The Culture Index

Starters with histories.

Documented cultures — where they came from, who kept them alive, and how they got to now. These are field reports, not formulas. Some of these organisms have been continuously fed for longer than most countries have existed.

A sourdough starter is the only kitchen ingredient that can have a provenance. Keep one alive and you’re maintaining an unbroken chain of feeding that stretches back to whoever mixed the first jar. These are the ones worth writing down. If you want to make one rather than read about one, that’s Starter School.

Poilâne Levain

The culture behind Paris’s most famous bakery, kept alive since 1932. Three generations, one wood-fired oven, one unbroken lineage.

Carl Griffith’s 1847

Carried west on the Oregon Trail, passed to a ten-year-old at a Basque sheep camp, and kept alive since by strangers mailing it to each other.

OriginOregon Trail

Blackley’s Ancient Egyptian

In 2019 the co-creator of the Xbox used syringes in museum basements to extract dormant yeast from 4,500-year-old pottery. Then he baked with it.