This Sourdough ‘Hotel’ Watches Your Sourdough Starter For You

Hold your horses! The Sourdough Inn isn’t exactly what you may be thinking. At least for me, I thought it was a hotel that provides a loaf of freshly baked sourdough like DoubleTree does with their cookies. A DREAM!

Turns out it’s a “hotel” JUST for your sourdough starter specifically and a blessing to bakers who are on the move.

The Sourdough Inn opened in Brooklyn, NY during the winter of 2015 in order to help Brooklyn hipsters learn more about sourdough bread. In 2020 it relocated to Ørestad, south of Copenhagen, Denmark; a country with a rich history in sourdough. If you happen to be going away on a vacation, the Sourdough Inn will house and take care of your sourdough starter. Yes, it’s a bread daycare!

When it comes to sourdough, a baker needs to be able to create and feed a starter; also referred to as a culture. Sourdough starter is formulated from flour and water. The fermented combination of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria that comes from the starter is responsible for the flavor and airiness of sourdough.

If you’re a traveling baker, leaving your culture behind without it being fed daily can and will lead to disaster—especially if you’ve had your culture for a long time. They [starters] can essentially live forever with proper care.

Though this may seem like a niche idea, having this sort of infrastructure in place for bread enthusiasts and bakers would end a long standing frustration they had when producing sourdough.