There's a thing that good sourdough and good dried pasta have in common, and it isn't an ingredient. It's a clock.
A loaf of Zeally Bay sourdough ferments for thirty hours. A packet of L'Abruzzese spaghetti dries at 35 °C for at least two days. Neither number is on the front of the pack, and neither is what most people think about when they pick one up. But it's the whole story. Give flour, water and salt enough time and something happens to them that no shortcut reproduces. This is a guide to what that something is, and to the bakers and pasta makers on our shelves who still bother.
What sourdough actually is
Every risen bread needs gas. Yeast eats sugars in the dough and breathes out carbon dioxide, the dough traps it, and you get crumb instead of a brick. The difference between sourdough and everything else is where that yeast comes from.
A packet of baker's yeast is a single species, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, bred in a factory to do one job fast. It's also newer than most people assume. Compressed yeast turned up in England, Germany and the Netherlands in the 1780s, a pure single-strain culture was first isolated in 1879, and the industrial product we know today was settled by the 1920s. Bread is at least three thousand years older than that. Egyptian records of leavened loaves go back to 1300–1500 BCE, and for all of that time the leavening was a sourdough culture: a living community of wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria kept alive in a jar of flour and water, fed, and used to start the next batch.
Those bacteria are the part that matters. In a mature starter they outnumber the yeasts by roughly a hundred to one. The yeasts make the bread rise; the bacteria make it sour, producing lactic and acetic acid as they work and dragging the dough's pH down to somewhere between 3.8 and 4.6, against 5.3 to 5.8 for a straight yeasted loaf. That acidity is the tang you taste, the reason a sourdough crust caramelises the way it does, and part of why a sourdough loaf holds up on the bench for longer than a yeasted white.
It's also slow, because you can't hurry a culture. Where a commercial dough proves in an hour or two, a sourdough is measured in tens of hours. Zeally Bay's is thirty. Bonfire Bread, another Australian baker, quotes 24 to 48. The flavour and the keeping quality are what that time buys.
Why rye bread is nearly always sourdough
Here's the bit that ties bread and pasta together, and it's pure grain science.
Rye isn't wheat. It carries far more of a fibre called arabinoxylan, five to seven per cent of the grain against one and a half to two and a half in wheat, and it's much richer in the enzyme that breaks starch down. Mix rye flour with water and leave it at a neutral pH and that enzyme goes to work on the starch structure before the loaf has a chance to set. The result won't slice. Bakers have long known this: above about twenty per cent rye in a dough, you have to acidify it or the crumb collapses into paste.
Sourdough is the acidifier. Dropping the pH reins in the enzyme and lets those arabinoxylans absorb water properly, and suddenly you have a dense, elastic, sliceable rye loaf. So for rye, sourdough was never a flavour choice. It's the only way the bread works. Ancient Grains' Rye Grid Sourdough is exactly this: a rye loaf that exists because the grain forced the method.
Grain dictating method is the whole principle. And it's the same principle that makes dried pasta good or bad.
What makes dried pasta worth buying
Dried pasta is two ingredients: durum wheat semolina and water. Durum is a different species from bread wheat, so hard that it's milled into a coarse, sandy semolina rather than a fine flour, and so rich in strong gluten and yellow pigment that Italy, France and Greece each write into law that dried pasta may be made from durum semolina and nothing else.
What separates a good packet from a mediocre one is what happens after mixing. The dough is pushed through a die to give it shape, then dried. And drying is where the shortcuts live.
Industrial lines dry pasta hot and fast, often above 90 °C, and there's an honest reason for it: high heat coagulates the wheat protein quickly, which props up a weak semolina. The food-science literature says this plainly. Drying above 65 °C "can partially compensate for the weakening of the structure" when the raw material isn't strong enough on its own. Fast drying, in other words, is partly a way of rescuing lesser grain.
Slow, cool drying is what you can afford when the grain doesn't need rescuing. It lets the protein network set at its own pace, so the starch stays trapped inside it during cooking. That's the difference between pasta that holds its bite and stays clear in the pot, and pasta that goes slack and clouds the water. Trained tasting panels also find low-temperature-dried pasta less bitter, which comes down to fewer heat-damage compounds forming in the drying room.
"Slow dried" on a label means nothing by itself, though. The same review that explains the science warns that the phrase "is not sufficient to provide clear and univocal indications of pasta quality." What's worth trusting is a number.
The pasta makers on our shelves, with their numbers
Girolomoni is a farmers' co-operative in the hills of the Marche, central Italy, working out of a fourteenth-century monastery at Montebello that Gino Girolomoni spent forty years restoring after arriving there in 1971. They built their own mill in 2019; the semolina travels from mill to pasta factory through a closed pipe they call "the semolina road", the water comes from springs inside two thousand hectares of forest on the estate, and the wheat comes from member farms, most of them in the Marche. The pasta dries for seven to twelve hours depending on the shape, at 60 to 65 °C, in a room heated by a biomass boiler burning local wood chips. Organic certified by ICEA. We stock the durum spaghetti, lasagne sheets, risoni and the spelt fusilli, among others.
L'Abruzzese has been making pasta in Glynde, in Adelaide's east, since 1980, by a family from Abruzzo. Their number is the coldest we know of: dried at 35 °C for a minimum of 48 hours, roughly four days from flour to pack, and extruded through bronze dies that leave the surface rough enough for sauce to cling. Their spelt spaghetti and spelt linguine are actually a blend of Australian organic spelt and khorasan, which is worth knowing if you're choosing for flavour: khorasan brings a buttery, almost sweet note that plain spelt doesn't.
The Stock Merchant makes a clean spelt spaghetti that's a good everyday choice when you want the nuttiness of spelt without the price of imported pasta.
Olive Green Organics is a Sydney company, but the pasta itself is made in Bolivia from Andean grains with rice from neighbouring Argentina, and it's the one we reach for when someone needs pasta with no wheat at all. The high fibre penne is the shape to start with.
Pasta Natura, from Busca in Piedmont, grows its own grain and legumes and makes pasta from them without any wheat: red lentil, chickpea, brown rice, teff. The teff and quinoa conchiglie is a shell shape, which means it holds sauce in a way spaghetti can't.
Pasta Emilia is the fresh one. Anna Maria Eoclidi opened in Bronte in 2005 and has been on Riley Street in Surry Hills since 2012, making fifteen or more organic fresh pastas a week from flour milled in Emilia-Romagna. We stock the duck and truffle tortelli.
The bakers
Healthybake is an Australian family company, baking since 2001 in Lilydale on Melbourne's eastern edge, and they're the backbone of our sourdough shelf. They work in spelt, khorasan, rye and oat, from Australian flours milled to their own specification. Start with the spelt sourdough if you want a loaf that behaves like the wheat bread you grew up with, or the khorasan rolls if you want to taste why people fuss over that grain. The hemp sourdough is the odd one out in the range and worth a try for that reason.
Ancient Grains, out of Croydon South in Victoria, is where to go for the darker, denser end of the spectrum. Their oat sourdough cobb is a five-ingredient loaf, oat flour, sourdough, oat bran, water, olive oil and salt, and the rye grid is the rye bread this whole article has been building toward.
Zeally Bay Sourdough bakes in Torquay on Victoria's Surf Coast, and their leaven is the oldest continuously kept culture we know of in Australian retail: John and Jan Farnan started it in 1981 at their earlier bakery in Geelong and the family has fed it ever since. Thirty-hour fermentation, a stone hearth, no baker's yeast, and every ingredient certified organic or biodynamic. We don't currently carry the loaves, but we do stock their spelt sourdough crumbs and breadcrumbs, which are what happens when a bakery this careful has ends left over.
A word on gluten-free sourdough, because it's a different thing and it's fair to say so. Without gluten there's no elastic network for a wild culture to inflate, so gluten-free bakers build structure another way: starches, gums and psyllium, with a rice-flour sourdough folded in for flavour and a little baker's yeast for lift. That's how Gluten Freedom, from the Venerdi bakery in Auckland, and Schär's millet and quinoa sourdough are made. They're good at what they do. They just aren't thirty-hour loaves, and nobody should pretend otherwise.
If you want to bake it yourself
Nothing here is out of reach at home. Health Kultcha's dried sourdough culture will start you a jar in a few days, Bob's Red Mill spelt flour is forgiving for a first loaf, and if you'd rather try pasta, Willowvale semolina and an egg is the whole recipe. For a sauce that earns a good pasta, Chef's Choice passata rustica is the one we'd put on the table.
Everything above is available online with Sydney delivery, and in store at Leichhardt and Crows Nest. If you're standing in front of the bread and can't decide, ask. Someone on the floor will have an opinion.
