We have finished collecting your sourdoughs!
In September 2023, we launched the HealthFerm citizen science project. We received a phenomenal number of responses, and over the following months began to reach out to many of you to ask if you would be willing to send us a sample of your precious sourdoughs for science. In June 2024, we reached our quota for sample collection and decided to wrap up the collection. The HealthFerm citizen science online questionnaire closed, and it is no longer possible to submit samples for analysis. With that out of the way, let’s have a look at what all your samples look like so far. We are happy to share that we have collected more than 680 sourdoughs across different countries within Europe (Figure 1)! It would not be an exaggeration to say that such an effort has never been undertaken (in this part of the world), making this a one-of-a-kind opportunity to explore the microbial diversity of sourdoughs across Europe. For this, a big and heartfelt thank you to all of you!
Figure 1.European map showing where all the collected sourdoughs come from. It may not look like it, but you are looking at nearly 700 pins here!
How unique is your sourdough recipe?
All over the internet or within hobby baking circles, you may have noticed that everyone’s sourdough recipe is kind of different. Some people prefer a more liquid dough, some more solid; some ferment theirs for days, others just hours. So where does your recipe stand with the other members of our community? We have some insights that may be of help.
Figure 2. Flour types used during sourdough feeding. Different bakers use different flour types to maintain their starters. Where do you fall in this graph?
Firstly, the flour type (Figure 2). It’s pretty clear that most of you prefer using the ol’ reliable white wheat flour with your starters. However, notice that for people who prefer using rye, a higher proportion use the whole-grain counterpart instead (Isn’t this interesting?). It is well known that wheat and rye have different baking properties (rye barely has any gluten, for example), so one can expect vastly different breadmaking recipes as a factor of the cereal. Whether this will have notable impacts on the bacteria and yeasts inside the starters or on how it impacts human health will definitely be one of the things we will look out for in the future.
Figure 3. Chart of the dough yield subdivided into categories.
Secondly, what is the dough yield of your starter? For those not in the know, the dough yield (also called a baker’s percentage) is a baking term that shows the relationship of the total mass of an ingredient or product with the flour used (see _here_ for more information). From this, we can see that the vast majority of you have a dough yield of 200 (Figure 3), i.e., your starters are made from equal weight of flour and water. Yet a small subset prefers having a more liquid starter (lower dough yield). Again, it would be interesting to see if this will have a greater impact on the microbial community as well as the chemicals it produces.
Figure 4. What is the birth year of your starter?
As a last bonus, aren’t you curious about how your starter’s age compares to the pack? Our data shows that most sourdoughs were started during 2020 and 2023 (Figure 4). Hmmm, I wonder what certain significant event happened in 2020 that made a lot of you decide to pursue this hobby.
So, what happens now?
The fun begins. We (the scientists behind HealthFerm) are now in the process of analyzing your starters from multiple angles. Some of us are interested in learning about the identities of the microbes in it and seeing if some of them can be useful for further applications. Others want to learn about the different chemicals in it and see if some sourdoughs can be considered “healthier” than others. All this and more will take a lot of time (and effort!), and we regret not being able to give you a hard deadline on when to expect your results. Rest assured, however, that they will 100% come, and we will be the first to tell you when it’s available. For now, we would like to ask for your patience so that we are able to do the most high quality science we can with each of these ~700 samples (some of which are published from time to time in our blog!). So stay tuned on this blog, and we will give you more updates as time goes on and, eventually, more information about the microorganisms living in your sourdough starters!
