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Mike Avery

In article >,
says...
>
> "Kenneth" > wrote in message ...
>
> > ... One of the things that I have never understood is the
> > attitude that we sometimes see here that "real" Sourdough is
> > a particular bread. It plays out in the odd belief that if
> > one uses anything other than flour, water, salt, and starter
> > the result will not be "authentic."
>
> Newbies are encouraged to believe that adding a lot of unlikely
> stuff to dough makes better bread. A good reason for that is that
> we like to see the little buggers stagger and fall.

Actually, if you look at bread historically, almost all breads before
the mid to late 1800's (when reliable bakers yeast was introduced) were
made with sourdough. Some breads, mostly in England, were made with
yeast re-cycled from beer, or ale. This was not widespread, as far as I
can tell, outside of England.

Relatively few breads we eat don't predate that time frame. Croissants
and baguettes are two that come to mind, and they are both helped by
sourdough.

Sourdough existed before San Francisco and will continue to be around
when San Franciso is only a memory.

Sourdough - it isn't just for big 4 bread!
Sourdough - it isn't just for white bread!
Sourdough - it isn't just for bread!

> > Of course, all that is nonsense. Sourdough is an approach to
> > making lots of different kinds of breads (and, by the way,
> > other delicious things), and those breads you are describing
> > sound wonderful to me.
>
> That kind of newbie coddling, Kenneth, is what has got r.f.s.
> to where it is today.

You mean, darn near dead? No, I think the very rude attitudes of a
number of the regulars here has more to do with it. There is a lot of
one upmanship, a lot of deragoatory language and not nearly enough help
and comradarie. Sure, some people come in with yeast based starters and
want to teach us about sourdough. And some boreing people prattle on
and on about "boys and their toys". Some folks do deserve a gentle
tweak. Instead they get a lot of grief. To some extent, I participated
in some of that, and I regret it. (Well, mostly. The boreing person
who prattles on and on deserved everything s/he got. S/he can be polite
in other forums, but chooses to be rude here and them complains about
how s/he is greeted when s/he self admittedly comes back to annoy us.)

Spam is everywhere. Even in healthy newsgroups. The signal to noise
ratio gets poor mostly when there is little signal, which applies here
and now.

The Mike who was here long before the current crop of Mike's