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Because I’ve been asked over the years, “is sourdough bread gluten free?” AND could it be a healthy, safe option for someone living with chronic health issues…
I’ve finally got some very clear answers for you!
To be honest, trying to answer these questions opened up a pandora’s box for me. I was then faced with questions I didn’t even think to ask like what makes bread labeled “sourdough”… real sourdough?
I came to discover that, especially if you live in the US, there’s not only a lot of fake sourdough sold on store shelves, but ideas shared on social media about how to make everything from sourdough pancakes or sourdough cookies is probably wrong.
We’ll get into all of this in today’s episode, but I first must acknowledge that for years, gluten has been demonized as a health wrecker. This led countless people to eliminate it (and sourdough bread) from their diets.
I spent years teaching how bad gluten was for health…
But after 15 years spent avoiding gluten, I’ve made some really startling discoveries.
And that’s where sourdough bread comes in (underscoring my long journey to answer that “is sourdough bread gluten free” question).
In today’s episode, I chat with Dr. Bill Schindler, an archaeologist and food scientist, about the ancient techniques that could revolutionize how we approach bread. He explains why modern wheat is causing problems for so many people and how fermentation transforms grains into a gut-friendly sourdough bread.
Dr. Schindler is leading the charge in reviving traditional food preparation methods that can help restore our health. Through his work at the Modern Stone Age Kitchen located in Chestertown, MD, he’s proving that sourdough bread can be both nourishing and delicious.
If you’ve ever wondered whether sourdough bread could be worth a try, this episode is for you!
Or, listen on your favorite app: iTunes (Apple Podcasts) | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | Subscribe on Android
In This Episode:
- Why modern bread is making people sick
- The difference between ancient + modern wheat varieties
- What fermentation does to gluten (and why it matters)
- Benefits of sourdough bread
- Is sourdough bread gluten free? (and my experience trying sourdough bread)
- The hidden truth about “store-bought sourdough”
- Why fermentation time of sourdough bread is crucial for digestibility
- Before you eat a sourdough cookie or sourdough pancakes…
- What to look for when buying sourdough bread so you know it’s real
- How Bill + the Modern Stone Age Kitchen is reviving ancient baking techniques
Quotes
“Anybody who's starting to dip their toes into this world of not only eating in this way, but also making your food from scratch at home, fermentation is a great sort of gateway into that world.”
“Typically if [the label] says yeast… citric acid, lactic acid, or acetic acid, then I can guarantee you it isn't sourdough and they're trying to fool you.”
Links
Find Dr. Bill Schindler + the Modern Stone Age Kitchen online | online | Instagram | Instagram
Get Dr. Schindler’s book Eat Like a Human: Nourishing Foods and Ancient Ways of Cooking to Revolutionize Your Health
Healthy Skin Show ep. 233: Should You Go Gluten-Free to Stop Eczema, Psoriasis or Other Rashes?
379: Is Sourdough Bread Gluten Free + Healthy? (Sourdough Bread Benefits + How To Tell If It’s Real) w/ Dr. Bill Schindler {FULL TRANSCRIPT}
Jennifer Fugo (00:11.292)
Bill, I am so excited and honored to have you here on the show. Thank you so much for joining us.
Bill Schindler (00:16.884)
It is truly my pleasure. I can't wait to have the conversation with you.
Jennifer Fugo (00:19.878)
So one of the things people might not realize is that A, I've met you in person because I am a little obsessed with your sourdough bread bakery. So I've been to your bakery, and I am just so enamored and inspired by what you have done there. I appreciate that you have really taken this idea, I don't know if you would call it slow food, I feel like there was a slow food movement that I'm not really sure if anyone is still calling it that. But you've kind of taken this idea of old ways of cooking food and producing food, and turned it into something that is accessible in the modern world. So I'm really curious to kind of kick this off as like, what got you so interested in this whole cooking and food arena that you're now doing something that's so different from many other food establishments and bakeries out there?
Bill Schindler (01:22.732)
Well, first off, the fact you said the word accessible makes me so incredibly happy. That means we're doing our job. I dive really deep, and I'm sure everybody listening will learn that very quickly over the next little bit of time we have together, but I dive really deep into these rabbit holes and I get really focused on something. And sometimes in the past when that happened, the food that came out of it was potentially incredibly healthy, but nobody would eat it because it was so different than what maybe they were used to, even if it was something we should have been eating. What my wife and I have landed on, my entire family landed on, here at the Modern Stone Age Kitchen, which is part restaurant, part bakery, part nonprofit teaching establishment, is to create familiar food as nourishing as it can possibly be. If we created the place, what I envisioned in the beginning, of a restaurant that serves only the food that I think is exactly what humans should be eating every hour of the day, we'd have been out of business already because there's probably two or three people in the county to eat that way.
But what we've landed on and what's become very powerful for us and meaningful for us is, okay, people have their ideas about what food they're going to eat. And it's very hard to change our perception of food and what we consider food, what we consider proper food. There's so much related to it, you know, it's our politics, it's our religion, it's our socioeconomic status, it's our family traditions. All of these things impact what we choose to eat and how we choose to eat it. And what we've landed on here is, hey, let's meet people where they are. And because we can use ancestral approaches to food to make it as safe and nourishing as it can possibly be, we can provide for you the absolute healthiest version of all of those things. So we have some crazy things here for sure, but we also have sourdough pasta and homemade meatballs. We have pizzas. We have all of these things that are familiar to people, but the most nourishing version possible.
And what makes a lot of sense, and I hope we have a chance to talk about this a little bit during our conversation, is we have a mouth, and a nose, and eyes, and ears, and a sense of touch for very important specific reasons. And one of those is for us to figure out how to nourish ourselves. The food that actually, and this is because of millions of years of evolutionary pressures, the foods that are the safest and most nourishing for us to eat have to pass those tests. It has to pass, when we look at something, we have to say that's worthy, that looks worthy of putting in my mouth. That smells worthy of putting in my mouth. That feels worthy, and finally, tastes worthy of me actually consuming this. And so the most nourishing food possible for our bodies should also be the most delicious and satiating at the same time. I'm sorry, that's a little tangent on the accessible piece, but I'm thrilled you said accessible.
My background is, I'm an archeologist. I taught college for 20 years at Washington College, I taught at Temple University, I taught at Monmouth University. And I'm a prehistoric archeologist and my focus is on ancestral technologies, especially as they relate to food and diet and health. And the three and a half million years’ worth of time that our ancestors have been creating tools to change the way raw ingredients, to process raw ingredients before we put them into our mouths, has literally transformed our diets to the point where it helped support massive body and brain growth. And essentially these technologies that impacted our diets literally built us as humans. So I'm not of the mindset that we should take exactly what somebody was eating 500,000 years ago and that should be our diets today. I'm of the mindset that if we understand what our ancestral dietary past is and use the lessons from that as a foundation for how we should eat today, and then we make modifications for a lot of different reasons, but our ancestral dietary past, the diet that built us as humans, is foundational to how I view food and diet and health today.
Jennifer Fugo (05:32.125)
So that is a little different from those who kind of started the paleo movement back in like, I wanna say, gosh, I'm gonna say 2012-ish, 2014. I remember going to like Paleo FX and learning about the paleo diet and there was a lot of dogma, there was a lot of stigma about certain types of foods, like grains were really bad. They were really off the table at that time, where a lot of people have kind of circled back and don't talk about that anymore. Yes, there's some individuals that have veered towards a more carnivore-style diet, and even that, think there's a little bit more nuance coming into that space as well.
Bill Schindler (06:16.171)
Absolutely.
Jennifer Fugo (06:21.556)
But do you think that grains are inherently bad? Or do you feel like some of the wisdom from the ancestral world provides us with some data about, like you said, how to make these more accessible to us in a way that, I don't know, actually nourishes us?
Bill Schindler (06:42.444)
I love, there was a, how do I say this? First of all I heard Paleo FX is coming back believe it or not, I saw that the other day online. The paleo diet was a fantastic change to the conversation. It was it was very useful, it got people, the part of the reason you and I are having this conversation today is because there were people that were leading that movement then that got us even thinking outside of the box. One of my issues with the paleo diet is it sort of romanticizes the past and demonizes the present. So in other words, they set this line in the sand and everything before it is good and everything since the agriculture revolution is bad. And even though, from a macroscopic scale, there is some truth to a lot of that, everything in the past wasn't good and everything since we started farming isn't bad. My approach, and I think it is a more holistic approach and actually allows us to nourish literally caveman bodies that we still have today but in a modern context, which is very different than the context that we're eating in right now, whether it be political or religious or whatever, it's very different now than it was a month ago. It's very different now than it was five years ago. It's certainly different than it was thousands of years ago. I promise I'm answering your questions about grains, but it's around about.
Jennifer Fugo (08:01.02)
No, no, no, this is really interesting.
Bill Schindler (08:04.194)
The technologies that our ancestors used in the past, and some of these technologies are incredibly simple but powerful, like stone tools that allowed them to start butchering, or hunting implements, or fire, or fermentation. What these technologies did was it allowed our ancestors to access nutrients from the environment that our bodies absolutely have no biological business accessing ourselves. And then taking those and accomplishing three things, making those ingredients or the raw materials as safe, nourishing, and bioavailable as possible, or safe nutrient dense, and bioavailable as possible. And those are all fantastic things. And what we did, the reason that helped us so much, is because we as humans, and we still do this today, many of us just don't realize it, is we do a lot of things to our food before it goes into our mouths. Like other animals are eating their natural diets because they have specifically designed digestive tracts that allow them to access nutrients from the environment that we can't.
Actually, the only two ways that humans get nutrition from the environment, after we're weaned off of our mothers, is either we take an animal that is perfectly designed to eat a certain diet. They eat that diet, they eat whatever they're eating from the environment, it goes through their digestive tract, it becomes safer, more nutrient dense, and bioavailable. Their bodies turn it into blood, fat, meat and organs. And then we eat that animal or we replicate, before it goes into our mouths, what happened inside of those animals' bodies, things like fermentation, for example. And then we can access the nutrients directly. Those are the only two ways, but all of that requires technology.
So back to the grains. Our ancestors, even a long time ago, we know this from archaeological evidence, were consuming limited amounts of wild grains. There's a lot of problems with wild grains, but one of them is that it is incredibly labor intensive to harvest and process these wild grains. So were they eating them? Yes. Did they make up a large part of their diet? Absolutely not. Other than in the furthest extremes of the latitudes, northern latitudes and southern latitudes, where you know, towards the poles where you have no vegetation for a large part of the year. In those areas, we're talking about completely carnivore diets except for a very limited amount of time in the year pre-historically.
Bill Schindler (10:21.194)
But everywhere else, animals, I'm convinced, are the most nutrient-dense, bioavailable resource on the planet and made a huge difference in our evolutionary past to create us as humans. But we were eating plants the entire time as well. And actually, we were eating plants before we were eating animals, plants and insects. So the idea, if we're talking about a carnivore-like approach, the idea that we weren't eating plants is not true. But grains don't really come into our diet on a massive scale until the agriculture revolution about 12 to 15,000 years ago.
That said, we appear as modern day Homo sapiens about 300,000 years ago. Almost hundreds of thousands of years before we started farming, people that looked just like you and me with the same brain size, the same gut size, the same body size, with the same nutritional requirements had been around for hundreds of thousand years before we started farming. So I did a podcast with Paul Saladino several years ago, before he sort of loosened up with some of his strict carnivore approaches, and I knew he was gonna ask me about bread, and I was prepared. And it's the same answer I'm gonna give you now. He said, what's this with sourdough? I don't understand, what's this with bread? I can't believe, do humans need bread? What do you think?
Bill Schindler (11:48.502)
I said, no, there is no nutritional requirement in the human body that we need to eat grains. In fact, grains, if they're not processed properly, can be very, very dangerous and detrimental to us. But, as far as humans are concerned, to be fully nourished as a human, we need to do so much more than just meet our biological requirements. We need to meet our emotional requirements, our cultural requirements. We need to meet, if it's important to you, your traditional requirements or political ones or whatever they are. Food is so wrapped up in everything we are as humans. To be fully nourished, we need to think about more than just how much protein and how much magnesium is in our diet, right? And part of that includes, for some people, bread. So if you are going to eat bread, then the safest, most nourishing form of bread is real, traditional, wild, slow-fermented sourdough bread.
Jennifer Fugo (12:38.289)
I love that. I love the context, right? Because I think in this world where everybody wants like a yes and no simple answer, the truth is there's a lot of gray to this. And there's a lot of context that gets left out of this conversation, so people are like thinking, oh it's bad, oh it's good. Most people get stuck in the middle and feel overwhelmed and don't know what to do, and then just feel guilt eating however they're eating instead of being given more direction, more context, more historical information of how this could be potentially a helpful tool.
So we will talk about sourdough and is sourdough bread good for you, because obviously this has been a big change for me, and I'll talk a little bit about that. But I wanted to ask you first, what was the importance of fermentation in terms of a historical perspective for human beings? When did we start fermenting foods and why was it so important for us? Because I think that's an important place to start if we're gonna talk then about sourdough.
Bill Schindler (13:37.664)
It's a perfect place to start, thank you. Anybody who's starting to dip their toes into this world of not only eating in this way, but also making your food from scratch at home, fermentation is a great sort of gateway into that world. Especially vegetable fermentation because it's incredibly easy, it doesn't take any special equipment, you can do it right on your countertop in your kitchen and start learning that process. First thing I want everybody to understand is, number one, this is not going to sound pretty, but it's true, fermentation is just controlled rotting. It's a natural process where food is breaking down and decomposing, and we humans are intervening and controlling it to our benefit.
For those of you who just got grossed out by that, just remember the highest quality versions of the food that we find the most pleasure in are all fermented. So cheese is fermented dairy, yogurt is fermented dairy. Sourdough bread is fermented both with a yeast and a bacterial fermentation. Real salami is fermented raw meat that's never cooked, I mean, it's truly fermented. The highest quality coffee in the world is fermented, the highest quality chocolate in the world is fermented. One of the detoxification ways of dealing with olives is fermentation. Across the board, in fact, I spent a lot of time around the world, my whole family has, living and working with indigenous groups, and documenting how they're eating and sharing food and cooking with people. I don't know of a traditional diet around the world that doesn't have fermentation at its core. It is incredibly important.
Bill Schindler (14:53.602)
And this is what fermentation does. Fermentation, first off, begins to break down food and it pre-digests it for us so our bodies don't have to work as hard to access the nutrition in it. In some cases, it actually unlocks nutrients that otherwise wouldn't have been available to our bodies. That's number one. Number two, fermentation, and there's different types of fermentation. Most of them, not all of them, most of them take an ingredient or a food and the bacteria create lactic acid through the fermentation, which means the pH is dropping. And quite often what happens is that pH drops into an incredibly safe zone for humans. In other words, the pH that it arrives at makes it so that only the beneficial microorganisms to our bodies can live, and they thrive, and it's a very hostile environment to very bad things like E. coli for example, and Listeria and others. So it is a way to make food incredibly safe. It increases the shelf life, it makes food tastes better, it impacts the texture, it impacts the aroma. It's a win-win-win-win all across the board. So it's a great thing to begin to think about. The organisms required for fermentation are naturally just occurring in the world. They're on my skin, they're in the air, they're on your skin, they're on our food, they're on the flour, they're everywhere. And all that we need to do is harness them and put them in the right environment to do the right work for us.
The other thing that's incredibly cool about fermentation that we've lost in our modern foodways all over the world is that the specific bacteria and yeasts and other microorganisms that are responsible for the fermentation, depending on what it is you're fermenting and how you're doing it, are specific to different areas in the world. So some are here, some are here, some are different populations, different ratios. So the work they're doing is all the same, but there's little nuances in things like flavor or aroma or texture that provide this sense of terroir, that we only talk about in wine now, but used to be in all of our food, and we're getting it back now. So if you made the same loaf of sourdough bread with the same ingredients in San Francisco, or I made it here in Chestertown, or somebody else made it in Paris, they would have slightly different nuances that are specific to that area. And I think that's something we should be celebrating in our food.
Jennifer Fugo (17:41.565)
Wow, that is really beautiful to think about that, that there's a nuance to, I mean, that takes local eating to a whole different level in a sense, because you're actually, you're kind of infusing the food with organisms that we really can't see generally, right? We don't even really recognize that they're there on a moment to moment basis. Like we know there's bacteria, but we don't think about it. And yet that's what's infusing your food with, wow, that is really, really cool. I did not think of it like that.
Bill Schindler (18:14.946)
I take it one step further. There was a study done several years ago. It was an institute I think affiliated with Tufts University. I forget exactly, but they went and collected sourdough cultures around the world, and bread, and looked at the final loaf of bread and looked at it under a microscope. And what they were trying to show was that they could identify the bakery that bread came from by the microorganisms that were present in the final loaf of bread. And they could. But what they found was even more profound and I think even more beautiful. Again, some people might find this disgusting, I think it's beautiful. They not only could identify that loaf of bread to the bakery, they could identify that loaf of bread to the baker. That the microorganisms on the baker's hands influenced the microorganism load in the bread, and it was symbiotic, that the culture that they were using in the bakery was also impacting the microflora on the skin of the bakers, and it was this conversation. And again, I know it sounds kind of cheesy and we're hugging trees and whatever, but it's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
Jennifer Fugo (19:18.076)
It's beautiful. Yeah, I'll add to this conversation. There was a study and I think it's in Nature, I'll make sure to grab the link to it, where, I forget who it was that looked at this and what university, but they did find that adding fermented foods to your diet really had a dramatic improvement in the biodiversity of your gut microbiome. And so I consider any of these fermented foods that you're talking about great options for people. And listen, I know for some people listening to this, they're like, hey, I have histamine intolerance, I might be struggling with something. That's cool, that's cool, this is for you when once you've kind of dealt with that and you've gotten on the other side of it, which is possible to do. But I think when you can tolerate these things, like you said, there's this beautiful conversation that happens between these organisms, our cells, the world around us that is so, so fascinating. So that being said, I'm just curious, from some of these cultures that you've gone to visit, you said every single one has fermented foods.
Bill Schindler (20:27.158)
Absolutely.
Jennifer Fugo (20:46.981)
So we have, for example, you talked about sourdough, we've got wheat today compared with the wheat of the past. And obviously there are, well, I shouldn't say obviously, there are some strains of wheat that, I don't know, I was taught were like older, ancient strains like einkorn, spelt, kamut. So what are your thoughts on that? Like modern wheat, US wheat, versus like old wheat, what have you kind of found seems to be like a middle ground for all of us?
Bill Schindler (20:59.778)
It's a fantastic question, and people aren't talking about the the totality of something that goes into something like sourdough bread, from everything from the fermentation to the flour choice, as much as I think we should be. So many people just want one answer. Oh my gosh, if we go to an ancient grain all our problems are gonna be solved. And it's never one thing, it's a lot of different things. Now, I will say, we have, because of the struggles, the lift, of trying to start a restaurant with these very important ideals and these tenants that we will not stray from, we had to pick and choose certain things just to be able to stay afloat. So we have exactly what we're doing now and we have a whole list of aspirations we're trying to get to. One of those aspirations is changing some of the flour that we're using. In fact, we should literally hear within the next three weeks for the response for a grant we just wrote actually, just wrote a year ago. Part of that is for a 40-inch stone mill and sifter to use local grains from Centerville, MD. I'm so excited about that possibility because if we can get that, not only will a lot of our breads be baked from that exclusively, but we could also offer flour that we're grinding from the guy that's down the road growing the grains. And they’re ancient heirloom grains as well, which is awesome.
But right now, to be fully transparent and honest, one of the main things that we're focusing on is the technologies, using these ancestral technologies to make food as safe, nutrient-dense, and bioavailable as possible. And also, obviously, getting the highest quality ingredients as we possibly can, but we can't, at the moment we have no opportunity to make all of our bread from completely 100% local, organic heirloom grains. I wish we could, that would be the gold standard for this. But the flour choice does make, the sourdough process, which we'll talk about in a minute, is transformative. But the flour choice does make a really big difference.
So there's a lot of things that have changed through selective pressure and through intentional genetic mutations. Some of them happening, when I say selective pressure, ever since any of our ancestors started harvesting plants, even wild plants, they were changing the genetics of those plants. So a great example would be, because I don't want to get in this black and white, everything in the past wasn't genetically modified and everything is now, this is a great example. Let's say you're a hunter gatherer and it's berry season and you're going to go pick these berries and you all go. And in the patch of berries you go to that's a half a mile from wherever you're camping, there is a whole diversity of different size berries and different size pits and all this. So let's say the best ones that you want, the big fruits, like 20% of the fruits you're looking at are these big ones that you really want. So 20% of them. But because those are the ones that you want, those are the only ones that you harvest. So you harvest only those big ones, with that genetic makeup that produces the big fruits. And then you come back to camp, you eat those fruits, you go to the bathroom not far away from where you're camping, and you leave. And the next year you come back, and all of a sudden not only don't you have to go as far to get those berries because those seeds, almost a hundred percent of those plants are now the big-fruited ones, and you literally just changed the gene pool of those plants because those are the ones that you eat, and those are the ones that pass through, and those are the ones that got deposited in the pile of manure. And all of a sudden you're genetically modifying things just through selective pressure. So we've been doing this at some level forever.
Bill Schindler (24:50.03)
But the kind of genetic mutations that are happening now are happening in labs with people in lab coats and test tubes for specific, taking things completely out of context and out of their natural environment, and to the detriment of not only the environment, but also the nourishing qualities and sometimes safety qualities of that food. Because rarely is anybody genetically modifying a plant for the benefit of the consumer, they're genetically modifying plants for the benefit of the people that are making the genetic mutations. And most of that has to do with money.
One of the issues with wheat especially is that the process, sourdough bread, the oldest loaf of sourdough bread ever found right now dates to about 8,600 years ago, was found in a site in Turkey. Every loaf of bread from 8,600 years ago to the mid-1800s was sourdough bread, every loaf of bread consumed anywhere in the world was by default sourdough bread. Until Louis Pasteur, I know he’s celebrated, I'm not a huge fan, was able to take strains of yeast and replicate them in a lab. And then all of a sudden when we did that, we took that bacterial fermentation that happened alongside the yeast one and kept the bacteria away, and just the yeast fermentation. As a side note for anybody that likes beer, beer was probably older than bread, and every glass mug, clay pot of beer, wooden container of beer from thousands of years ago, until the mid-1800s, was a sour beer as well. And only now do we separate that bacteria from the yeast and just use the yeast in many cases to actually create the alcohol. So we're separating these things the artificial way.
A lot in the bread making process has changed since the mid-1800s, in addition to just adding the yeast, now we are mass producing bread on such a huge scale that we require, for the process that we have now in the modern industrial food system to create bread, like Wonder Bread, for example, we have to abuse that wheat to do it as fast as, not we, as fast as they're doing it. And that requires a massive amount of gluten. So the grains right now are being bred for wheat grains for places like Wonder Bread. And so a great example, it takes me here about a day and a half minimum to make a loaf of bread that I'm going to put on the shelf and serve to a customer. It takes one hour start to finish, from flour to bread that's not even baked, but forced-cooled down and sliced and put into a plastic bag, one hour start to finish, to make a loaf of Wonder Bread. So part of these genetic mutations are for that lowest denominator, that lowest, this abused wheat grain, in order for it to survive that process.
Jennifer Fugo (27:32.088)
Oh my gosh. So you're saying your process which is the slower form, this older form, is like a 36-hour minimum process, versus an hour process for these very refined wheat products that we can easily buy on a grocery store shelf.
Bill Schindler (28:03.502)
Absolutely. And you mentioned the slow food movement earlier. Making food slowly, just to make it slowly, I mean, there's some nostalgic pieces to that. So I don't want to just make it sound like, oh, because it takes us 36 hours, it's a better loaf of bread. It's more traditional that way, but what's really important with the sourdough part of this, and we could use the same example with dairy later and the like, is what is happening during that time? It's not like you have a bunch of Italian grandmothers slow making pasta and rolling the pasta in their hands, and they're touching that pasta for hours and hours and hours. There's something beautiful and nostalgic about that. There's not necessarily anything more nutritional about the fact that they happen to be rolling it by hand and the machine isn't doing it, but there's something very cool and nostalgic about it. When I say sourdough bread is taking me this long to make, in fact, even though that bread takes a day and a half to make, me or one of our bakers are only actually engaged with that bread for a total of about 15 minutes over that entire time. What is happening is we are babysitting and controlling trillions of bacteria and yeast that are doing this incredible work to those grains to turn them into something that the human body can tolerate and actually derive nutrition from. So it's not just that time, it's all of those, in this case, the bacteria that are transforming the gluten into something that's different, helping get rid of anti-nutrients like the phytates and the lectins, starting to break it down and doing all of those wonderful things, dropping the pH into that really safe zone we talked about before. And it’s improving the flavor and it's improving the aroma as well.
Jennifer Fugo (29:50.257)
And so can I ask you, because somebody might say, oh, well, the next time I go to the store, I'm going to get a sourdough loaf of bread from the grocery store because I’ve heard of the benefits of sourdough bread. So is there a way to know if something is actually sourdough? Like what qualifies bread as sourdough, and is there a badge or little logo or something that we can look at on a product that would be like, yes, this is actually sourdough?
Bill Schindler (30:19.394)
No. That's a short answer is no. There's two countries in the world that have any sort of requirement for a baker to have to meet these requirements to call a sourdough. And we do not live in one of those countries. So a baker or a company can call anything on the shelf sourdough, anything. There's no requirements whatsoever. Here's what's happened and here's how you can identify something very easy that actually isn't sourdough. And it's been a huge issue because there's a lot of bad things that happened because of COVID, but there were things that changed that were positive as well. And one of those things that I love is that people started talking about sourdough. But what didn't come across in those conversations was that there's a lot of things that are called sourdough, most things that are called sourdough that aren't actually sourdough. So I've talked to so many people that were like, hey, I heard that I could eat sourdough, and I went to the store and bought sourdough and got so excited. I came home and I ate it and I had the same sort of negative reactions to it. Well, it probably wasn't sourdough.
So here's what you need to understand. Number one, one of the things that sourdough bakers hate is the word sourdough. Because a good sourdough baker can completely control the sourness of the bread, and actually it shouldn't be too sour. In fact, if the sourdough bread is too sour, real sourdough bread requires two fermentations happening side by side, a yeast fermentation and a bacterial fermentation. Both the wild yeast and the bacteria are just here in nature, we've harnessed them and we're just feeding them and keeping them happy in their work, doing work for us. The yeast does two things, it eats available sugars and creates carbon dioxide and alcohol. So if you're making bread, we care about the carbon dioxide, that's what makes it rise. We don't really care about the alcohol, there's not much of it, it burns off anyhow when we bake it, so it's not a very big deal. For making beer we care about both of those, for carbonated beer, carbon dioxide from the yeast and the alcohol from the yeast. But we're talking about bread, all it does is rise. The fact that we're using wild yeast, again, is nostalgic like the grandmother's rolling the pasta, but the yeast part of it, it doesn't matter if it's wild yeast or if it's yeast from the grocery store, Fleishman's yeast. It's doing the same thing.
The important part is the bacterial fermentation. The bacterial fermentation is the one that's transforming the gluten, taking care of the anti-nutrients, breaking it down, pre-digesting it, and is responsible for the flavor and the aroma in the final bread. So we need that bacterial fermentation. If we mess up a little bit, there's a third fermentation that can happen. It's not dangerous at all, it just doesn't taste very good. If the yeast has produced too much alcohol and we've let it sit for too long, there's a third fermentation from an Acetobacter bacteria that takes the alcohol and makes vinegar, makes acetic acid. We don't want that. That's a nasty sour, sour bread. I think too many bakers in the past were doing that, so the public perception of sourdough is that it is supposed to taste sour.
Bill Schindler (33:33.048)
Well, the modern industrial food system has taken that misconception and is capitalizing on it. So what they're doing, remember, there's no requirement for what they have to do to the grains to call them sourdough, they're baking a regular loaf of yeasted bread and adding something to it that is sour. To meet this, again, wrong and problematic expectation of the consumer that they're supposed to taste something sour and therefore they have sourdough. So it doesn't matter if you're in the bread aisle in the grocery store, you get all the sandwich bread, or you've walked on the other side of the grocery store by the deli, and you have the bread that's actually packaged in the brown bags.
Jennifer Fugo (34:06.299)
Yep.
Bill Schindler (34:25.418)
And it says sourdough, and it looks real pretty and artisanal, and it has a stalk of wheat on it, and it's double the price, and it says sourdough. It probably isn't, but this is how you can tell. If you turn it over, if it says yeast, then it probably isn't sourdough. There are some sourdough bakers that do add yeast to change some things with the way that it rises. It's not a dead giveaway, but typically if it says yeast, it's not sourdough. But if it says citric acid, lactic acid, or acetic acid, or vinegar, which is acetic acid, then I can guarantee you it isn't sourdough and they're trying to fool you. It doesn't matter the packaging or the price, if it says anything sour on the back then, I mean, you can buy whatever you want, but if you want to buy sourdough, then turn it over and put it down. The only two ways that you know you're getting real sourdough bread is either to make it yourself, which it is not that difficult to do, or go to somebody you trust. In other words, somebody where your food chain for your bread is like one link long and you're talking to that link at the bakery.
Jennifer Fugo (35:05.436)
Well, that was the one thing, and so for those who follow me on Instagram, you've seen maybe some of this, is that, so since 2008, I found out that I was quite sensitive to gluten and stopped eating gluten entirely. I’ve lso been asked a lot, “Is sourdough bread gluten free?” and “is sourdough bread good for you?” and “What are the benefits of sourdough bread?” And I've been on a long journey with food and my diet and my gut microbiome and all things. And so wheat was kind of the last thing. I was on a dairy journey, I would say, the last maybe like two, three years of really rethinking the way that the food industry is marketing plant-based dairy to us, and really questioning what we were buying. And for all of you who know, I did a three-part series, so I'll add those to the show notes if you want to check that out. So I now eat dairy.
But wheat was the last thing. And I was really nervous, and I found your bakery in Chestertown, Maryland. So I don't know how many times I talked to your wife, your staff members, and I was asking questions because I was nervous, I was legitimately afraid. I thought, oh my gosh, I don't know if I can tolerate this and is sourdough bread gluten free, if it's gonna cause all these symptoms. And so the suggestion from your team was to try the products that you bake that are fermented for three days, which I didn't even realize that there would be a difference in fermentation time. So could you talk a little bit about, you said, for example, a loaf of bread might be fermented for about 36 hours, a day and a half, but yet you have some that are three days. So could you share with us a little bit about the time difference and why you've implemented those two different options?
Bill Schindler (36:51.638)
Sure, absolutely. And I'm gonna say a couple things that are going to get technical for a minute, but if this is more than some people want, just understand you need to make sure that there's a certain amount of time that all the flour in the recipe has had access to the bacteria to have it transformed into its safest and most nourishing form possible. That's what we need. And depending on the recipe and the temperature and how much water is in it and how much bacteria is in it, that time could be quite short. It could be as little as three and a half hours, three hours sometimes, is enough for that flour to make that transformation.
Remember when the bacteria, just like the yeast, the bacteria are eating available sugars and there's a lot of chemical and physical changes happening in that dough. But one of the things that's happening is they're eating available sugars and it's cranking out lactic acid. Lactic acid is not acetic acid, lactic acid is a very pleasant acid. Lactic acid is the sour we get from when we eat yogurt, lactic acid is the sour we get from a really well made sauerkraut. Lactic acid, if you've had a really good piece of salami and it just has that little bit of sourness to it, it's the same lactic acid. It's the same, and it's the same process that's happening. So there's a lot of chemical and physical changes happening, but one of the most important ones is when the bacteria create enough lactic acid that the pH drops to 4.6, an enzyme gets activated. It's a protease enzyme, so that means it works on proteins, gluten is a protein. It's a protein that gets activated that starts literally chopping up the gluten strands. We want that to happen to a certain extent. So at room temperature with a lot of water, things ferment more quickly when they're warm, things ferment more quickly when there's more bacteria, and things ferment more quickly when they're wetter.
So in a really wet dough, before the show we were talking about focaccia, focaccia is an 80% hydration dough. There's a massive amount of water in there. So it's fermenting, it's warm, lots of bacteria, it's super wet in there, all this is happening. And in a very short period of time, there's enough of that fermentation happening that it drops below 4.6, gluten strands start getting cut up in a way that our body can tolerate it more. That bread is super healthy when it comes out, I mean really well-fermented. If you had talked to me, so they were right, the other thing I would have added is that focaccia is probably, for somebody who's worried about some gluten intolerance, that's probably the one I would start with because of exactly how that fermented. The two things to worry about are one, there's so many recipes out since COVID for all these gluten-free everything. Gluten-free cookies, gluten-free pasta, gluten-free everything. Most of them, I'm sorry, not gluten-free, I mean sourdough. Sourdough pasta, sourdough cookies, there's so many of these recipes out there. Most of them are actually not sourdough, and it's not an intentional thing, but this is what happens. Somebody wants to make a sourdough cookie. So they literally go, and I've seen this happen, they go to like the Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe, and they find a way to sneak in a little bit of sourdough mother in there.
Jennifer Fugo (40:11.696)
Yeah, that's the discard, right?
Bill Schindler (40:13.57)
It could be discard, discard just means the leftover sourdough mother, but the sourdough mother is essentially, it's just flour and water, but it's loaded with the bacteria and yeast needed to do sourdough. So they put a little bit of that into this other recipe. So you have the sourdough mother coming in and then you put all the other ingredients together, including like two cups of flour. You mix it all up, make your cookies, and put it in the oven and bake it. Well, the flour that's coming in with the sourdough discard has been through the whole fermentation process and is in that safe nourishing form. But the other two cups of raw flour you just put in there never have an opportunity to ferment, and it's not sourdough. Like you've baked it, and you have a little bit of sourdough mother in there and a whole lot of flour. And if you're gluten intolerant, you will see the effects of eating that cookie. Most sourdough bread recipes online are actually pretty legit. Most of all the other sourdough recipes are problematic because they don't give enough space and time and the environment for that other flour to get transformed.
The second issue, and it's related to this as well, is when you take your dough, your batter, whatever, and stick it in the refrigerator. Our refrigerators at home are usually between 39 and 41 degrees. In that temperature the yeast really, really, really slow down. So there's a process in bread making that we call retarding, where we take the bread and put it into a basket or in its form and then put it in the fridge overnight, slow it down, and then we put it directly in the oven the next day. And that's fine if the beginning part of the process has given enough fermentation for the bacteria. In that environment, in your refrigerator, at those temperatures, the yeast really slow down, but the bacteria shut down. So if your recipe, and this is not talked about enough, but if your recipe has you mix everything up and then stick it in the refrigerator for 12 hours, 24 hours, it could be five days, it's in an environment where the yeast will do its thing. You could actually come back the next day, put that loaf of bread in the oven and it would look like this gorgeous loaf of sourdough bread, I mean, Instagram-worthy. But it is not actually not sourdough. If you had a pH meter and put it in there, you would know that the bacteria didn't have a chance to do its work.
Jennifer Fugo (42:32.346)
Wow. So you're saying it really needs to sit out for a period of time before being put into the refrigerator.
Bill Schindler (42:39.832)
Yes, or never go into the refrigerator. But the reason I am bringing this up is because what they told you about something being fermented for 36 hours, the reality is how we do it here, there's a part of that time, a significant part of that time that would have been outside at a temperature where the bacteria did its work. And that's important. Let me just say one other thing. I'm sorry and I know it's getting technical, but I think it's really important.
Jennifer Fugo (43:09.244)
Please. No, no, I love it. I love it.
Bill Schindler (43:19.53)
As that pH is dropping, the longer it stays below 4.6 and that enzyme is doing its work, and even more so if it drops low enough like below 4, like 3.8, 3.9, that enzyme is going bananas and is destroying the gluten. From a health perspective, awesome. But from a bakery perspective, if I drop it too low, I can never make a loaf of bread with it because the gluten is so destroyed that it won't hold its shape, and it won't trap that carbon dioxide, and it won't rise properly. So the reason I'm bringing it up is because I would caution against somebody going to a bakery that says our sourdough bread is fermented for 36 hours or 48 hours. Not 36, I'm sorry, 48 hours, or some say our fermentation is five days. The only way they're making bread that is fermented for five days is if they kept it in the refrigerator for five days. And if they've kept it in the refrigerator for five days, they've slowed down the yeast. Great. They can actually get it in, they can time that perfectly. But that unless they've had it out long enough before it went in the refrigerator, they shouldn't be calling it sourdough bread because it hasn't been fermented. So again, it's really good to, and I know this is getting a little bit nuanced, but for somebody who hasn't eaten bread in a very long time, some of this information might be really important.
Jennifer Fugo (44:32.442)
No, it's good, especially for people who wonder about the benefits of sourdough bread, is sourdough bread gluten free, and is sourdough bread good for you.
Bill Schindler (44:46.858)
I'll tell you, we have a massive amount of customers that are gluten intolerant that do fine on our bread. And we just are really proud of this. And if I said it on a podcast even two years ago, everybody would have called me a liar, but the studies that are coming out now are supporting this. We have just identified our eighth celiac customer that is absolutely fine on our bread. Now we have customers that are celiac that are not fine on our bread, but we know for sure we have eight, and I mean eight medically diagnosed, blood test celiac customers that are absolutely fine on our bread.
Jennifer Fugo (44:59.741)
Wow.
Bill Schindler (45:15.126)
So celiac, like everything else, is a spectrum. And what I think is the case, I'm so confident in the process of the sourdough that what I think is actually happening is, there's flour all over the place in our bakery. There's flour in the air, there's flour on the thing we load the bread with, there's flour everywhere. So if somebodyhas that much of a problem with flour, sure, there's a tiny bit that's sneaking in even to a fully fermented loaf of bread, there's a little bit on the outside that it may be something like that. And we can't get around that. But knowing the nuances, some of the nuances of what you should be asking, what you should be looking for in a label, can really make the difference between understanding whether or not it's worthy of trying.
And one other very quick thing. I'm very proud of this, about three, four months ago, we had a woman come in, she was in her 80s, she hadn't had a sandwich in 16 years. And it wasn't because of the gluten, it was because she's allergic to commercial yeast, and she couldn't find a sourdough bakery that wasn't also adding a little bit of commercial yeast in. I said, we don't add any yeast at all. And she's like, no way. And she had her first sandwich in 16 years with us. And we talked to her the next day, she said she was absolutely fine.
Jennifer Fugo (46:40.027)
Wow. Well, I wanna share too, because I think it's important for people to know, I really was afraid to try something. And like I said, I had been in your bakery multiple times, asking multiple questions, over and over again, like “Is sourdough bread gluten-free?” because I was working my way through like working the courage up to actually give it a shot. And so the first thing I tried was one of your croissants, which I hadn't, let me tell you, I've had gluten-free croissants. They are not good. I mean, I'm sorry. I've had a lot of different ones. We have a pastry chef here in Philadelphia that makes them. You try. Like that's how I will leave it, they try.
Bill Schindler (47:21.686)
I've tried one in my life.
Jennifer Fugo (47:33.841)
And listen, if that's what you have to do because of celiac and whatnot, I totally understand that. But I do think there's this moment where you're like, this is not, this is okay, it's not that great. I had tried gluten-free sourdough bread about a year before and it was just so dense, I didn't really enjoy the experience of eating it all that much. And so when I had the croissant, I don't know, there was this moment of like, you know those commercials or TV shows where it's like the lights come on and it's like, ahhhh, like that was kind of the moment that I had. So I had your croissants and some other pastries because they were flaky, and then more recently, this past week, I purchased the focaccia and gave that a try. And that was amazing. And I will say that one difference between gluten-free breads that I have eaten over the years, because I've eaten many, is like, you feel very satisfied with what you're producing. Like I eat a piece, a small piece of focaccia, and I feel satisfied, content, happy. I don't need to cut another slice and have another slice. I'm good, right? So it's interesting, and maybe that goes back to what you were saying, like what nourishes us, but it feels almost like what you're creating is satiating.
Bill Schindler (48:51.31)
You know, I think there's two, first of all, I'm so thrilled. That croissant recipe has taken me about eight years for us to nail down, and I'm so, so very proud of it. I'm so glad you were able to experience it like that. It makes eight years of work worth it. There's two things I think that make you, with food that's produced this way, especially bread, not need to cut another slice. One is, in both of those cases, one of the things that plays a large role in satiation is obviously fat. So croissants have a good bit of high quality butter in it. So that I think helps there. And focaccia, we do put olive oil on there. So I think there's a little bit of that. But what's also very interesting about sourdough, we haven't had a chance to talk about this yet, is because there's those simultaneous bacterial and yeast fermentations eating all these available sugars, the glycemic index plummets. So all bread, no matter if it's Wonder Bread, all yeasted bread, or the Pepperidge Farm, super grainy whole berry, whatever thing next to it. Both of those fall into the high range in the glycemic index. And there's been studies done, and I write about this in my book and I actually have the numbers, I don't recall them exactly at the moment, but they've taken the same exact recipes, same ingredients, but put it through a sourdough process and it takes it from the high range, through the middle range, into the low range on the glycemic index. So your blood sugar response to eating a slice of sourdough bread or a sourdough croissant is a different experience than if you were eating a regular croissant or a slice of bread that has all these available carbohydrates.
Jennifer Fugo (50:37.852)
I really think that your bakery, for me, has been the last piece of reclaiming food that I was told for years was bad for you, was almost like, and I still have colleagues that are like, gluten, oh gluten is the devil. We can't have any wheat, we can't have any grains, we can't, and they're still on that train. And I think there's something that happens when we demonize food to a point where we just like don't even know what to eat, and foods no longer become safe that, like you said, have a long history. There's this traditionalness to producing foods that can increase bioavailability, all of the nutrients, add to our gut microbiome and improve its biodiversity, all of these things. I just think it's such an interesting conversation. I have so many more questions for you, but I think you just have to come back, Bill. I'm gonna be honest.
Bill Schindler (51:38.99)
I would love to come back.
Jennifer Fugo (52:06.46)
I think you have to come back because we have more things to discuss. And I know that people who are listening to this, I want to give a little caveat, we're not saying that sourdough may work with wheat, for all people who have celiac. I just want to be very clear about that. I am not celiac, I know that for sure, I don't have the genes. I was gluten sensitive and I was very reactive for a long period of time. But yeah, guys, this is weird for me to say, I eat wheat because of you, Bill.
Bill Schindler (52:12.846)
Thank you.
Jennifer Fugo (52:32.302)
And you guys, I've literally been to his bakery multiple times. Now I know people's names, I've had breakfast there, I've actually been able to eat a sourdough bread as well. And the cool thing Bill shared with me beforehand is that there you can, if you don't live in Chestertown, Maryland, which is a beautiful little town on the Eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, you guys ship, right? Like you do ship some things.
Bill Schindler (52:45.294)
Absolutely. Yep, we ship anything that doesn't have to be refrigerated. And I know we talk a lot about the bakery aspect of this, we are a full service restaurant. We produce a lot of foods to ship and also to have in our reach-in. So anything that isn't refrigerated, we can ship. And we're working right now diligently on a freezer shipping, frozen shipping program so we could par-bake croissants and have them shipped and that sort of thing.
Jennifer Fugo (53:11.394)
And you teach cooking classes there.
Bill Schindler (53:13.922)
Yes. So we have two entities here. We have the Modern Stone Age Kitchen, which is the restaurant, bakery, all of that together. And then we also have a nonprofit called The Food Lab and we do a lot. And that's where we are really passionate about nourishing the community, but we're even more passionate about educating and connecting the community with their food, their past, their environment, all of these things, and empowering them to actually make these foods at home. And I will tell you, it doesn't seem like it's a great business model to teach somebody how to make sourdough bread and expect them to come and still buy it. But that is what we're all about. So we do a lot of classes, we do sourdough bread classes, I have a nose to tail butchering class this Saturday, we do cheese making classes. We do all sorts of things. And the focus is on how to take these ancestral approaches to food and implement them in your home kitchen and nourish your family.
Jennifer Fugo (54:04.528)
Yeah. And you've got a website, which I am gonna, correct me if I'm wrong, it's modernstoneagekitchen.com. And you've got a book that's available on Amazon called Eat Like a Human: Nourishing Foods and Ancient Ways of Cooking to Revolutionize Your Health. We'll put a link to that in the show notes.
Bill Schindler (54:25.742)
Thank you.
Jennifer Fugo (54:27.408)
Seriously, y'all, you gotta follow Bill because he goes on some wild adventures and eats some wild things, literally wild things, that I'm like, oh, interesting, is that good? So I live vicariously through your journeys, I learn so much, and I deeply appreciate that you're willing to come here and share your experience with sourdough, and we'll have to talk about all this other fermented dairy and fats and all sorts of stuff the next time.
Bill Schindler (54:53.368)
Sounds great, I look forward to it. Thank you for having me.
