The Starter That Has Been Alive Since 2017
Somewhere in a tub in our cold store is a culture of wild yeast and bacteria that has never stopped being fed since the week we opened in 2017. It has outlasted three ovens' worth of maintenance contracts, two changes of flour supplier, and every member of staff who was here when it started except one. We give it flour and water every morning before the first loaf goes in, seven days a week, including Christmas. It has no name, though people keep asking for one, and we have never quite settled on one that felt right.
What people usually want to know is whether it is really the same starter the whole time, given that we are constantly removing most of it and feeding what remains. The honest answer is that it is a continuous culture, not a fixed object — think of it more like a river than a stone. The specific yeast cells from 2017 are long gone, replaced many times over by their descendants, but the population, the balance of organisms, and the character it produces have been carried forward unbroken since day one. In that sense, yes, it is the same starter. In the sense of being made of the same molecules, obviously not.
It is also, after eight years, still genuinely unpredictable. A change in the weather, a new bag of flour, even a slightly warmer proving room can shift how it behaves within a day. We have baked with this starter long enough to know its usual patterns, and it still occasionally does something we did not expect — rising faster on a cold week, sluggish on a warm one, for reasons we cannot always pin down. Anyone who tells you sourdough baking becomes a fixed formula after enough practice has not been doing it long enough. It stays a negotiation.
The daily feeding is the least glamorous part of the job and the one that cannot be skipped. Miss a day and the culture weakens, its acidity balance shifts, and the bread that comes from it tastes flatter and rises less reliably for days afterward. It is also, unavoidably, waste — we discard roughly a kilogram of spent starter most mornings, because a culture this size needs regular removal to stay healthy, and we have not found a way around that cost. Some of what we discard goes into pancake batter for the staff breakfast. Most of it does not get used at all.
We keep a backup in a second container, refreshed separately, in case anything ever happens to the main tub — a fridge failure, a mistake, whatever it might be. We have never had to use it. We would rather never find out how we would feel if we did.