Welcome to Season Two of Modernist BreadCrumbs! It seems only natural—and appropriately poetic—to start this season talking about starters. They’re the inception of the loaf, the first step. You don’t need a starter to make bread, but the story of cultivating yeast from the environment around us—whether you call it “starter,” “culture,” “levain," or “mother"—is what we’re focusing on in this episode, from microbes to miche. We'll hear from Executive Producer Michael Harlan Turkell about his "mother," baker Sarah Owens about her "Beast," microbial ecologists Dr. Erin McKenney and Dr. Rob Dunn of "The Sourdough Project," and, of course, the co-authors of "Modernist Bread," Nathan Myhrvold and Francsico Migoya.