Pennsylvanian Tastes Sweet Success With Sourdough

Irv Friedlander opens the refrigerator, rustles behind the tubs and bottles and plastic containers, and pulls out two stout jars. He pops open the lid of the first one, and the smell of yeast wafts forth. Inside is a cream-white paste topped with a yellow liquid.

This is it: Irv’s sourdough starter, progeny of the stuff his older brother gave him in the late 1960s. For 30 years, he’s lovingly cultivated this simple mix of flour, water and yeast. With it, he’s grown a reputation too.

Friedlander has had his fleeting eccentricities: beekeeping, home brewing. Skeptics might include his former profession, chiropractor. But his sourdough obsession has given him his small sliver of local fame, via fabulously tangy pancakes that he whips up for the public twice a year.

“That sourdough has been passed down through Irv’s family,” marvels Judd Diener, a friend, as Friedlander churns up the mixture with a wooden spatula.

“God knows who gave it to my brother,” Friedlander says. “Or how old it is.”

Doesn’t sound so tough to keep a batch of sourdough starter alive for 30 years? That’s where that other jar comes in. It contains a chocolate-shake-colored slurry and a rank liquid. This is what happens when bad things happen in the sourdough.

Friedlander’s sourdough first made its way out of his kitchen a few years ago at a Rotary Club breakfast for charity.

“Jokingly, I said, ‘OK, I’ll make the sourdough pancakes,’ ” Friedlander says. “Now I’m stuck.”

Twice a year, the breakfast showcases his pancakes, and because of it, he often finds himself filling requests from friends and Rotarians for a dollop of his starter.

“I even have some,” says Diener.

That’s how Friedlander got his start too. His brother, Robert--no slouch himself when it comes to minor eccentricities--cooked him some pancakes one day, and Irv Friedlander, then a longhaired hippie at Rutgers University, couldn’t believe how good they were. He left with a jar of the starter.

It’s been with him ever since, longer than his wife of 25 years, Elaine.

He has kept it alive through two stints as an auditor, a year at Temple University to study contemporary American ethics, several years teaching handicapped kids at a school in Haddonfield, N.J., through chiropractic school in Portland, Ore., and a long, crowded road trip back to West Chester, a suburb of Philadelphia.

Thirty years since he first started with the sourdough, the 53-year-old Friedlander has shaved off the long hair; he goes bald now. He wears cardigan sweaters rather than tie-dye, and he’s a salesman, something he vowed he would never be.

Still his sourdough lives on, unchanged from the original.

“It’s sensual,” Friedlander says by way of explanation. “Getting your hands in there and kneading it. And you can get a lot of anxiety out, kneading bread.”

The trick is to feed it--add flour and water--at least every six months. Keeping it in the refrigerator helps. He learned over the years to avoid jars with metal lids, which can ruin the sourdough.

And he keeps two jars going, so he has a backup in case of trouble. If it dies, he could make another starter by leaving water and flour out for a while, but the new batch wouldn’t be the same. That distinctive taste would be gone.

All this he learned from an old book.

“This is the bible,” he says, pulling out a tattered copy of “Sourdough Jack’s Cookery.”

Friedlander has handled the little book so much he had to rebind it with string. “Sourdough Jack” Mabee got his start in Sitka, Alaska, in the 1930s and first put his wisdom to paper in 1959.

“He’s a character and a half,” Friedlander says, flipping through the pages of recipes and advice.

His affection for the old author is no mystery. Robert Friedlander recently revealed what his brother never bothered to ask: He made that first starter--the one he gave to Irv--with a kit that came with Sourdough Jack’s book.

So maybe it’s no surprise that, like Sourdough Jack, Friedlander isn’t above making a buck on his obsession.

He and Diener are testing a few recipes they hope to market. Maybe they can dehydrate the starter to make it possible to ship it? Or freeze the stuff? If so, they can take the locally famous starter and spread the joy.

“You never know,” he says. “You might have a ‘Sourdough Irv’ on your hands.”