Will Grant has been friends with his business partner since he was 5.
It was a warm July day and Grant’s job was to sit in the back of the pickup and hold up a 20-gallon garbage bucket filled with the sourdough starter his family would use at the new pizza place they were launching in Kingston – That’s A Some Pizza. As they drove to town, the warm day and the ingredients that had been fed into the starter the night before made for an ... explosive combination.
As Grant, now the owner of the shop, remembers it, the top blew off the container and the gooey starter began streaming down its sides.
“So here was a 5-year-old trying to fold this stuff back inside there. I remember looking in the cab of the truck thinking my dad was going to be mad at me. He was just laughing, saying ‘Don’t worry about it,’” Grant said. “It’s the same sourdough starter that we use today.”
Every pizza crust made in Grant’s tiny shop on Winslow Way on Bainbridge Island is made from that starter, which bubbles and grows in buckets in the back of his shop.
Each time Grant and his employees draw out some of the starter to make crusts for the pizzas they produce – on weekdays, 100-200 a day, and 400-600 a day on weekends, Grant said – they pour in more ingredients, just like Grant’s parents – Lee and Marti – and their friend Phil Hausmann did after launching that original Kingston location in 1984.
Three decades after the Kingston shop opened, Grant's sourdough starter has drawn national and international attention to his pizza. Grant and one of his employees used it to win awards as two of the top pizzas in the nation last year at the Caputo Cup, an annual pizza-making competition that draws pizza makers from around the country. Food tourists now come to his shop, and on a Friday night it can take awhile to get a pizza delivered on the island.
The sourdough starter's history stretches back past the '80s, according to Grant. It was around before the internet was even a twinkle in the mind’s eye at DARPA, long before a microwave first warmed up water for tea, before Henry Ford’s first Model T rattled to life and even before the Wright brothers launched their first powered flight at Kitty Hawk.
That’s A Some’s starter is over 120 years old and dates back to the Klondike Gold Rush, Grant said. There’s no way to gauge exactly how old a sourdough starter is, meaning it’s up to oral histories and families to pass the heritage on, Grant said.
“This sourdough is like a sibling to me,” he said. “I’ve known it since I was 5 years old. I’ve taken it with me to Italy, to Las Vegas, Atlantic City.”
A library for sourdough
Add St. Vith, Belgium, to the list of places where That’s A Some’s sourdough has been recognized. There, it’ll be preserved for years to come, in the Puratos Sourdough Library, a collection that operates solely to preserve and study the world’s sourdoughs, similar to how seed libraries work. The library now has 108 samples in its refrigerators, according to Karl De Smedt, the library’s director.
“The purpose of the library is to protect and preserve the biodiversity of sourdough, have a place where we can study them and compare them with others,” De Smedt said. “We also provide backup if needed to the owners.”
“Sourdough has been used for 5,000 years to make bread,” he said. “Over the last 150 years commercial yeast has disrupted the sourdough process and many bakers have forgotten how to make, use and preserve it. Through the library, we try to reinstall that forgotten knowledge.”
Sourdough is made through a fermentation process. Flour and water are added to microorganisms like yeasts and bacteria, which keep producing more of the pungent, bubbling sourdough goop. Once dough rises and is placed in an oven, the living organisms die off, leaving behind bread with a distinctive sour taste.
At the library, experts will be able to study sample samples, determine their biological makeup and see how they change as they age. One sample Grant sent will be preserved and fed each month, while another sample is examined.
"We can now study samples, see what is living in there and check and recheck the starters after some years being in our library, but also go back to the original bakery to get a new sample and compare that with the sample today and the results of the first analysis,” De Smedt said.
'Insanely busy'
After Grant took home first place honors in the “non-traditional” category and manager Allen Raymond tied for second place in the “traditional” category at the Caputo Cup in October, business at That’s A Some’s Winslow Way location has jumped, according to Grant. The store was the only pizza shop in the country to place in two categories.
“We’re just so tiny,” Grant said. “We’re probably the busiest restaurant on the Kitsap Peninsula, and we’re 500 square feet, and really a 430-square-foot kitchen.”
To serve the island better, That’s A Some is opening a new location in the Coppertop Loop development off Sportsman Club Road. It’ll be three times the size of the Winslow Way location, with space for production and commissary kitchens, Grant said. He expects it to be open by the end of September.
And back in Kingston, Grant is returning to his roots to open a new downtown pizza shop called “Sourdough Willy’s” this fall. There he’ll offer his pizzas and run a pizzaiolo school where he’ll run seminars on working with pizza. He’s working on a book, too.
“I’m really trying to bring this pizza culture to the Pacific Northwest,” Grant said. “People think pizza is Domino’s and Papa Murphy’s and Little Caesars, and I’m here saying pizza’s much, much more. This is a tradition that’s been going on for thousands of years in Italy.”
