This Classic Bread Was One Of A Cowboy's Favorite Foods Out On The Trail

Today, baking sourdough is a cool activity, a pastime so ubiquitously trendy that the press has breathlessly covered it from many angles, including how Taylor Swift makes loaves with sprinkles. We Google how to feed sourdough starter and share snaps of our picturesque results on social media. However, sourdough bread has a long and surprisingly un-glam history, including a period in the American West when cowboys perfected the craft of whipping up perfectly crusty sourdough biscuits without the benefits of specialized utensils, running water ... or even packaged yeast.

Sourdough bread shines on the list of foods cowboys ate on the trail because, among humble fare like beans and cornbread, sourdough was a food that required some finesse. The cowpokes assigned to the cook wagon were measured by their prowess with sourdough, which was cooked in a dutch oven over smoldering campfire coals — no thermometers or timers to be found. Historians marvel over the artistry it would have taken to get everything just right and consistently produce airy, delicious bread. 

Many cowboy cooks carried a precious jar of sourdough starter, but some formulated their own with nothing but flour, water, and the wild yeast present in the outdoor air, which is still a valid way of doing things today for those who aren't squeamish. San Francisco sourdough tastes different even today, for instance, because of the distinct combination of wild yeast and environmental conditions only found in that part of California. On the trail, loaves of sourdough were concocted by competent cooks willing to expand their craft beyond biscuits and really would have been a way of showing off a deft hand.

Of all the fare that cowboys noshed on while driving cattle on the trail, what made sourdough bread so special? There aren't any Old West cowboys to interview on the topic anymore, but we can hazard some hypotheses about what drew them to sourdough and caused them to venerate the cooks that reliably produced great results. Cowboys, you see, didn't eat much fresh food. Beans, jerky, and dried fruit were all cornerstones of the trail diet, because supplies had to be carried for many weeks over long distances. Fresh bread would have been a near-unimaginable luxury, something hot and tender among tons of chewy or mushy preserved options. Furthermore, bread was the perfect accompaniment to any lunch or dinner, used to sop up beans or stew or to stretch a small amount of meat into a full meal.

Basically, cowboys loved sourdough for many of the same reasons we still savor it today: it's versatile, delicious, and forgiving for home cooks. The next time you are lamenting your struggles to turn out perfect loaves, spare a thought for the cowboy cooks of yore, who had no measuring cups nor digital thermometers nor packages of instant yeast. They were baking sourdough on certifiable Hard Mode, which makes our latter-day efforts seem pretty foolproof. Enjoy your sourdough sandwiches and toasts, and thank goodness that you aren't trying to bake over coals!