Jessica Badalana
speaker
1,485 appearances
10 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 5 Jun
Jessica Badalana’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 — 6 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
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And I had been saying sort of derisively that I didn't have a sourdough starter during the pandemic. I never baked sourdough bread. And then recently I found a photo that I posted to Instagram saying, That was of a melted container of sourdough starter. This was like April of 2020. And in fact, I did have a sourdough starter and I put it in my oven to keep it warm or coddle it.
I turned my oven on and I melted the plastic quart container that it was in. But I had blocked out the memory of ever having a sourdough starter during the pandemic, ever baking bread with it.
It was buried trauma. But others fared a lot better than I did. And you see it now because people are still baking tons of sourdough bread at home.
Do you feel like we've sort of reached like peak sourdough at this point, or are there still places to go?
Yeah, the third, Tartine book three, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think everyone knows about sourdough breads or sourdough rolls and English muffins and bagels, but there are all these applications for sourdough discard. You know, so once you've fed your starter and you have all this discard, people are kind of realizing, like, I don't want to just, like, discard my discard. I want to use this flavorful matrix, you know, to work for me.
And so it's getting added to all sorts of interesting things. You know, and here in South Portland, Maine, there's a bakery called Night Moves that I love. Oof.
And the baker, Carrie Haney, is adding sourdough discard to her cacao brownie. And it's mind-blowing. It has such a depth of flavor, and it plays so nicely off the chocolate. And it just kind of shows you the opportunity that people have with sourdough discard as an ingredient unto itself.
Well, and that's what I was saying. I mean, there's so much to talk about that I think we had to tease out one thing that we could focus on because we could talk for, I mean, we did when we were working on The Big Book of Bread. We talked for years, actually years.
Actual years of our life were spent thinking and talking about both how to start, maintain, troubleshoot with sourdough culture, but then the beautiful things that you could bake with it. So we had to just like bite off a small piece of the apple here.
This episode is brought to you by King Arthur's Sourdough Shop. We have fresh sourdough starter you can order so you can skip the week it takes to make one from scratch. And we also have the tools you need, like our popular sourdough crocks and appliances, including the beloved Sourdough Home, which is like a cozy little refrigerator for your starter.
We also have one of your favorite tools, David, the Raisin Dough Riser.
That's a super handy tool, especially if you're a sourdough baker who lives in a colder climate. We also have our New York Times bestselling Big Book of Bread, which demystifies sourdough baking and is a treasure trove of recipes. Who wrote that thing? For bread, bagels, and everything in between. I mean, who wrote that thing? Some geniuses.
Some geniuses named Jessica Bonalana and some other people.
You can find everything you need for sourdough baking at kingarthurbaking.com.
And of course, if you have a baking question that simply cannot wait, you can always reach out to our Baker's Hotline via phone, email, or online chat. Just go to kingarthurbaking.com slash bakers dash hotline. That's kingarthurbaking.com slash bakers dash hotline. Or call us 855-371-2253. That's 2253 as in bake. Let's hear our first question.
I feel like I'm opening up a can of worms here, but how do you know if your bread is underproofed or overproofed?
I think also sometimes people don't shape properly, like they're not shaping their loaf tightly enough. So rather than like have some strength there and some shaping that will help it rise, it sort of just flops outward rather than rising upward.
You ready, Amber? I'm ready.
Things that get better with age. Women, cheese, wine, but sourdough starter?
Showing 1261–1280 of 1,485 · page 64 of 75
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