Nothing says “I love you” like fresh-baked bread. Nothing says “I love you so much that I am willing to risk a lifetime of failure” like fresh-baked sourdough bread. Lucky for you, I have already experienced a lifetime of failure and I have a few tips to help you along your way.
Baking sourdough bread can be tricky. I am a firm believer, however, that anybody can do it, with some determination and a little practice. I have read countless blogs, watched countless videos, and baked countless loaves, and by far, the later was the most educational.
That being said, if I can provide you with some entry-level guidance and help you avoid some common mistakes long enough to see some success, I believe you will be more likely to stick with it! Breadmaking is a labor of love and I hope it brings you as much joy as it does me. These steps are about maximizing your CHANCE of getting a perfect loaf, but in bread, as in life, there are no guarantees.
If you want to skip ahead to the recipe, by all means, be my guest. I am often frustrated when I am looking for a quick recipe for dinner, kids yelling throughout the house, only to have to scroll, or worse yet, read, through pages of someone’s opinions and descriptions of their recipe. (tl;dr) No judgement here.
Basic Sourdough Ingredients
Sourdough breads are made from a few basic ingredients:
Sourdough Starter – A mixture of flour, water, and naturally-occurring yeast. There are several mail-order places you can buy one, or I’m sure that they are available in all of the fancy organic yuppie hipster supermarkets. If you want the best sourdough starter money can buy, from 1847 on the Oregon Trail, it’ll cost you a forever stamp: carlsfriends.net Expect a whole lot more on this topic in future posts.
Flour – Any old all purpose flour will do for now, but if you plan on opening a bakery, you may want to explore some different brands King Arthur is a good one) and types, including bread flour, which has a little more protein, and thus produces more gluten, which is totally unnecessary for the home baker.
Water – You’d think that this one would be self-explanatory, but not quite. If you have “city water” which is treated with chemicals, this could hinder the growth of, or even kill, your yeast. You can remove chlorine from your tap water by filling up a big pot and letting it sit for 24 hours. If you still have problems with chemicals after that or just don’t want to wait, store-bought filtered water works great!
Salt – Bread without salt is like life without love…
Basic Sourdough Technique
In this method, sourdough starter is combined with water and flour (by weight) and allowed to “colonize” for an hour or so to get established, before the salt is added. Salt draws water out of substances, so if you skip this step you will still get bread, but your yeast may be less active which may give you an inferior rise.
If you really want to be a nerd, you can just combine the flour and water for an hour or two before adding the starter. This is called Autolyse and allows the flour to fully hydrate and to begin developing gluten, before the yeast gets to work. It is not necessary for your first loaf but may be something you want to explore in the future. Remember, these steps are about maximizing your CHANCE of getting a perfect loaf!
Next, we add in our salt and give the dough a good kneading. This can be accomplished a few different ways. For the purpuse of this simple post, I’m going to say eight minutes in your KitchenAid mixer with a dough hook on medium speed.
Our dough is then covered and allowed to rise until it is doubled in volume, which will probably take at least four hours at room temperature. This is called bulk fermentation. A cool way to watch this happen is to use a clear cylindrical crock we use in foodservice. You can mark the cylinder and wait for the dough to double in height. Usually, I just leave it covered in the bowl of my KitchenAid on the counter.
Preheat your oven to like a thousand or as high as it goes. We want our bread to explode upwards as soon as we pop it in the oven, and we do this with the highest temperature we can get. 450-500 would be great.
For our simple loaf, we will now dump our dough out on to our lightly-floured counter (or fancy bread board if your brother-in-law happens to be a master carpenter).
To shape our basic sandwich loaf, we will basically “punch” the dough down flat, and then roll it towards ourselves, into an oblong shape. Drop it, seam-side-down, into a loaf pan and set it on the counter to do it’s final rise while the oven is preheating.
When the loaf has risen up above the loaf pan, and the oven is good and preheated, we want to slash our loaf so that we can control how it rises. If we don’t do this, it will erupt (called an “ear”) unpredictably and not be as pretty. A clean razor blade works well. A serrated kitchen knife should work in a pinch as well. We want to cut the dough without disturbing it or dragging it too much. you can absolutely go over your cuts more than once to get them deeper. Notice how I didn’t slice these guys and how they split?
Bake for 15 minutes before checking on it. If it is nicely risen and developing some color at this point, you can turn off your oven and let it continue to cook for another fifteen minutes. Remove the loaf pan from the oven and then remove the loaf of bread from the loaf pan and let cool completely before cutting into it (yeah, right).
Basic Sourdough Recipe
Here is the basic dough recipe I use to keep it simple. I use this for sandwich loaves, baguettes, boules, batards, rolls, pretzels, pizza dough, etc:
300 grams of active sourdough starter
600 grams of water
900 grams of flour
1 Tbsp salt