From Hong Kong Streets to the Guangzhou Countryside: My Journey with Sourdough Bread

I. Origins

I loved it.

The village where I lived was in the Northern District of the New Territories, designated early on as a strategic new development area due to its proximity to Shenzhen. Although most residents had been rooted there since their grandparents’ generation, they held no officially recognised title to their land or homes. The government regarded them as if they were nothing; years of advocacy could not shift the development plans. After graduating from university, I arrived here carrying little more than a thin thread of sympathy. From the spirited early years of resistance to the crushing low after the full weight of suppression came down, in a landscape where resistance was impossible, in a village where the end could come at any moment, we clung to the small things in life. Like tending to a lump of batter, watching it grow, contributing a little sourdough starter each day, and using it to bake bread—how delightful that was.

That jar of fermented batter was a “sourdough starter”. Grain flour mixed with water, repeatedly “fed”, given enough time for various yeasts and bacteria—each with its own leavening power and flavour—to land and take root; once relatively stable, you have a sourdough starter. Add the starter to dough, let it ferment, divide and shape it, ferment again, bake—and you have sourdough bread.

I brought sourdough bread to my village neighbours. Together we made old-dough mantou (a rare thing in the south, and especially in Hong Kong), and agreed to bake sourdough by the paddies. Thinking back, they may not have loved the sourdough bread all that much, but a longing for new things and new friends, and an aspiration towards a full and healthy daily life, found expression through the bread—and the sourdough starter, like us, entered their lives.

A sourdough starter needs daily maintenance: feeding it flour and water at a fixed ratio to keep it active. Feeding is about creating an apt, stable growing environment for the diverse microbial community. Temperature, water-to-flour ratio, frequency of feeding, type of flour… Countless combinations mean countless microbial communities, and in turn countless flavours of bread.

The villages of Hong Kong are, in a sense, similar to the microbial community within a sourdough starter. No matter how other industries in Hong Kong rise and fall, the villages grow wild amid the flood of urban expansion, forming loosely knit yet resilient community networks within. Scattered farmland and small-to-medium workshops are vital parts of many villagers’ lives and livelihoods; older residents can largely be self-sustaining, many working-age people maintain a livelihood outside the city’s crushing pressures, and countless creatures find precious habitat—even if, by the reckoning of mainstream economics, none of this is worth mentioning.

These rural areas are a bit like a sourdough starter that has gone without feeding for a while: you get stray microbes with odd flavours and no leavening power, not exactly thriving, yet you can still pull a loaf out of them—and occasionally stumble upon an unexpectedly special flavour.

In 2019, some villagers were forced into “voluntary relocation to public housing” (renting or purchasing high-rise apartments in which the government held a stake), and the decades-long, multi-generational history of self-sustaining, “wild” rural life drew to a close. Demolition destroyed the possibility of nurturing a self-reliant environment, while villagers were recast as scoundrels squatting on land to claim compensation. Those who moved into high-rise flats became genuinely vulnerable, forced to depend on chain stores, social welfare organisations, meagre government allowances and welfare—yet still unable to settle.

The friend who introduced me to the sourdough starter is called Xiaodou. She had come across sourdough a few years earlier and become utterly obsessed, fervently feeding many kinds of starter babies raised on different grain flours, and enthusiastically sharing both the starters and the possibility of making sourdough bread easily at home. In her view, sourdough bread should not belong exclusively to upmarket foreign bakeries, nor only to the stratum of people with overseas living experience who can accept it. It could be part of the daily life of housewives, busy working people, or any grassroots citizen willing to take a little more control over their everyday existence.

Compared with making bread using instant yeast, making a sourdough loaf is time-consuming. Instant yeast is a purified culture of yeast; at the right temperature, from mixing the dough to pulling the loaf from the oven, three or four hours suffice. With an automated bread machine, the entire process needs no supervision at all.

But sourdough bread? Before mixing, you must first prepare an active levain—that alone takes a minimum of three or four hours. Then you mix the dough, go through two rounds of fermentation, and finally bake—around six or seven hours in total. Ten hours for one loaf—where would anyone find the time?!

But what if we shift our thinking and treat the sourdough process as keeping company with a community of living beings? The microbial community that plays the pivotal role in bread fermentation is either activated or suppressed depending on the environment, with different species rising and falling in succession. If we create the right conditions—chiefly temperature—so that the microbial community harmonises with the rhythm of our own lives—for instance, restraining its growth at low temperatures when we are too busy to tend to it, and carving the continuous ten hours into several segments according to our own routines, stretching them across two days or more—then making sourdough bread ceases to consume time and becomes a companion to life. Once you find the rhythm where the starter and daily living fit together, you can freely enjoy the pleasure of nurturing a sourdough loaf.

Xiaodou’s peer learning group gathered a circle of friends drawn in by sourdough bread. We met roughly once a month, sharing the joy of baking bread and other fermented foods, and swapping ingredients. Each person was a little universe, baking bread for those around them. Especially after 2019, as partners supported one another through absurdity and despair, holding on to whatever scrap of courage kept us going.

3

Sourdough Starter in Commercial Bakeries

In 2020, after two years of baking at home, I decided to take a job at a bakery. I wanted to see how a truly delicious sourdough was made, and I began to think of bread-making as a future livelihood.

I chose the bakery I considered to have the best sourdough in Hong Kong. Unlike many shops that wave sourdough and wild yeast as a pretence while selling overpriced quick-yeast loaves, this one—despite being a scaled operation—genuinely used sourdough with cold long fermentation, the whole process from maintaining the starter to pulling the loaf from the oven taking three days.

It was also different from a one- or two-person micro-bakery: it had a full workshop, dividing the bread-making into separate stages—which was a point the owner took great pride in. Sourdough bread, with so many uncontrollable variables in its production, could indeed be made at scale with consistent quality!

The bakery’s sourdough starter was very healthy: fed at a fixed time each day, kept at a constant temperature to ferment, it developed a precisely stable flavour. Each day the owner revised the formula and production quantities, printed them out, and handed them to the staff, who simply followed the fixed procedures.

The owner did his best to account for every variable, driving the uncontrollable elements in production to the bare minimum. He required staff to photograph key stages and report back to him—the dough temperature after mixing, the loaves just before loading into the oven, and so on. Staff were the least important element of the bakery; all that mattered was having hands and feet and being able to understand instructions. It was hard to say whether the staff had no value, so the owner worked harder to keep everything under control, or whether the owner’s obsession with total control had rendered the staff valueless.

After five months working there, I was exhausted. The physical burden was secondary; what undid me was that I could no longer eat the bread. The smell of baking loaves made me tense and nauseous, as though I were back in that workshop thick with blame and complaints. I still thought the bread in that shop was outstanding—simply unable to take another bite.

The people making the bread were unhappy, yet the consumers eating it had no idea, and perhaps did not care, because the bakery, having set aside the workshop’s workers, had reshaped the atmosphere and values presented to customers. I cannot deny the bakery’s worth in introducing good sourdough to the public, but clearly I could no longer be part of making bread that way.

What was worse, the joy of baking and sharing bread with others had vanished. I always felt my bread was not good enough. The dogs I was living with during that time helped me eat a great deal of bread, so much so that they now turn their heads away at the sight of it. It was so dispiriting.

IV. The Sourdough Starter Takes to the Streets

After 2019, compounded by the pandemic, many people lost faith in the establishment, yet their freedom of action narrowed. “Why not set up outside the MTR station selling breakfast bread!” suggested a friend whose stable job had been forcibly interrupted by the political situation.

Outside the rural-adjacent station lay a large open space, part of which was a holiday street market made up of container stalls laid out by the government, while the adjacent vacant lot was often occupied by aunties and grandmothers selling their own farm produce or even late-night snacks. Although informal vending was illegal, and regulation had become stricter under the pandemic’s gathering restrictions and mandatory mask orders, more people were driven to take the risk out of sheer necessity.

Armed with the mindset of “we’re going to practise making bread anyway; if someone wants to eat it or even pay for it, all the better”, we stuffed the loaves into our bags and walked outside. Under the pandemic, growing attention to health and food meant more people had heard of sourdough bread, and riding on people’s sympathy and goodwill towards young people, we enjoyed a remarkably open and friendly selling environment from the start.

Selling face to face, trust came easily. Besides sourdough bread and sweet cakes, a friend who loved pour-over coffee also came along to lend a hand. We would bring the sourdough starter out and share it with anyone who wanted one.

During the pandemic, people in masks surprisingly accepted our refusal to pre-wrap anything—we bagged the loaves into paper bags right in front of them. People even disregarded the regulations, pulling their masks off to eat bread, drink coffee, and chat and laugh together.

Apart from selling bread, mingling among the aunties’ and grandmothers’ stalls was what excited us most: helping one another sell goods, asking neighbours to sample new products, or working together to play hide-and-seek with the government departments that came sweeping through.

V. The Migrating Sourdough Starter, the Community Longed For

I returned from Hong Kong to the mainland before the pandemic restrictions were lifted, enduring a week of quarantine with my sourdough starter. Even in autumn, the Lingnan region saw temperatures above 25°C—at which the starter needed feeding at least once a day. Before setting off, I tucked the starter into an insulated box packed with ice packs and brought along enough flour for daily feeding. Feeding it each day was no trouble, but what to do with the surplus sourdough produced every day was rather a nuisance. It was during this quarantine, remarkably, that I made a breakthrough: steaming mantou with the sourdough starter that were not sour at all, in place of the dreadful quarantine meals.

That was the most tense period before the lockdowns were lifted. As soon as quarantine ended, I set off with my dogs for the countryside outside Guangzhou, to visit the sourdough bread workshop in Yinlin village, Conghua. Before this, I had many imaginings about what ingredients bread-making ought to use, but little practical experience. If one treats the sourdough starter and dough with the same care one would show to a community of living beings, then surely one must use additive-free or organic flour. But seeing that the Chitu Workshop at Yinlin used entirely domestic ecological smallholder flour still took me aback. Imported organic flour was no more expensive than domestic ecological smallholder flour, yet the latter was less consistent and differed greatly from European flour, making it all the harder to bake loaves of reliably stable quality that measured up to traditional European-style bread standards.

The workshop’s bread was not remarkable in flavour, yet it carried a quiet, everyday strength—without quite realising it, you found it woven into your daily meals, a food you missed from time to time. In an ecologically thriving village, even the bread was made with mountain spring water—something I had never experienced before.

More fortunate still, the workshop was set within Yinlin Ecological Farm, and seamlessly incorporating the farm’s produce into the bread was quite the norm—brown rice, dried lychee, sweet potato, lemon, and so on. I could feel that the smallholders’ ecological flour, vegetables, and fruit were not simply stand-ins for conventional ingredients but the very heart of the bread. What came out of the oven was absolutely not a replica of shop-bought bread with the ingredients swapped; it was bread with a distinctive character all its own, radiant with the vitality of the land on which the workshop stood.

There were everyday consumers of sourdough bread right in the village, lives intertwined, exchanging bread for home-grown produce and handmade goods; the workshop collaboratively nurtured the sourdough starter, and the starter nurtured a community encompassing people and other living beings alike.

Here, I used up the last of the German flour I had grown accustomed to and began feeding my sourdough starter with domestic smallholder ecological flour. Afterwards, I carried the strength-bearing sourdough starter back to my birthplace, a place now strange to me, hoping to ferment new communities and relationships—together, to create a habitat where we could all thrive in symbiosis.

Foodthink contributor

Sanjiao

Loves discovering food and ingredients, and is now trying to make a living from bread, linking all beings other than oneself.

 

 

 

 

A Note from Foodthink

Fermentation allows us to rebuild our connections with one another, to create new communities and social bonds, and to reclaim a measure of food sovereignty within an ever-more-homogenised food empire. Would you like to hear more stories “fermenting” out of fermented food? Tonight at 19:00, Foodthink and Lakeshore Culture will hold the fourth discussion of The Art of Fermentation reading group at Rendez-vous bookstore, with insights from guest speakers Shuyu and Jingyan. A very few in-person places remain; please register or book a place for the online livestream.

This weekend, Foodthink’s Ferment Awakening Festival will join forces with Chengdu Life Market (26 November) and Nanning Urban Farmers’ Market (25–26 November) to host fermentation markets in Chengdu and Nanning. Come and taste homemade fermented delicacies made by our farming friends and feel the magic of fermentation!

 

About the Ferment Awakening Festival

The Ferment Awakening Festival was launched by Foodthink in October 2023, partnering with dozens of farmers’ markets, farms, fermented-food artisans, restaurants, publishers, and charitable organisations nationwide as co-creators. Themed around fermented foods, it offers more than two months of online and in-person events across cities and communities in China, including screenings of The Alchemy of Food video series, fermentation-themed markets, reading groups, film screenings, talks, workshops, and tastings.

Follow the Foodthink WeChat Official Account and the social media channels of our co-creator partners to receive the latest videos, articles, podcasts, and event updates, find fermentation events near you, meet more fellow fermenters, and let fermentation awaken life!

Ferment | Awakening | Festival 

– Hosts –

Foodthink Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market

– Co-creators –

Lakeshore Culture Bule Cheese Yijian Bread Xiucai Bean Workshop

Happy Lab Nine Inch Craft Brewery Houttuynia Garden Daxiao Coffee

Qiaolike Niupi Tang White Tiger Village coffea SHED

Chengdu Life Market Nanning Urban Farmers’ Market Fengnianqing

(List updated on an ongoing basis)

– Supporters –

Tianren Culture Heyi Holdings

Editor: Tianle