It’s Alive!

In May 2020, Web Exclusive by Lauren KruchtenLeave a Comment

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WEB EXCLUSIVE Homemade bread is trending. If you’ve been on Instagram or Facebook in the last couple months, you’ll have seen a lot of people are baking bread with their extra free time in quarantine. And if you haven’t, you might’ve realized that flour and other baking supplies are scarce on grocery store shelves.

Some breads are harder to bake than others. Banana bread is an easier project that anyone can master with cheap, over-ripened bananas. Focaccia is also fairly easy and can be decorated with leftover produce in your fridge or herbs from your garden. Sourdough bread, on the other hand, is trickier, as it requires a sourdough starter that takes time and patience to develop.

That’s where Endless Ferments comes in.

The recently launched company specializes in sourdough starter culture, as well as kombucha starter culture, that kick starts the process of baking sourdough bread for you. The starter contains a mixture of flour and water combined with wild yeast and healthy bacteria. To get the sourdough process started, simply add fresh flour and water to the starter and let it ferment for a few days before baking.

Endless Ferments Sourdough Starter
Endless Ferments Sourdough Starter

Although Endless Ferments launched just in time for the current bread craze, co-founder Patrick Hill of e-commerce agency Backpack Partners and his team have been working on the product for a few months now. Hill got into making sourdough through his brother, and since he’s been staying at home, has taken up baking as a personal hobby. He says it’s a great way to avoid going to the grocery store and ultimately saves him money as he’s not buying bread from the store.

“[Baking bread] is something that we think everyone should do,” Hill says. “Endless Ferments are all alive, active and ready to go so can start instantly and continue indefinitely.”

Carroll’s Kitchen, a nonprofit social enterprise restaurant in downtown Raleigh, is currently growing Endless Ferments starters. The restaurant was looking for more work, as right now it’s only able to offer takeout, so the partnership came about naturally. “We needed help growing the sourdough and they needed help providing for their employees, so it really worked out,” says Hill. For every sourdough starter sold, 10 percent of the sale goes to Carroll’s.

The kombucha starter, on the other hand, is made out of Endless Ferments’ facility on Ebenezer Church Road. Endless Ferments’ kombucha cans contain live starter culture to grow your own SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast)—the “mother” of kombucha. To get started, just open the can, add black tea and ferment for about seven to 14 days. Once it has fermented, you can bottle the kombucha with fruit, herbs, extracts or other ingredients like ginger to create any flavor you desire.

Endless Ferments Kombucha Starter Culture
Endless Ferments Kombucha Starter Culture

Hill says that there are benefits of brewing your own kombucha at home, too. For starters, it’s way more cost-effective than buying an average five dollar bottle of kombucha at the grocery store. Many store-bought kombuchas are also pasteurized and don’t have as many probiotics as if they had been brewed at home. Kombucha is said to be great for gut health and skin.

Once you purchase the kombucha and sourdough starters you can use them over and over again, as long as you continue to feed and ferment them. “The hope is that Endless Ferments makes it easier for everyone to make [sourdough and kombucha] at home,” Hill says. Hill and his team are using the kombucha and sourdough starters for the initial launch of their company; later, they hope to expand into other products as well.

Purchase Endless Ferments kombucha and sourdough starters at endlessferments.com.

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