Sourdough bread near me: the loaf, the starter and the book

Bread was our fourth-biggest seller last week. Not coffee, not cake. Bread.

If you’ve been searching “sourdough bread near me” from Milford or anywhere in the Poconos, you can walk into 322 Broad Street and buy a loaf today. But that’s only a third of what we keep. We also sell the starter culture to make your own, and the books that teach you how. Which is a slightly unusual thing for a shop to do, and the reason is worth explaining.

What’s actually on the shelf

Two families of sourdough, and they’re not interchangeable.

The wheat sourdough is the one most people come in for. Real long-fermented sourdough, sold by the loaf from the bakehouse counter. Nothing clever about it. It’s just bread made the slow way.

The gluten-free sourdough is a different animal entirely. The starter is water and brown rice flour, and the loaves are built on sorghum, millet and cassava flour with psyllium husk holding them together. All organic. A 26oz loaf, two weeks in the fridge, six months frozen, and it comes in compostable packaging.

Four gluten-free versions rotate through: original, olive and herb, fig, and a seeded buckwheat one with sunflower seeds and molasses. The buckwheat is the one staff fight over.

The honest bit about gluten

Long fermentation breaks down some gluten. You’ll read that a lot, usually with the implication that sourdough is therefore fine for people who react to wheat.

It isn’t. Not if you have coeliac disease.

Wheat sourdough is still wheat. The fermentation makes it easier on plenty of people with a mild sensitivity, and that’s a genuine difference. But it does not make it safe if gluten is a medical problem for you. If that’s you, the gluten-free loaves are the shelf you want, and they’re a properly separate product, not a wheat loaf with a label on it.

We’d rather tell you that at the counter than have you find out at home.

Why we sell the starter as well as the loaf

Here’s the part that makes us a strange bakery.

Sitting on the shelf a few feet from the bread is a shelf-stable gluten-free sourdough starter, cultured with organic brown rice flour, $18.99. There’s a Breadtopia starter jar, straight-walled glass with a lid that keeps contaminants out but lets air in, and a rubber o-ring so you can mark where your starter sat before its last feed, for $12. And in the bookstore section, Emilie Raffa’s Artisan Sourdough Made Simple and Elaine Boddy’s Easy Everyday Sourdough Bread.

Buy those three and you never need to buy a loaf from us again.

That’s deliberate. The self-sufficiency side of this shop exists because Liam’s view, argued at length in his own book, is that knowing how to make the thing matters more than being able to buy it. Selling you the skill undercuts selling you the product. We do it anyway.

Sourdough in a Pike County kitchen

Practical note for anyone starting a culture here: our houses are cold from October, and a sluggish starter in a Milford kitchen in January is almost always a temperature problem, not a flour problem. Find the warmest spot you have. On top of the fridge works. So does an oven with just the light on.

Late August is a good moment to begin. The kitchen’s still warm enough to get a starter established in four or five days, and by the time the first properly cold weekend hits you’ll have something stable to feed.

One warning: the gluten-free loaves sell out. Regularly. They’re baked in limited numbers and the fig and olive-herb go first. If you’re driving in from Honesdale or Port Jervis specifically for one, ring ahead.

Come in and have a look

Bread, coffee, and a wall of books about growing and making your own food, all in the same building.

The Better World Store is at 320-322 Broad Street, Milford PA 18337, open 8am to 6pm every day. Call 570-832-8555 to check what came out of the bakehouse this morning, or just come in. The loaves are near the counter and someone will tell you honestly which one to take home.