The HealthFerm sourdough community is growing!
Over the past weeks, we have been receiving many new registrations from sourdough enthusiasts from all over Europe, motivated to become part of our HealthFerm project. The HealthFerm Citizen Science community has now grown to more than 800 sourdough lovers!
The countries with the most citizen scientists signed up so far are Switzerland (289), Finland (129), Germany (110), Belgium (92), Italy (31), Romania (28), Netherlands (18), France (18), England (13), Denmark (12), and Austria (11). Please help us continue growing our community over the next few weeks before we stop collecting sourdough samples by late spring. We kindly ask you to spread the word to all your friends and acquaintances and share the project link with all sourdough enthusiasts you know, especially those living in countries and regions with relatively fewer registrations. As you can see from the map below, we have not received a lot of signups from Portugal, Spain, and most countries in north-eastern Europe. Also, we barely have any registrations from Greece. Greek sourdough enthusiasts, where are you?!
Figure 1: Location of HealthFerm citizen scientists currently registered in Europe. Each dot represents one of you! Registration points are colored according to the flour types you indicated to use for the feeding of your sourdoughs.
Why do you keep your Juuris, Freddies, Tarwebloems, Maias… ?
Do you recognize the name of your sourdough on the word cloud below (Figure 2A)? Many sourdough enthusiasts within our HealthFerm citizen science community consider their sourdough as an important ‘family member’ deserving of a cute or fun name. In our registration survey, we collect a lot of information about each specific sourdough, such as the ingredient composition and fermentation parameters which we will correlate with the future microbial and chemical analysis data from the lab. Linking these different factors, all contributing to the uniqueness of your sourdoughs, will give you and us a better understanding about which specific parameters of the fermentation process impact the microbial communities thriving within the sourdoughs, and how this directly translates to bread texture, flavor, and nutritional quality. So far, most HealthFerm citizen scientists maintain their sourdough mainly because they like the taste of sourdough bread and like baking bread themselves (Figure 2B). Additionally, more than 50% of you indicated that you bake with sourdough due to perceived health benefits. This is exactly what we will be looking for when analyzing the microbial communities within your sourdoughs: identifying microbes and studying what they do that can potentially benefit human health.
Figure 2: sourdoughs are often considered as ‘domestic animals’ or ‘family members’. A) They are given cute and fun names. B) Overview of the most frequent reasons indicated by HealthFerm citizen scientists on why they keep, take care of and bake with sourdough.
Most frequently used flour types for sourdough in Europe
We are currently on the last lap in our sample collection with the goal of achieving a comprehensive coverage across Europe. The complex analysis procedures in the lab will be started only after finishing the collection process because we aim to analyze all the sourdoughs in one go to make sure that measurements are comparable across all sourdoughs. What we can do now though - besides asking you to help reach even better registration coverage in Europe ;) - is look at your survey responses and do some statistics. For example, we combined the survey responses from all countries we’ve received registrations so far and extracted the information about the used flour types. Most European sourdough lovers use wheat (more than 50%, see Figure 3), with white wheat (43%) being more preferred over wholemeal wheat (8.6%). Rye sourdoughs are also quite popular (26.5%), with a bigger proportion preferring to use wholemeal rye flour (14.7%) over white rye flour (11.9%). About 10% of you like to experiment with and optimize their sourdoughs by feeding them with self-composed flour mixtures.
Figure 3: Proportions of flour types used during sourdough feeding. For each cereal (wheat, rye and spelt), white (lighter color) and wholemeal flour (darker brown) are distinguished. Multigrain, self-composed mixtures and other flour types are shown in a medium brown color.
What do we do next with all the collected sourdoughs?
We are currently conserving your samples at -80 °C for more in-depth analysis, which will be done and results communicated as soon as we gather a sufficient number of samples (our community goal of approximately 1000 citizen scientists with good coverage across entire Europe). This means you can actually help speed up the process by encouraging more sourdough lovers to participate in our project ;)!
Once we reach this community goal and all the samples arrived in our labs, we will start looking into chemical and microbial compositions of your sourdoughs. Very in-depth analyses, so-called ‘omics’ approaches, will be used to capture and characterize as many sourdough microbes and metabolites as possible. Stay tuned for more news, updates, and insights on which techniques we will apply for the analysis of your sourdoughs in the upcoming months.
- The HealthFerm project team
