11/01/2026
The latest Awesome Ottawa award goes to Jason Nickerson to support a wild yeast sourdough from Ottawa’s wild places.
“I want to make an Ottawa wild yeast sourdough using wild yeasts collected in Ottawa parks and forests,” says Jason, “as a way of sharing this awesome place.”
“Sourdough starters,” he explains, “are a living culture of yeasts and lactic acid bacteria that ferment flour and water and give rise to a loaf of bread. When ‘fed’ regularly and cared for, they create a stable ecosystem that can be used for decades – sometimes centuries – to make bread using a natural fermentation process instead of adding in commercial yeasts.”
“Sourdough starters are fundamentally a place-based thing,” Jason continues, “and the types of yeasts that colonize them are dependent on the location where the starter is made and kept, and the kinds of yeasts that are introduced by the flour that's used, the yeasts in the air in the kitchen, and even the hands of the person making it.”
“A few years ago,” says Jason, “I started experimenting with the idea of shaping sourdough through the deliberate introduction of wild yeasts from places that I love, and places that are hard to reach and difficult to describe to people who haven't been there. I was exploring the idea that wild yeasts introduced into sourdough could be a way of sharing the experience of being in these places and conveying a different sensory experience of being in Canada's wild places.”
“I started capturing wild yeasts through small home fermentations of spruce tips and wild berries from the forest, and introducing them into my own sourdough starters,” he continues. “They worked – they changed the way the starters behaved. With this proof of concept, I started Lodestar Backcountry Provisions, and have been collecting wild yeast samples in Canadian forests and working with an Ontario yeast lab in Guelph to identify food-safe yeast strains and grow them for use in sourdough. Now I want to make an Ottawa wild yeast starter.”
Jason is an Ottawa-based explorer and adventurer who spent the last decade working for Doctors Without Borders – “often,” he says, “in beautiful and remote places that are impossible to describe unless you’ve been there.”
“I do sell these starters on my website,” he adds, “but I don't really make any money off this and would gladly give a free starter to any Ottawa organization or community group who wants one.”
