Books and articles by Dafne

White Magic

What is pasta madre or sourdough leavening?? Where can you buy it? How is it different from brewer’s yeast? Isn’t that natural leavening too? Let’s start with the first question: pasta madre isn’t yeast, in the sense that it isn’t a foreign ingredient which is added to the dough to make it rise. On the contrary, it is part of the dough…this is the mystery of the holy trinity regarding pasta madre, biga? and bread which are three but at the same time are one entity.

And it concerns the ability of one food to auto regenerate, to pre-digest itself through a fermentation process in a cycle which renews itself, mutating degeneration in regeneration and death into new life.

Download the pdf of the article published on AAM Terranuova in September 2010