55 Best Sourdough Bread Quotes – Funny and Inspiring

As a major sourdough fanatic, I’m always game to hear a good sourdough quote.

Yes, I love the inspirational ones. I also appreciate the educational ones that emphasize just how beneficial sourdough is for your body. And I cannot leave out a quote that brings a smile to my face!

I’ve spend the last few weeks reading books, interview transcripts, and going into the deep, dark places of the Internet to find the best sourdough quotes for every occasion.

Whether you want to laugh, get sentimental, or just stew in your love of sourdough, here are over 50 sourdough quotes to share and save for later.

Inspirational Sourdough Quotes

This compilation of inspirational bread quotes (I did my best to find sourdough quotes, specifically) features amazing writers like Eric Pallant, incredible chefs like James Beard, and pop culture icons like Claire Saffitz (love her!).

These quotes bring on the warm fuzzies, and many of them highlight just how incredible sourdough is for the body. If you didn’t want to bake a loaf of sourdough, you will now!

“If you really want to make a friend, go round someone’s house with a freshly baked loaf of sourdough bread.” –Chris Geiger
“When we make something from start to finish with our bare hands and it’s delicious and it brings joy to friends and family, it becomes hard to do anything else but bake, am I right?” –Tara Jenson, Flour Power
“[…] Making any sourdough bread connects each baker to a history of sustenance and pleasure, revolution and self-sufficiency, scientific discovery and creativity that stretches back to early human settlements […].”–Eric Pallant, Sourdough Culture
“Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts.” – James Beard

“[S]ourdough eventually becomes a way of life. Experimenting with different ways of using it is one of the most satisfying aspects of using wild yeast in your kitchen.” –Christa Parrish, Stones for Bread
“The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight.” – M.F.K. Fisher
Life is too short for bread that’s not fermented. –Unknown
“Sourdough is basically an edible Tamagotchi.” –Meik Wiking, The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well
Be like sourdough: warm, comforting, and good for the soul. –Unknown
“I think bread is magic. I just think it’s so magical that you can mix basically three ingredients – water, flour, and salt – and get something delicious. That’s a little minor miracle every single day in your kitchen.” –Meredith Laurence
Like sourdough, good things take time to rise. –Unknown
“Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again, because every time, the solution was consumed. I mean, really: chewed and digested. Thus, the problem was ongoing. Thus, the problem was perhaps the point.” –Robin Sloan, Sourdough
“I needed a more interesting life. I could start by learning something. I could start with the starter.”― Robin Sloan, Sourdough

“If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars and all the heavens.” –Robert Browning
“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” –Mahatma Gandhi
“Without bread all is misery.” –William Cobbett
“Bread deals with living things, with giving life, with growth, with the seed, the grain that nurtures. Its not coincidence that we say bread is the staff of life.” –Lionel Poilne
“Bread is the king of the table and all else is merely the court that surrounds the king. The countries are the soup, the meat, the vegetables, the salad but bread is king.” –Louis Bromfield
“I love baking, it’s the most calming thing for me. It’s therapeutic, it makes the house smell good, and I get to take the goods to my friends. I do it for other people.” –Lily Collins
“Sourdough is a paradox because it’s simultaneously very simple and very complex.” –Claire Saffitz

“Knowledge is flour, but wisdom is bread.” –Austin O’Malley
“Bread – like real love – took time, cultivation, strong loving hands and patience. It lived, rising and growing to fruition only under the most perfect circumstances.” –Melissa Hill
“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.” –Erin Bow

“To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest – on behalf of the senses and the microbes – against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much prefer we remain passive consumers of its standardized commodities, rather than creators of idiosyncratic products expressive of ourselves and of the places where we live, because your pale ale or sourdough bread or kimchi is going to taste nothing like mine or anyone else’s.” –Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
“The baker’s skill in managing fermentation, not the type of oven used, is what makes good bread.” –Chad Robertson, Tartine Bread
“There comes a point in your life when you need to stop eating other people’s bread and make your own!” –Chris Geiger
“Sourdough? Well, next to the Bible, sourdough is the most important possession on the frontier. You can make flapjacks and biscuits with it, patch a crack in the cabin, treat wounds, and even make brew.” –Maggie Brendan, No Place for a Lady (Heart of the West, #1)

“James and Colleen Simmons, authors of Daniel’s Challenge and Original Fast Foods, and owners of LDShealth.ning.com, have this to say on the subject: “The commercial bread-making industry figured out how to isolate strains of yeast that made bread raise very quickly compared to the old-fashion bread-making method; soon sourdough starts became a thing of the past for most of us. What we didn’t know when we traded Old-World leavening techniques for quick-rise yeasts, is that not everything in wheat is good for you. In fact, there are several elements in wheat that are down-right problematic and that have led to grain intolerances in about 20 percent of today’s population. When you compare what happens to the bread when it is leavened with commercial yeasts versus a good sourdough starter, another story unfolds…. The sourdough starter contains several natural strains of friendly bacteria and yeasts that also cause bread to rise; however, these friendly bacteria also neutralize the harmful effects of the grain. They neutralize phytic acids that otherwise prevent minerals found in the grain from being absorbed properly; they predigest the gluten, and they also neutralize lignans and tanins found in wheat.”1” –Caleb Warnock, The Forgotten Skills of Self-Sufficiency Used by the Mormon Pioneers (Forgotten Skills of Self-Reliance Series by Caleb Warnock Book 1)
“Maybe baking was providing an affirmation of life, a hope for rebirth after weeks and months of numbing isolation.” –Eric Pallant, Sourdough Culture: A History of Bread Making from Ancient to Modern Bakers
“Some researchers attribute the increase in gluten intolerance and celiac disease to the fact that modern breads no longer receive a lengthy fermentation. The organic acids produced by the sourdough culture also seem to slow our bodies’ absorption of the sugars in white flour, reducing the dangerous spikes of insulin that refined carbohydrates can cause. (Put another way, a sourdough bread will have a lower “glycemic index” than a bread leavened with yeast.)” –Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
“It is genuinely possible to reach the point where you desire broccoli more than fries and wholemeal sourdough more than sliced white bread.” –Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“Some Danes talk about their dough as if it were their baby, which they feed and care for. Sourdough is basically a gastronomic alternative to The Sims.” –Meik Wiking, The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well
“For every day I have known her, she has eaten the same breakfast: sourdough toast with butter and whipped honey. She slices the golden brown toasted bread into four small squares and places them on a paper towel she has folded in half. A generous smear of softened butter goes on each piece, as thick as frosting on a cupcake, and each is then topped by a good-size dollop of whipped honey. As a child, I watched her do this hundreds of times, and now, when I’m sick, sourdough toast with butter and honey is like medicine.” –Sarah Jio, The Violets of March
“The very best thing about being a baker is watching somebody bite into a blueberry muffin or a fresh slice of sourdough dripping with butter and seeing them close their eyes and savor the taste. You’re making their lives better, just a little tiny bit.” –T. Kingfisher, A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking
“If the starter is misbehaving and simply will not rise your bread as it should, don’t be sentimental. We’ll fix it using science, or dump it because of science. Don’t get hung up on keeping it alive if it is suffering. It’s very simple to make a new one. And while some bakers will tell you a nice story about the aged nature of their starter, time actually bears no resemblance to quality.” –James Morton, Slow Down, Make Bread (From Scratch)
“Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.” –Nikolai Berdyaev
“Happiness is freshly baked bread.” –Unknown
“Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.” –Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
“[B]read is alive. […] [W]hen you work with it, you have to treat it as something alive and you can’t control it, you have to understand it and help it by all the knowledge that you have to help it, just like a parent, at a certain age, is very hard to control a child.” –Nancy Silverton
“Think of yeast as a time machine.” –Richard Bertinet
“I bake for myself as a form of therapy, I bake to participate in a larger cultural movement, and I bake to remember it in my bones.” –Tara Jenson, Flour Power

You may also like reading: 282 Best Sourdough Starter Names: Ideas & Inspiration

Funny Sourdough Quotes

“Feed the beast!” –one of Anthony Bourdain’s favorite bread bakers (and quite possibly my favorite quote)
“You can’t smear olive oil or butter or jam on a hole, right? What does a hole taste like? Nothing! I’d rather have a nice even crumb that I can toast beautifully and smear all sorts of deliciousness on top of.” –Ben Starr
“All sorrows are less with bread.” – Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Making sourdough is like playing with playdough but for adults. –Unknown
My husband hates me. And by that I mean he bought bread from the store. –Unknown
Sorry, I can’t. I have to feed my sourdough starter. –Unknown
Procrastibaking: when you have a million things to do but ignore everything and bake. –Unknown
Warning: sourdough may cause symptoms, such as chickens and a farm. –Unknown
Sourdough starter: the only culture some of us have. –Unknown
Introverted but willing to discuss sourdough –Unknown
“Love is like a sourdough starter – it can last forever, or get super smelly and weird.” –Sophie Lucido Johnson
“How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?” –Julia Child