This Subscription for Homemade Sourdough Bread Means No More Starters to Worry About
2020 was the year of sourdough. With yeast shortages at catastrophic levels in the early days of the pandemic, everyone suddenly realized at once that one could bake bread, great bread, with an all-natural wild yeast starter, no commercial yeast needed. It was a golden age of self-efficacy, as the world embraced the breadmaking methods of the ancients, and jars of goo got witty names like Bread Pitt and Trisha Yeastwood and became like family members.
RELATED: 5 Rookie Sourdough Mistakes and How to Fix Them
As life has normalized a bit, many of us still maintain and bake with our starters, having gotten bit hard by the sourdough bug, whipping up pancakes and crackers with the discard. But not everyone. For some, the ongoing maintenance of a sourdough starter and the days-long process of baking from scratch got lumped in with the rest of the kitchen fatigues as a project that they no longer had the bandwidth to tackle.
RELATED: 7 Tools You Need to Start Baking Sourdough
But once you have gone sourdough, from an eating perspective, it is hard to go back. And if you are not fortunate enough to live in stone's throw of a terrific artisanal bakery, suddenly you have what seems like two bad choices: tedious baking from scratch, which while delicious never results in a great mood, or sad grocery store bread that never results in great dining.
The answer to our sourdough dreams: a subscription!
Enter Wildgrain. This first of its kind sourdough subscription service gives you all the amazing artisanal sourdough breads and pastries of your dreams, delivered frozen right to your door! These par-baked loaves are finished in your oven, for all the fresh bread flavor and aroma, but with none of the fuss. You bake straight from frozen, so you are never more than half an hour from a fresh loaf.
The boxes arrive either bi-monthly, monthly, or every six weeks, but you can adjust the frequency to suit your needs at any time, skip a delivery easily, or cancel with no penalties. Each box contains a mixture of loaves, pastries like croissants or cinnamon rolls, and hand-cut pasta. If you sign up now, you will get a free package of sourdough brioche rolls in every box for the life of your subscription, perfect for dinner rolls or sandwiches.
Courtesy Wildgrain / Meredith
Why I love this sourdough subscription
The products are all vegetarian, and made with non-GMO clean ingredients, naturally fermented to make them healthier, reducing the gluten content, providing probiotics, and creating lactic acid which helps the body absorb nutrients. But the most important part is that they are delicious. I am still in the sourdough camp of bakers, as I have been for over 5 years. It took me 18 months to get a bread that I really thought was great. And first loaf out of the box from Wildgrain, and I was a believer. They are absolutely baking the breads I want when I don't have time to bake myself. The pastries are wonderful, and I'm not making homemade croissants anytime soon. And to have beautiful fresh pastas in the freezer for those last-minute meals makes them feel like an indulgence and not a plan B.
The cost—$89 per box—can feel like a lot, but what we're talking about is getting the kind of bread you'd pay a similar price for at an artisanal bakery, not to mention the fact that it's arriving at your door ready to store, so you're not making those trips multiple times a month. And for folks living far from a great bakery, this is like having one move in as your next-door neighbor. Did I mention the smell of baking bread without all that fuss?
The bottom line
If you want to always have superior breads for every occasion, give your neglected starter to an ambitious pal, and head over to Wildgrain and sign up for a subscription, and don't forget to claim your free rolls for life!
Buy it: Wildgrain Sourdough Subscription ($89), wildgrain.com
