Miami's Best Bakers Donate Sourdough Starter to Rescue True Loaf Bakery

In the bakery world, a healthy starter yeast is essential to making incredible baked goods, but the process of feeding it and controlling the fermentation takes weeks. Unfortunately, during that time, anything can go wrong — and for one bakery owner in Miami, that's exactly what happened.

Owner of True Loaf Bakery, Tomas Strulovic, thought his Miami Beach bakery was on the brink of closing for weeks after his sourdough starter at the bakery got infected when the air conditioner broke.

On July 27, True Loaf Bakery took to Instagram to inform its customers it had to close for a few days to repair a broken air conditioner. The post read, "It's been so hot here. We were shaping bread at 95 degrees yesterday. The overall experience for employees and customers is not good. And the product is growing too fast and ultimately not up to par. So, we will close starting tomorrow for a few days until we sort out this sauna situation. Sorry for the inconvenience. See you soon!"

A week later, customers were shocked to read the update: "There is no bread today, again. There will be no bread tomorrow either. My starter has been taken over by don't know what. Working on it. Sorry folks," read the Instagram post.

When Carlos Frías, former food editor of the Miami Herald, posted about it, New Times reached out to Strulovic.

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"Sourdough means a bread that is naturally leaven, so no commercial yeast," Strulovic tells New Times. "We use a starter, which we feed in the morning and at night. When it's very hot outside or inside with no AC, you have to lower the seed that you feed it with in order to control the fermentation. Fermentation is dependent on a lot of things, including temperature. So, the hotter it is, the faster it goes. I lowered it a lot because it was 100 degrees or so in here, but the problem is that when you lower the seed of the starter to very low levels, the starter gets vulnerable to contamination, which happened to my starter."

For several days, he tried to make the starter work, but he couldn't get the bread to rise. Strulovic tells New Times it was a nightmare scenario, and that starting the process from scratch could take two weeks with no bread or sales, which is not something True Loaf Bread could afford as a small bakery.

That's when Miami's beloved Zak Stern of Zak the Baker and Jesus Brazon of Caracas Bakery, two James Beard Award-winning bakers, came together to help a fellow baker and friend in need.
"I've known Zak for a long time, and he has always been welcoming, the same thing with Jesus because we are both from Venezuela and we share a love for baked goods," says Strulovic. "I needed to borrow some seed, some healthy starter from somebody else and they came through. I'm very grateful for them. I was able to take the starter from them and make it my own, and now the bread is great; it's very healthy now."

In a collaboration no one saw coming, True Loaf has been able to reopen and is now selling bread and baked goods created by three incredibly talented bakers.

As for how the baked goods taste? Frias got a firsthand taste. "Today I ate the True Loaf x Caracas x Zak croissant and it was beautiful — not only for how it tasted, but for how it came to be," he ended his post on Instagram.

A beautiful story, in-knead (indeed).