Sons of mother yeast

Mother yeast - everyone is talking about it. Many use it for their dough. However, it is perhaps truly known only by few. Is it a current trend, following the desire for cool foods, that are of course genuine but also refined, alternative, told and sectioned by crowds of food blogger? Or is it the emerging of a necessity, of an archaic need that emerges once again in our collective conscience of once-famers, an unavoidable return to the past, to slow gestures, and secrets told from mother to daughter?

As a pizza-researcher, I personally hope it is some sort of peaceful cultural revolution: mother yeast not only as part of a daily healthy food, but also as the model of a new – yet very ancient – way of experiencing our relationship with food. Calm and slow. Because mother yeast is the result of a process requiring constant attention and care, long periods of rest after the kneading (as well as a lot of love).

However, before getting on the rolling board with flour and water and starting to mix it, freshen it up and leave it to serenely raise, why not define, once and for all, the meaning of mother yeast? Why not give us some real rules, forming a non-profit association of professionals, with rules that can explain what is an active mother yeast and what needs to be done to be able to obtain it?

During the latest edition of Taste in Florence, I had been invited to discuss on this fragrant topic together with a group of artisans and experts in the filed, and I felt this necessity very clearly. Not just for the sake of us professionals, who use flours and yeast every day and live a natural intimacy with the art of baking, but most of all, for the sake of our clients and of all consumers: I imagine them at the supermarket, while they handle a bag on which the contradictory (and in my opinion dishonest) saying “dried mother yeast” is written, or in a bar, in front of a “naturally leavened” croissant, wondering what that can mean, or on the Internet, wondering about the latest aggressive remarks against the – poor and ever more ill-treated – brewer’s yeast. I find it unfair that sly market reasons can generate confusion and fear regardless of the good faith of unaware consumers.

This is why I would like to invite all my colleagues who, like me, work every day with conscience and passion, trying to use all raw materials in the most adequate way, each flour and yeast, chosen on the base of the dough that needs to be created. Why don’t we sit down and write the good baking rules all together?

This is how the idea of creating Figli di pasta madre (Sons of mother yeast) was born, an association meant to represent a symbol of quality to place on all the products that are prepared with mother yeast. This is a proposal that I extend to all the colleagues who want to make it their own and become Figli di pasta madre together with me, so that we can grow, in fact we can leaven and create a new, healthy and lively fermentation in the marvellous world of bread making.

1. to be continued