60 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {food coloring} It’s not an exaggeration to say that Redwood City’s Deb Lemos is obsessed with sourdough—but with 375,000 followers on Instagram and a successful Etsy shop, clearly she’s not the only one. Baking is part of Deb’s daily routine, which she deftly balances with a full-time job as the director of finance and operations for the math department at Stanford University, where she’s worked for almost 40 years. “Sourdough is my passion,” Deb says. “I’m not someone who can be idle, and so I get up very early in the morning to get all of my sourdough baking and prep work done before the normal workday starts.” Deb, who grew up in Los Altos, started baking with her grandmother when she was young, but it wasn’t until the last decade that she really got into sourdough. A friend gave her Jim Lahey’s My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, NoKnead Method, which prompted her to start experimenting using his no-knead technique and conventional yeast. Then Deb decided to try making a sourdough starter. She was successful on her first try, and it’s the same starter she still uses today. “I loved it and became really obsessed; my family would say, ‘Oh gosh, she's talking about sourdough again,’” Deb laughs. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, Deb saw a huge rise in interest in sourdough baking and quickly launched her business. “All of a sudden, I became incredibly relevant,” she says. “Everybody was home, and everybody wanted to bake bread.” Deb launched her Etsy shop selling dehydrated sourdough BAKING sweet on sourdough words by LOTUS ABRAMS • photography by PAULETTE PHLIPOT
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