22 | EDIBLE SF SPRING 2026 took researchers to the Bulgarian countryside to see if tales about ant yogurt were true. Her colleague Sevgi Mutlu Sirakova grew up near there and knew that people still told stories about fermenting yogurt with ants, according to the published study in Cell Press. Locals led researchers to a mound of Formica rufa, commonly called red wood ants. The researchers added four live ants to a jar of warm milk, covered it with cheesecloth, then buried the jar in the ant mound to keep it warm overnight. The next morning, the milk had started becoming yogurt. Research chef David Zilber, who was on the expedition, noted the milk “had a slightly tangy taste with mild herbaceousness and pronounced flavors of grass-fed fat.” After making more yogurt with live, frozen, or dehydrated ants, they put a bug in the ear of R&D chefs at Restaurant Alchemist, a two-star Michelin in Copenhagen. The chefs fermented goat milk mascarpone with the pungency of pecorino and an antwich —-sheep’s milk ant ice cream sandwiched between ant-infused tuiles. Feeling thirsty? Then try the ant-milk-washed apricot liqueur and brandy cocktail. For years scientists assumed it was formic acid—popularized in the 1954 giant ant horror movie Them!—that enabled ants to ferment milk. But now we know it’s the ant’s holobiont: its body and microbes. And can you believe that the Bulgarian yogurtmaking ants were carrying lactobacillus San Francisensus—the very same microbe that gives San Francisco’s famed sourdough bread its distinctive tang? Biting into a warm, crusty, tangy piece of sourdough bread gives people pleasure, and creating that makes Azikiwee Anderson happy. When he started messing around with sourdough bread during the pandemic, he gifted loaves to friends. The bread was really a vehicle for creating connection. He expanded to selling loaves to his circle and social media followers. Eventually he opened San Francisco’s Rize Up Bakery in 2020, as a way to create community and healing the wake of racial injustices like George Floyd’s murder. Anderson liked nurturing his sourdough starter like an edible Tamagotchi, and creating cross-cultural loaves flavored with purple ube yam, gochujang chili, and curry leaves. But he didn’t like touching the yeasty dough. “I was icked out by it,” he recalls. “I ain’t touching those creepy crawly things. I don’t want that stuff on me. The idea of putting my hands in it freaked me out.” But he realized he already had plenty of creepy crawlies of his own. Walt Whitman got it right: We contain multitudes … of microbes. The average person is made up of 30 million human cells and 38 million microbes, according to a 2016 paper led by Ron Sender of the Weizmann Institute of Science. Anderson thinks about how each of us is engaged in a tug of war: Is our human self directing our decisions and moods, or is it the microbial community? Either way, every baker brings something singular to their bread. “What makes our bread uniquely our bread is what I call love, but you literally leave a piece of you,” Anderson says. “Every time you touch it, you give a piece of yourself to it.” That’s not just baker woo-woo. Researchers in the Rob Dunn Lab at North Carolina State University gave bakers identical sourdough bread starter recipes, and then analyzed the microbial content of the batches. They found each baker’s starter mirrored the microbial community on the baker’s hands. And the finished loaves tasted different, with varying levels of tartness. It makes you want to buy bread from a happy, well-adjusted baker. Anderson believes the best-tasting bread comes from people who have their stuff together. “Happiness comes from the inside, and all that kind of starts with your relationship with yourself, your relationship to your environment,” he says. “You get an intuitive relationship with all the things around you and try to give the best you can give.” Thanks to invisible microbes, sharing any fermented food—a loaf of sourdough, a jar of kimchi, or homemade kombucha—is a way of sharing yourself, and bringing more people into a circle with the natural world and a process as old as time. For Sarah C. Owens, a James Beard Award–winning author and instructor of Ritual Fine Foods in Sonoma County, her passion for fermentation started in her garden. Cultivating roses was an antidote to her stressful work life in Brooklyn, and she poured herself into it. She even traveled to the coast to gather seaweed that she mixed with sourdough starter, nettles, and molasses to make a preparation to feed her plants and soil. Fermentation broke down the nutrients in the ingredients, making them more available. At the time, Owens had digestive issues that forced her to give up eating bread with gluten, as well as commercial gluten-free foods. She realized her sourdough garden tea might provide what her body was missing too. “I was making compost tea and was brewing microbial teas to help plants get what they need from the soil,” she says. “Well, a sourdough culture is the same thing for humans and the digestive system.” Owens started experimenting with long fermentations of whole-wheat dough to break down the gluten proteins and make them more digestible. Slowly, her body started to heal. Her exploration led her to baking with other grains such as teff, spelt, barley, and millet, and going beyond European loaves to fermented flatbreads. Her book Sourdough shares recipes for fermented dough desserts like lemon madeleines and chocolate buckwheat cookies. As a rosarian and a lauded sourdough baker, Owens says the two pursuits are interwoven. Every loaf she makes evokes her connection to other people and nature, especially when she uses flowers to make a starter. “When you’re using flowers to create a culture, whether it’s a sourdough starter or jun, you’re nurturing that relationship with the flower and the bees,” she says. “It’s a beautiful potential we have to create connections in a world where our attention is so preoccupied with screens and telephones.” "What makes our bread uniquely our bread is what I call love, but you literally leave a piece of you. Every time you touch it, you give a piece of yourself to it."
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