I make my own sourdough. Have done for a while now. There is something about the process that I find genuinely satisfying in a way that I didn’t expect when I started. You mix flour and water, you leave it, you feed it, you watch it grow. After a few days you have something alive in a jar on your counter. A culture. A colony of wild fungal yeast and bacteria that you are responsible for keeping alive. Some people name theirs. I understand that completely now in a way I would have found ridiculous before I started.
What’s actually happening in that jar is extraordinary when you understand it. The wild yeast, which is a fungus, produces enzymes that break down the complex carbohydrates in the flour into simpler compounds. This makes the bread more digestible, more nutritious, and gives it that particular flavour that you simply cannot replicate with commercial yeast. We have genetically engineered our wheat over centuries into something our digestive systems struggle with. The sourdough process, driven by fungi, is what makes it manageable again. The fungi, as usual, are fixing what we broke.
Bread made this way has been around for thousands of years. It is the oldest method of leavening we know of. Before commercial yeast existed, before anyone understood what yeast actually was, people were capturing wild fungal cultures and using them to make bread. They just didn’t know that’s what they were doing. The knowledge was there. The understanding came later.
Now look around your kitchen and think about what else is fungi.
The blue veins in your Stilton or your Gorgonzola are Penicillium mould. The same family of fungi that gave us penicillin is ripening your cheese. The soft white rind on a Brie, also a fungal mould. Tempeh, the fermented soy product, is bound together by fungal mycelium. Soy sauce, miso, sauerkraut, kimchi, all involve fungi at some stage of their production. Quorn, eaten by millions of people who think they’re avoiding anything too unusual, is made entirely from a fungal mould.
And then there’s alcohol. Yeast, a microscopic fungus, produces alcohol as a by-product of respiration. Every pint of beer, every glass of wine, every whisky ever distilled exists because of fungi. The entire history of human celebration, commiseration, creativity and catastrophe that has taken place with a drink in hand, all of it underwritten by a fungus doing what it does naturally in the dark.
We owe fungi an enormous debt and we don’t even think about it.
I got properly into this when I started researching functional mushrooms and kept finding fungi everywhere I looked. In my bread. In my cheese. In my drink. In the medicines in my cabinet. In the supplements I was ordering and trying. The more I looked the more they appeared, like mycelium pushing through into the light once you know where to look. That’s the thing about fungi. They were always there. You just weren’t paying attention.
The supermarket gives you one mushroom in a plastic tray and we’ve somehow concluded that’s the extent of our relationship with this kingdom. It isn’t. It never was. Fungi have been feeding us, healing us, fermenting our drinks and ripening our cheese since before recorded history. They are woven into the fabric of human life so completely that trying to remove them would unravel everything.
Your sourdough starter knows this. It’s been trying to tell you for years.
May the spores be with you.