If you’ve been to the Little Italy Mercato on a Saturday morning, you’ve probably seen the line. Not a polite line, either. A determined one, full of people who found downtown parking and walked past 150 other stalls just to stand in front of one table selling bread. That table belongs to Swells Sourdough, and after four years of farmers markets and pop-ups, owners Pamela and Eric have finally opened their first brick-and-mortar bakery on India Street. The bread is the oldest kind on earth, made the slow way: organic, stone-milled California flour, water, salt, and a ferment that runs 36 to 48 hours. They opened it with a 15-month-old at home, because apparently sleep is optional when you’re in the dough business.
This week on Happy Half Hour, presented by Redfin, Pamela tells host Troy Johnson how she got here. Her path runs from baking brownies out of a kids’ kit her chef mom brought home from culinary school, to reading the weather on the presidential news channel in Mexico City, to meeting her husband on Instagram after the algorithm noticed she was craving croissants. Swells’ very first pop-up was at Lululemon, because you can have gluten and yoga pants too. Pamela also gets into why sourdough was a lifeline after years of stomach trouble. The two talk through the science of cold fermentation, why most supermarket flour has had its nutrients stripped out, and California’s upcoming ban on potassium bromate. And she has bad news for anyone romancing a 200-year-old starter: your starter is only as old as the last time you fed it.
Before all that, Troy opens with a crash course in bread history. It covers 14,400-year-old flatbread from Jordan, Gold Rush prospectors who slept with their starters to keep them from freezing, and the smuggled corned beef sandwich that got bread banned from NASA spaceflights. He also shares his best bites of the week, including a lobster pancake griddled in lobster butter, wagyu dumplings, and a bowl from a ramen chef voted Japan’s best four years running.
This summary was provided to you by AI. To hear from the humans, listen to Happy Half Hour wherever you get your podcasts.
