Frontiersman Sourdough
A Zero Waste Business
100% Organic Ingredients
Small Batch and Handmade
Donating to Environmental Conservation in Alaska
About:
Frontiersman Sourdough starter was first stocked in Anchorage shops in 2019. Our starter has since become a gift and pantry staple for locals and tourists alike. We now supply small businesses across the country, emphasizing our commitment to environmental and social sustainability:
Responsible Ingredient Sourcing: We use only organic ingredients in our starter and organic cotton in our textiles. As much as possible we source locally.
We are a Zero Waste Company: 100% of our packaging materials are biodegradable, down to the shipping labels and tape.
Small Business Partnerships: We are committed to working with only other small business, never big box stores or Amazon.
Significant Charitable Contributions: We’ve donated more than 10% of our profits to Alaskan environmental conservation, fishing and hunting educational programs, and farm-land trusts, including but not limited to: Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center; Outdoor Heritage Foundation; Alaska Farmland Trust, WWF; and Nature Conservancy
Handmade Quality and Scientific Quality Control: We ensure your starter is strong and woodcrafts will last. Everything is made by hand and undergos strict quality control measures. We regularly activate and stress-test our starter to ensure activity and dependability, and we collect temperature and humidity data on our starter to ensure ideal production environments.
Our
Sourdough Starter
Our sourdough starter is cultivated in Alaska, shelf stable, made with 100% organic ingredients, and packaged in biodegradable pouches.
The stable nature of our starter allows you to activate it and begin working with sourdough at your convenience; next week or years from now.
When you activate your Frontiersman Sourdough Starter, you are waking up the same microbes that we use every day, ensuring that you are baking with an active, healthy, and effective starter.
Origin of the name
In the era of the Alaska frontier, men and women maintained sourdough starter to leaven their bread and fuel their exploration. Frontiersmen in Alaska would wear a pouch of starter around their neck to keep it from freezing in the cold Alaskan winter nights. Today, old, grizzled Alaskans are known as “Sourdoughs” in homage to the prospectors, miners, and trappers that explored Alaska.
A History of Reactivating Starter
Alaskan frontiersmen would use sourdough starter to fill gaps in their log cabins. Folks in present day Alaska have collected some of this dormant sourdough starter and made bread with it!
The most impressive example of baking with dormant yeast comes from archeologists in 2019 baking a loaf of bread with sourdough collected from ancient Egyptian pottery. The oldest known sourdough was scraped from this pottery, reaching back ~4,000 years.
We operate in Anchorage, AK , the ancestral homeland of the Dena'ina peoples.