Your New Quarantine Hero Is This Aussie Chef Giving Away Sourdough Starter For Free
In years to come when we reflect on the year that was 2020, what we’re going to remember is ‘that time COVID-19 turned everyone into a baker’.
Now you could stick to the regular kind of bread, if you can find the flour, or you can up your baking game with a bit of DIY artesian sourdough. It’s the superior bread type, we all know it.
Usually, a sourdough starter will set you back around $40. Now, an Aussie chef — who currently lives in New York but got stuck in Australia while visiting family when *all this* started — is sharing hers for free.
Xinyi Lim took inspiration for the idea from a New York art project which sends sourdough culture around the world and maps where it goes: Bread On Earth.
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Her own localised version, which she’s named Start the Spread and I will never recover from, aims to make and maintain human connection is these strange social isolating times.
Lim is mailing out five-gram sachets of air-dried sourdough starter across the country, along with a booklet of instructions and a few personal musings from Lim herself, although she says you’re welcome to ignore that part.
The starter source first came from a woodfire bakery in the Sydney suburb of Annandale called Cherry Moon General Store. As it grew, so did Lim’s idea to share it around with more people than just her friends and family. And boy did it grow fast, with over 450 requests in only a few days.
These sachets are totally free, although if you have the means, it’s encouraged to send a donation that at least covers postage. Which seems very fair, especially considering Lim is still doing this whole operation on her own.
If you’d like to receive your own sourdough starter, you just need to email your name and address to [email protected]. Just be prepared for understandable delays.
You can find more info on the Start The Spread project via her Instagram page here.
(Lead Image: Instagram / @megafaunafood)
