The pandemic-fueled sourdough frenzy isn’t over

A look back at the bread-baking portion of the pandemic with Wildflour Bakery’s Karen Quinones — who made her pandemic-era sourdough hobby into her job.

CAMILA DOMONOSKE, HOST:

Remember the sourdough portion of the pandemic?

KAREN QUINONES: You know, we were on our phones a lot. We were watching the news a lot, and something that kept coming up on my news feeds were sourdough, sourdough, sourdough.

DOMONOSKE: That’s Karen Quinones of Monrovia, Calif. She was a nurse whose surgical center was shut down. Surrounded by lockdowns and curfews and isolation and wildfires and an earthquake, she decided to try baking this bread she kept hearing about. It grew into more than she’d imagined. Today, Quinones is the owner of Wildflour Bakery. I asked her how her very first attempts at sourdough turned out.

QUINONES: Bad, really bad – at the time, my first loaf was May of 2020, after making my sourdough starter about two weeks prior, and I thought it was the best-tasting bread I had ever tasted. But now, in hindsight, I take a look at the bread, and it was actually pretty gummy. And it was over-fermented. I just didn’t know what I was looking for. I really didn’t know what I was doing. I was just happy that it looked like bread and it tasted like bread.

DOMONOSKE: I have made many a loaf of sourdough like that (laughter).

QUINONES: Yes (laughter). So I was just like, wow, I’m making bread, you know? So it’s kind of a magical thing to be able to do something like make bread. I’ve been a cook for a really long time, and there hasn’t been anything as satisfying to me as making a loaf of bread.

DOMONOSKE: Right. And how did you learn how to make sourdough in these conditions where you’re in lockdown, you’re not working, everyone’s stuck at home? How did you do it?

QUINONES: You know, I always say I went to the university of YouTube. That’s where I got my education. So I followed some YouTubers. Joshua Weissman – I used his first loaf….