David Tamarkin
speaker
1,765 appearances
15 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 4d ago
David Tamarkin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Nice.
From King Arthur Baking Company, this is Things Bakers Know. I'm David Tamarkin, King Arthur's editorial director.
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?
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.
It's the name of your dog.
So what's the name of your sourdough starter? Now that I think about it, I have no less than four starters in my fridge right now, all of varying ages. I've only named one of them and I could have sort of The name applies to all of them.
And all of my starters are named choices because I wanted to remind myself that when I was frustrated or when I was annoyed that I had to feed it in the middle of the night before going to bed or when a bread didn't come out the way I wanted it to, that this was my choice. I made it. No one to blame but me and my choices. So that's why.
I blacked it out.
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.
I think there's a lot more ahead of us. I think when people start their sourdough journey, they really have one bread in mind. They have a crusty bull or batard that has a nice open crumb to probably a higher hydration bread. I think for a long time, when we think of sourdough bread, we have that loaf in mind.
It's really something that I think tartine bread, which you worked on one of those books, right? I think you co-wrote one of the tartine bread books.
I mean, just the fact that there were three Tartine bread books, I mean, speaks to the power of that bread in particular and the desire for people to make it. And that's why I say sourdough has so much more to go because there's so much more to sourdough than just that loaf. And that's a great loaf. But the other day, my husband made a sourdough sandwich bread, I think from the big book of bread.
It's so delicious. I mean, it almost tastes like brioche. I mean, it's so tender. It's the exact opposite of that crusty loaf. It's soft. The crumb is even. You can actually put something on it without it falling through. And it's delicious. And I think more and more people are going to understand that sourdough has tons of uses and can make all sorts of breads.
And it can have tons of uses outside of bread. Our test kitchen just put out a great sourdough brownie and the sourdough has a function there. It makes it super fudgy.
Our friend Lucas Volger wrote a Substack newsletter about our sourdough granola recipe, where we use sourdough culture to create a super crispy granola that needs less sugar because the sourdough is the thing that's making it crisp and binding it all together. So there's so many places that sourdough can go. And I think we're just getting started.
obsessed with night moves.
Yeah. It's a powerful ingredient. I think one of the things I love about sourdough is that it is function and flavor, and you can choose to take advantage of both those things or just one of them. Obviously, it has leavening power. Obviously, it has flavor. But if you use a young sourdough starter for some of these, quote unquote, discard recipes, you're not going to get any of that flavor at all.
And that's maybe what you want, but it has the function, as you said. It's another way to get hydration and flour into your recipe. I bring that up because I'm actually beginning to dislike the term discard recipe. Because I think we should be thinking about sourdough as an ingredient that goes beyond bread.
And it sort of sounds dismissive, like you would only make these brownies if you're using sourdough discard. When in fact, you could be building a sourdough starter specifically to make those brownies because you like the flavor of those brownies. Or because you like what it does in the lemon loaf that we just put on our site recently.
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