre-ferment or poolish can develop a more sour note using baker's yeast.

It's ... not terribly surprising that field-baked bread by nonprofessional bakers, mostly miners, operating with limited supplies and highly variable conditions would be of uneven quality.

The fact that professional European bakers arrived at the same time, with the still-extant Boudin baker being founded in San Francisco in 1849, and serving large numbers of customers, seems far more relevant to both the reputation and tradition.

Sourdough itself and the starter that sustains it is remarkably robust stuff, as both history and my own experimentation has demonstrated. The California gold rush isn't the only one to have a sourdough tradition, with the Klondike Gold Rush (Alaska) of 1896--1899 having a similar ... culture. Memorialised in the poetry collection Songs of a Sourdough by Robert W. Service (1907) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_a_Sourdough>.

A lot of comments are calling sourdough gross - strange. is it a west coast thing to think it’s totally normal like Americans vs Europeans on the topic of peanut butter or are the sourdough dislikers just far more excited to comment:
I grew up on the east coast; sourdough is normal and tasty to me. I doubt there is any real coastal trend. San Francisco is known for sourdough bread, but it wasn't invented and spread from there.
It's very hard to find in Massachusetts grocery stores. I go out of my way to Trader Joe's to get it. When I lived in California every grocery store had piles of it.

The "Sourdough" that my normal grocery store sells isn't sourdough at all. It's shaped like Wonderbread, has the same texture as Wonderbread, and a slightly different flavor.

I got into Sourdough because it had the least amount of sugar compared to all of the other breads. When I tasted it for the first time, I was hooked.

It's definitely eaten east of the Mississippi, so I don't think it's that.
I personally like sourdough a lot but still only order it when at a diner or brunch.
Once? I find this article to be an accurate description of sourdough breads (SF or otherwise) I have eaten; I don't like the taste of them at all.
That can be said of literally any food. For instance, I hate chocolate. And upon learning that, people will sometimes tell me, "oh, you must be thinking of /American/ chocolate. You'll like /real/ chocolate". Nope. I've humored enough people and sampled various combinations of cacao, milk, dark, Belgian, Swiss, and so on. I don't like chocolate.
Have you tried white chocolate? It's not really chocolate and it doesn't taste similar, but it might quiet the chocolate elitist crowd.
>And upon learning that, people will sometimes tell me, "oh, you must be thinking of

Nope, I think you must be an alien sent here to study us, but didn't quite get everything about being human right. Not liking chocolate is a shibboleth on if you can be trusted. You clearly cannot. ;-)

Came here to say that, it's way too sour. Sourdough is okayish when done well but I prefer yeast 100% of the time.
Sourdough is made with yeast
It may be an acquired taste especially stronger versions. But it's most of what I eat and what I usually make at home.
I feel like the most Bay Area bread is Dutch Crunch. So ubiquitous here and very delicious.
This is one of my most missed foods after moving away from the Bay Area.

Going to the Safeway deli and getting a Dutch crunch sandwich...I'm hungry now.

In the UK we have "Tiger Bread", which is my favourite type of bread. I wonder how that differs to Dutch Crunch.
It's the same thing. We call it Dutch Crunch because it came from the Netherlands.

Oddly the rest of the US has sourdough but none of them have ever heard of Dutch Crunch. Which is just as well because it really cuts up your mouth.

I think it's the same
It's a great way to exfoliate the roof of your mouth.
Dutch Crunch is also popular in the Seattle area.
Most sourdough is gross. It's very rare that I prefer it over a nice loaf of simple white or whole wheat bread. One advantage it has, is its unique taste. It reminds me of Clam Chowder and nice seafood restaurants. However, if they offered a simple baguette instead I would be perfectly happy.
Baguette is traditionally a sourdough. Specifically, a liquid dough levain.

This whole article seems strange because "sour-" the root doesn't exactly mean "sour" the taste. It's from "sauer" which implied any aerobic ferment or oxidation, since the old name of oxygen (and still in German) is sauerstoff.

Yes, ferments often produce telltale organic acids, but the takeaway is that sourdough isn't called sour because of the flavor, but because it implies that it's derived from an existing culture and not a fresh ferment, like Jack Daniel's Tennessee "sour mash" whiskey, which notably does not taste "sour".

Baguette is traditionally made from yeast rather than a sourdough. Typically what makes a sourdough isn't the yeast component, but the bacterial component. Lacto-Fermentation in general is dependent on the bacterial component to produce lactic acids making that distinct sour milk flavor. If you let a dough overproof you will get a sour taste because lacto-fermenting bacteria are freaking everywhere and will take over your dough. Sour mash whiskey doesn't taste sour because it is distilled.

Also, beware. There are lies, damn lies, and etymology. Sauer literally translates from German to English as sour. This is because their sauer-kraut, sauer-braten, and kefirs are all lacto-ferments. In fact, a lot of these recipes don't even use existing cultures and simply inoculate them from the air.

I had a lot of bad experiences with milk as a kid, especially a bout of the flu where I made the mistake of drinking milk while sick. So anything lacto-fermented is kind of nasty to me.

> This whole article seems strange because "sour-" the root doesn't exactly mean "sour" the taste. It's from "sauer" which implied any aerobic ferment or oxidation, since the old name of oxygen (and still in German) is sauerstoff.

I would have guessed that sourstuff was named after "sour" the taste, rather than the taste being named after the element. For one thing, people were aware of the flavor many thousands of years before they had any concept of the element.

If you over-proof dough then it could be sour. But that is considered to be an error.
As a German (Frankonian to be precise which even for Germany has an especially rich culture of bread) I find what Americans call "bread" quite gross. Most tastes are acquired and the low quality and culinary culture in regards to bread always astounds me when traveling anywhere outside Germany except Italy (they know how to make good white bread like Ciabatta) and maybe Indian naan and similar Asian variations, though that's something completely different to Western bread.
The USA is kind of huge. It has hundreds of enclaves and micro-cultures that can make people a 100 miles away from each other, almost seem like they are from a different country. What Americans consider "Bread" is usually such a wide range of items that it makes my head spin. Most of it isn't even really bread in the classic sense. However, in some areas of the USA, you can get loaves of the richest, most amazing breads imaginable from any country or culture in the world.

However, Americans usually don't buy their bread if they are serious about it because all the small town bakeries are out of business. They instead make it themselves.

It's definitely a unique flavor. My wife makes some that have these darker wet pockets of 'extra sour' that I love. Kid finds it absolutely gross, and I can see why completely. Just like Vegemite, and anchovies. I love them, but admit the flavor is...odd.
This makes sense - in my Slavic language, what English language typically calls bread, is not really bread but it is closer to baguette then to the bread. We consider bread something like sourdough or equivalent style made with yeast. Typically from rye (if you are closer to Germany), mix or just wheat (if you are closer to Hungary/south).
Sourdough is interesting because it is a yeast plus a lactobacillus to make the lactic acid. Lots of things are cured with lacto fermentation including hot sauce and half sour (not vinegar cured) pickles.

I love making my own fermented hot sauce but as an east coaster i can’t really stand sourdough.

> as an east coaster i can’t really stand sourdough

Lol what does which coast you live on have to do with how you appreciate sourdough or not?

I was an east coaster and I could not stand the lack of sourdough.
I appear to be distinctly in the minority, but sourdough is the usual bread I buy and eat, even though Colombo got swallowed up into Bimbo Bakery along with everything else. (My wife's "Rustik" bread? Also Bimbo.)
Bimbo even bought San Luis Sourdough (made down in San Luis Obispo), which used to be excellent. 'Used to be' being the key phrase.

Luckily, someone who had worked there started Brian's Own, which is very good.

> I appear to be distinctly in the minority, but sourdough is the usual bread I buy and eat

where do you live? on the US west coast it can be difficult to not buy sourdough, it's usually all they have.

source: I don't want to buy sourdough

I remember being taught a very different folk theory of sourdough in CA as a child in the early 1980s. I wasn't told about the Gold Rush era specifically. But, we did learn about sourdough starters being used by the pioneers as a portable method to take breadmaking out on the trail.

What I was taught is that it was due to the Mediterranean climate meaning that southern French and Italian immigrants easily replicated their native baking cultures here. Much like the CA wine industry that blew up later.

I confess I feel that most of the love of sourdough is a propaganda thing. I do like it now, but a good french loaf is still better.
In the SF Bay Area, "French bread" and "sourdough" are near synonyms, or at least were prior to the reasonably recent culinary bloom (1990s / aughts). Though of course there are sweet French loaves and baguettes, and non-baguette sourdoughs.

General / wider availability of true sour loaves outside California was exceedingly rare as of the 1980s, and I'd tend to believe well into the early aughts.

2020 et seq blew the lid off the Dutch oven, so to speak, though Tartine Bakery and others were cultivating the field / getting ... started ... before. Tartine itself was founded in 2002, according to Wikipedia.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartine>

Google's Ngram Viewer shows a doubling of occurrences of "sourdough bread" in print from 2007--2019, roughly, with a long slow climb from ~1960 and a sharp inflection in 2007. That ... roughly ... matches my own recollection.

<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sourdough+brea...>

I am from the bay area so maybe I acquired the taste early, but I love a good strong sourdough personally. I think a big part of what people enjoy eating is culturally inherited. If you've been told all your life that good bread should be sweet, you're likely to regard a different less sweet loaf with suspicion or derision. Certain cultures relish in eat things that may seem pungent or unlikable to outsiders. I didn't initially enjoy kimchi, but after some time having it around here and there I've come to love the unique intense flavor.
The standard for bread is so low in the United States, anything with taste is amazing!
I find slow overnight fermentation with industrial yeast can be pretty decent when you don’t have the time to keep a starter going and just want to bake some bread once in awhile. Big fan of no knead method.
> Miners frequently experimented with their dough to try to reduce its sourness.

This works by increasing the ratio of lactic acid to acidic acid. The less acidic acid the less sour the bread. This can be achieved with more water (firmer preferments are more sour) and higher temperatures.