Pan de Masa Madre

I lived in San Francisco for four years and before that, I spent about four or five summers there. It is still the most beautiful city I have ever visited, and I consider it one of my hometowns. One of the mystiques is the city's world-famous sourdough bread.
Artificial intelligence argues that it is not the bacteria of the environment that makes the sourdough what it is, but rather the method by which the bread is prepared. I cannot argue for or against since I have ZERO interest in the life of something on its cellular level.
For those who are anal retentive about measurements and timing and temperatures, sourdough videos can feed your need to the max. One such video even encourages the future home baker to possess a digital scale or suffer the consequences.
I don't eat that much bread anymore. (My carbohydrate of choice has changed to white rice). But there were times when I used to have a starter in the fridge and I do remember making sourdough English muffins, sourdough Pullman loaf, sourdough rolls.
There is a cuisine that features sourdough. It's Ethiopian.

The sourdough pancake-like flatbread is called injera. The grain (cereal) used for preparation is teff. It is a deliciousness that defies explanation, and I am truly saddened whenever I meet someone who proclaims to hate Ethiopian food and blames the main culprit as being the injera. At a table, the first morsel of injera is made by tearing it and then scooping up some vegetables, grains, pulses, or salad. It is then used to handfeed the man of the table. It is a sign of love and respect. My eyes well up when I think of such things. Food = Love.
Alas, one who diets and dreams of ideal weight should not be spending this much time romanticizing sourdough starters!