Producer

A sourdough starter was given to my family while I was attending Juneau Douglas High School in the early 1960s. Our classmate’s grandmother had made her starter while working for the Douglas Treadwell Mine in the early 1900s. My family has fed and cared for the starter ever since. After seeing a commercial package of dried sourdough in a tourist shop while traveling, I decided I might try drying this authentic Alaskan sourdough starter myself and share it with others.

After being adopted by a revered Tlingit elder, it was clear that I could fulfill his wishes of teaching us about enculturation by using the sourdough as an analogy. In addition, my involvement with Chapter N, PEO, an international educational philanthropy which raises monies for local kids’ scholarships, it was evident that it would be a fine product to offer locals as well as visitors during the cruise ship season. The money raised with the sales of this product, after paying for packaging costs, strictly goes to funding kids’ scholarships for further education.

These sourdough starters make excellent gifts, can be shipped easily and inexpensively, and have made their way all over the world. Seven of our local nurses currently employed at Bartlett Hospital and several others serving us here in Juneau have received scholarships through Chapter N, PEO’s scholarship program.

The ingredients are simply all-purpose flour, water, and pinch of sugar and the yeast plant from the air. Stickers are applied on the small zip-lock bags for the year that the starters were dried and packaged. Included with the starters is a sheet of paper that provides written instruction on how to reconstitute and care for the starters on one side; and a story to perpetuate Tlingit Elder Clarence Jackson’s mission for promoting unity in our world through enculturation. The shelf life of the product is indefinite as I have had success in reconstituting my first batch of dried sourdough from 2013, and it began bubbling the first night that I fed it.