In between seasons of The Bachelor and Bachelorette, the crew at the Long Beach office love watching The Great British Bake Off in the lunchroom. Everyone knows that no one makes a better pork pie than Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith’s pate choux swans are simply breathtaking. Like everything else at Orion, a committee was needed to nurture our aspiring home bakers and thus was born the Orion Bread Club. At Orion, we like to keep things simple and baking bread is no exception. Water, flour, salt, and some time (no tears, never tears) are the only ingredients you need to make bakery-quality bread in the home kitchen. The first step for naturally levained bread, or bread made without store bought yeast, is to simply mix flour and water and get your sourdough starter started already. Over time, the starter becomes heavily populated by lactobacillus, a genus of Gram-positive, facultative anaerobic or microaerophilic, rod-shaped, non-spore-forming bacteria (DUUUHHH!). Labtobacilli kills any bad bacteria or mold that would try to sabotage the wild yeast you’re cultivating and makes a preferential environment for your yeast to flourish and reproduce. The absence of the ever-popular active dry yeast means that while your bread might take 24 hours to finish instead of 2, the wild microbes you have cultured now have time to break down proteins that help your body in digesting the bread. And for the carboholics out there, that simply means an increase in consumption as measured in loafs per hour per day (or l/h/d for the professionals).
The avid home bakers at Orion have grown so attached to their starters that they see them as pets and science projects. Fittingly, our starters have been (punningly) named Dough-loris, Dough-Fairy, Dough-biwan Kenobi, and Bread Pitt. And don’t limit yourself to just using it in bread! Starter provides not only health benefits, but also a depth of flavor to your baking projects. Our favorite recipes include adding a couple scoops into your homemade waffles, crepes, cornbread, or even your homebrew beer! But don’t just trust the autobot that wrote this blog, hear directly from some of the fearless members of the Bread Club as to the benefits of club life:
- O’hara, a senior staff geologist, uses scoring and different flour combinations in her loafs as another way to express her creativity.
- David, a staff geologist, says what interests him most is “the fascination of taking care of millions of tiny organisms in a two-cup jar. It’s the lowest maintenance pet you can own!”
- Mia, a project manager, loves baking because “the smell of fresh-baked bread can easily pull teenagers away from their phones.”
Check out the photos of the Bread Club’s creations and be jealous!
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- With just 5 tries, you too can have a loaf this pretty!
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- Dumbo called and wants his ears back.
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- If you stare long enough you will see the Empire State Building.
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- Dough bubbles.
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- Slightly burnt, but substantially delicious!
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- Who needs Powerade when you have sourdough beer?
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- Hey cool, crepes with a sourdough twist!
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- Don’t be a square, try some sourdough waffles!
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- Paul Hollywood is not impressed!
