GEORGE TOWN, Sept 21 — If you mix unbleached flour and filtered water, what do you get?

Plain dough with a lot of potential to become something good, delicious and healthy.

If the dough is “fed” and left to ferment properly, you are on the way to making the starter for sourdough bread.This is how the delicious baked goods at Yin’s Sourdough Bakery start out.

Chan Su Yin, better known as Yin amongst her customers, had been making homemade bread for her family for almost a decade but it was only three years ago that she learnt about the goodness of naturally leavened bread.

The former pharmaceutical salesperson was living in the United States with her husband and three children when she started experimenting with the various ways to make healthy bread, particularly the kinds that use minimal ingredients, zero chemicals, no preservatives nor additives and have all the benefits of “live” cultures.

“I started making sourdough bread for my family using unbleached flour and filtered water and even taught my mother how to make her own sourdough bread,” she said.

The kitchen staff busy preparing the dough to be baked

Soon, her family, relatives and friends were hooked on her healthy and delicious bread.

“My mother is diabetic and we found that after eating this bread, just two slices a day, her blood sugar has been under control since,” she said.

Yin decided to read more about the benefits of sourdough bread and found research that suggests it may be beneficial for people with diabetes and those with gluten intolerance.

“Though it is made of flour, the process of making it such as the fermentation has broken it down and the live cultures gave the bread more beneficial nutrients as compared to plain normal bread using commercial yeast,” she said.

Making sourdough bread is not an easy process despite its simple ingredients as it takes time, patience and lots of love where the “starter” or pre-ferment needs to be cared for and fed at precise times daily.

“I told my daughters that I have a ‘baby’ to take care of as I have to ‘feed’ the ‘starter’ every day to let it rise and ferment,” Yin joked.

The fermented dough is shaped before it is baked

The original ‘mother dough’ starter was made using just unbleached flour and water where it was left to ferment and ‘fed’ with more flour and water on a regular basis to allow it to grow and stay alive.

This process can take days or weeks. Once the “mother dough” is ready, it can be used to culture fresh starters that are then used for bread-making.

The whole fermentation process for a starter using a “mother dough” can take up to 10 hours or so, depending on the room temperature.

Yin’s sourdough bakery offers a variety of buns such as coconut bun, cranberries walnut bun, foccacia, cinnamon roll and bagels

The resulting bread from the fermented dough is soft, solid, fragrant and most importantly, healthy and boasts of a low glycemic index (GI) — an important factor for diabetics or those on a low GI diet.

When Yin and her family moved back to Penang, they set up a small bakery near their home in Balik Pulau to introduce the wonders of leavened bread to locals.

Her bakery started out with only several types of bread using sourdough and customers were given the option to custom order the types of bread they wanted and then pick up their order at selected pick-up points throughout the state.

Soon, the bakery was supplying a selection of sourdough bread to several organic food stores all around the state.

“Most of our customers are in town so we arranged to deliver their orders at the pick-up points — organic food stores — and we also made more to supply to these stores,” she said.

A little more than a year after opening the bakery in Balik Pulau, Yin decided to relocate to George Town for easier access by its wide customer base.

Yin taking out freshly baked sourdough bread

Yin’s Sourdough Bakery is now at Pesara Claimant in George Town and it has expanded to include a cozy little café where customers can enjoy the scones, buns, toasts or delicious homemade panini sandwiches for brunch, lunch or tea break.

Instead of making only the usual German rye sourdough bread, Yin’s bakery uses sourdough as the basis for its variety of buns and bread.

To date, the bakery has 12 types of bread that includes coconut buns, cinnamon rolls, cranberry walnut buns, polo buns, cranberry walnut whole wheat boule, foccacia and loaves of whole wheat bread, country white bread and classic white bread.

Chocolate muffin with beetroot cream cheese topped with strawberries

Amazingly, though all these buns and bread are free from any preservatives, colouring, additives or any bread conditioners and chemicals, they also have anti-fungal qualities so they have a longer shelf-life than other organic, preservative-free bread.

“All my bread lasts about five days in room temperature and due to the fermentation process, it does not grow mould easily too,” Yin said.

Other than culturing her “mother dough” and new starters every day for the next day’s batch of bread and buns, Yin also makes kefir.

Kefir is another cultured item but it is a probiotic beverage similar to yogurt in which milk is fermented with Kefir grains.

Sourdough scone topped with cranberries and walnut

“This is another of our healthy products but we also sell Kefir grains to some customers who prefer to make their own using goat’s milk or coconut milk because they can’t take cow’s milk,” she said.

Though the bakery has a selection of bread and buns for walk-in customers, Yin said it is best for those who want more to place orders first.

This is true because by 3pm, most of the bread is gone. The bakery is open from 7am to 4pm on weekdays and only open for half a day on Saturdays.

It is closed on Sundays.

Yin’s Sourdough Bakery 11, Pesara Claimant, 10100 George Town, Penang www.yinssourdough.com Tel: 01124195118 Email: info@yinssourdough.com