This is the recipe for sourdough bread for beginners that I’ve been using over and over! It’s a medium/large sized loaf and is easy to modify based on the flours you have at home.

I’ve been lusting after sourdough ever since I first started my food blog. I remember back in 2011, one of the food blogs I used to follow, Pinch My Salt, shared her sourdough starter journey and how she made her starter with pineapple juice. I remember seeing that and being mind-blown that you could capture your own yeast just by mixing, refeeding, and waiting. The whole process also skeeved me out as someone who has accidentally grown many science experiments in my fridge, but after seeing so many people bake sourdough bread with the yeast shortage from the past few months, I got my hands on whole wheat flour and never looked back.

I recently shared my start to finish of baking sourdough bread and I’ve learned a lot about bread-making since then, MOSTLY through trial and error.

A lot of error.

I’ve baked at least 6 pancake loaves, mostly from over-extending myself and getting a little too ambitious with batch mixing dough to make multiple loaves OR batch mixing coloured dough to make marbled loaves.

The bread always tastes good, but I find when I overcomplicate my dough, the results tend to get pretty messy and not as beautiful. I have yet to perfect my marbled dough technique, but I figured I’d nail the regular boule before I tackle marbling again.

This recipe uses the following baking percentages:

100% flour (350g)
80% hydration (280g)
20-21% levain (70-75g)
2% salt (8g)

You can lower the hydration to 75% (so 262g water instead) if you aren’t ready to work with a stickier dough. You could even lower it down to 70% before you get the hang of handling the dough. One of the best things to use is a plastic scraper for the bowl, a wet metal bench scraper for folding the dough, and wet hands and surface area to manage your dough. A lot of hand-washing to be done! But in these COVID19 times, that’s not unusual anyway!

Levain vs Mature Starter?

If you don’t have a sourdough starter yet, I have a similarly long-winded post about how I troubleshoot my sourdough starter and how Carter the Starter was born. Good sourdough bread begins with a strong starter. Mine is fed twice a day with a 1:5:5 ratio of food because my starter is ravenous with 1:4:4 still, and it feeds on 50% rye bread. You can also use a starter with all-purpose, or whole wheat, or whatever you like. Each starter has it’s own special eco-system and you can bake bread with the same flours you’ve fed it (it’s actually typically better that way, although I don’t often bake with rye).

I see most recipes using a levain to leaven their sourdough, which is a young sourdough starter at it’s peak in hunger/strength. There are plenty of bakeries and professional bakers who ONLY use mature sourdough to bake with, but I’ve only ever built a levain to make my bread. Maybe one day I’ll experiment with using mature starter, but for now, I can only speak to using a levain.

This recipe builds a separate 1:2:2 levain (so 1 part starter : 2 parts flour : 2 parts water) which is typically ready to use 5-6 hours after feeding, depending on the temperature of your house. This is also based on the fact my starter is accustomed to being fed 1:5:5 twice a day. If you don’t have as strong as a starter, you might have better luck using mature starter for your bread instead. If that’s the case, simply use 20% of the weight of my recipe (so 70-75g) of mature starter in lieu of the levain.

What kind of Flours?

Like with the sourdough starter, you can bake bread with nearly any kind of flour. Typically, better, more nutritious bread has more whole-grains in it, but you do you. There are plenty of recipes that use All-Purpose flour as the base, and the first 20 or so of my loaves were made with organic all-purpose because that’s all I had. The only issue with AP flour is that it is lower in gluten/protein, and thus doesn’t absorb as much water as whole wheat, bread flour, or other kinds of whole grain flours.

That’s why I tend to add gluten flour, or vital wheat gluten (the same stuff used to make seitan), to up the protein of my flours to yield a chewier and stronger bread. It’s not absolutely necessary, and you can probably leave it out and replace it with 20g of whichever flour you like.

In this loaf, I’m using 1847 Bread flour (a local Ontario flour mill), which is a pretty thirsty flour. I’ve got my hydration at 80% (so if my total flour weight is 350g, 80% would mean 280g of water). Normally that is a pretty wet and difficult dough to work with, but since my bread flour is so thirsty, it acts more like a 75% hydration loaf, which is a lot easier to handle. I’ve since baked with an 85% and 88% hydration and both loaves acted more like an 80% hydration loaf. So get to know your flours: flours like rye don’t soak up as much water, but whole wheat and spelt tend to soak up more in my experience. Have fun and play around with different blends. I like keeping the bulk of my flour to be bread flour, and then I play around with the remaining 80g to be either spelt, whole wheat, or a combo of the two. I have been meaning to get my hands on red fife too!

Autolyse

Pictured here is the autolyse process of bread-making: when it comes to sourdough, the texture of your dough and the flavour of your dough come down to gluten-structure and sourdough starter strength. Achieving a well-risen loaf of bread requires a balance of fermentation and gluten strength, which all begins with an autolyse. The term autolysis means “self-digestion” (Greek-derived), which in this case, means the sugars in flour begin to break down once water is added to it.

This sounds bad, but the autolyse process of combining flour and water yields a more elastic dough because it gives the gluten a head start to develop. You could just as easily make bread and skip the autolyse completely, but it’s a technique developed by chemist and expert bread-maker Raymond Cavel (source) and yields a creamier bread crumb that has revolutionized the art of French bread-making.

Folding Technique: Strengthening the Gluten

So in the recipe I list two different kinds of folds: stretch & folds or coil folds. From what I can tell, coil folds are common for larger bulk amounts of dough (like if you’re baking 40 loaves at a time or something), but from what I can tell, people use coil folds for smaller batches because it’s a more gentle method of agitating the dough. Stretch and folds are really easy and can be performed in the same bowl you mixed the dough in, and I’ve had great results (as well as bad results) with both methods. Either or works! I find I like coil folds mostly because the dough is kind of neatly organized for shaping by the time you’re done. With my S&F loaves, I’ve had to scrape it out of the bowl a little bit.

The whole point of either folds is to stretch and strengthen the gluten so you’ll have a springy, tender and chewy bread. The better the strength, the better the structure of bread, and you’ll be more likely to have a nice, domed loaf bread versus a flattened pancake of a loaf.

Bulk-fermentation: How to know when it’s Proofed

I think the hardest part about the bread-making process is the proofing: when to know when it’s ready. One of the main ways to know is by recognizing when your dough has increased in volume enough. It should be between 70% bigger or nearly doubled in size, and you’ll notice it almost being a bit jiggly. This can take between 3-6+ hrs of bulk fermentation (bulk fermentation begins when you add levain to your dough, and ends when you put it in the fridge). The reason it ranges so much is based on temperature and elevation. The hotter it is, the faster it’ll proof. The colder it is, the more time you need to give your starter to work its way through the dough.

My main method of knowing if it’s proofed is the poke test: where you poke a well-floured part of the dough to see if it springs back. If it springs back quickly, it still has some proofing left to do. If you poke it and it stays dented, then it’s over-proofed. (If it’s over-proofed, I’d try to do a gently reshape to see if it’ll bounce back, but worst case scenario, just bake it anyway and you’ll have a bit of a pancake loaf, which is ultimately still bread).

If you poke it and it springs back but leaves a bit of a dent, then you’re correctly proofed!

It’s a lot of trial and error, and worst case scenario: whether it’s under-proofed or over-proofed, you’ll just bake and have slightly denser bread. I’ve eaten about half a dozen less-than-ideal loaves and that’s what I love about sourdough. You can still eat your mistakes :D

What do I proof it in?

If you don’t have a banneton (I bought mine from Canada Baking Supplies but it took almost 2 months to get here), you can use a bowl or a colander lined with a lint-free tea towel (like the ones from IKEA). I recommend using rice flour (brown or white) to dust your banneton, because it absorbs moisture in a way that ensures your dough won’t stick to your cloth. My very first loaves stuck to the tea towels and yielded some pretty messed up looking loaves, so learning the rice flour trick from a bunch of you DM’ing me on Instagram was a game changer.

I eventually invested in a banneton (also if you buy one, get the XL or XXL ones because they are deceptively sized and normally quite small), and mine came with some linen cloth liners which were AWESOME. So handy and I can just brush off the extra rice flour instead of caking up tea towel after tea towel and risk damaging our washing machine haha. It’d probably be fine (our washing machine has handled about 20 loaves worth of tea towels so far), but having the dedicated liners has been very helpful. The bannetons help keep the shape better by allowing the bread to breathe while it’s proofing in the fridge, so I’m really glad I invested in these bannetons.

I shape mine in the batard (that’s the long oval) shape because it means the bread is a bit shorter and easier to toast. I’ve also heard that it’s better at yielding an open crumb structure than a boule, but both the boule and batard shapes make delicious bread. Be sure to cover with a plastic bag or a shower cap so it doesn’t dry out completely in the fridge from the open side of the banneton.

Lastly when it comes to proofing: the reason you cold-proof in the fridge is to allow the sourdough to continue developing flavour. When put in the fridge, the yeast slows down in production (so it won’t rise as quickly) but the bacteria continues to munch away at the dough, which means you’ll have a nice, sour loaf. The longest I’ve proofed in the fridge is 14 hours and that was a delightfully sour loaf, but I’ve seen proof proof for 24 or even 48 hours to get a ridiculously sour loaf, which sounds DELICIOUS.

Scoring

My favourite part about baking sourdough is the scoring! I’ve been following r/Sourdough and probably too many bread-makers on Instagram and there are so many people who have such amazing bread scoring ideas! I love the temporary art that is scoring the dough, and how the more confident your cuts are, the cleaner they tend to be. Again, even if you completely mess up your scoring, at the end of the day, you will still have delicious bread to eat.

I will say, that a bread lame is pretty handy. At the very least, purchase some safety blades (they’re ridiculously cheap and available at most pharmacies) and you can carefully hold the safety blade to make your cuts. I’ve invested in a UFO style lame (as you can see in the video below) and there are a lot of people who use the traditional long bread-lame that slightly bends the blade. Either works! If you don’t have either, a sharp knife will also do just fine. All you want to do is give the dough a direction to expand, otherwise it’ll expand out of the bottom and that yields a bread that is slightly more difficult to toast.

Baking Equipment

When it comes to baking equipment: I started out baking on my 12 inch cast-iron skillet and used another small pan for ice when I put in the dough. You want to create steam so that the dough is moist enough to allow the insides to expand and break through the score you’ve made. The more steam you have, the bigger the oven spring (how much your dough poofs up). Using a cast iron dutch oven with a lid is probably the simplest way to capture steam from your dough. You can also use a spray bottle or a couple ice cubes to place inside to add more steam, but it’s totally up to you!

I’ve seen people use baking stones or pizza stones, and use a turkey roaster pan overtop to achieve a similar effect, and I’ve also seen people have a tray of lava rocks in the oven. Just before baking, they splash a bunch of water on the pre-heated rocks and close the oven to bake. Kristin from Full Proof Baking has some SUPER satisfying compilations of oven spring videos with that method.

Personally I find the dutch oven the simplest method. I waited until I saw one on sale at Canadian Tire for like 70% off (it was still 180$ in the end) but it’s been so worth it! Plus you can cook with it on the stove, up to 500F in any kind of heat because it’s cast iron. PLUS mine is enameled so it can technically go in the dishwasher, but I’m far too scared of doing that, and I only really bake bread in it anyway so I don’t really wash it ever.

It’s not gross ok, I always bake bread on parchment paper anyway.

My last tip for baking is to remember to lower the heat down to 450F after you get that initial oven spring. The reason you go to 500F in the first place is because you want to get as much activity in the oven spring to lift the dough before it hardens and bakes. Then you lower down to 450F to continue to bake the dough through and the caramelize the crust. With sourdough, you can always go a bit darker than you think. I see a lot of people baking for up to 30 minutes after the oven spring (so 50 min total) to get that really dark, caramelized crust. It doesn’t really burn, it mostly gets a deep, wonderful flavour. If you keep it relatively light, it’ll taste fine but you lose a lot of that Maillard reaction.

So that’s it! That’s the complete comprehensive post. It’s a little long winded, but this is the aggregation of everything I’ve learned about sourdough so far from my fairy doughmother Liz Miu, watching countless videos on Youtube (Mainly Pro Home Cooks, Proof Bread, Joshua Weissman, Binging with Babish, Full Proof Baking, Food Geek) and reading tons of posts from sourdough enthusiasts on Reddit and Instagram.

I am by no means an expert, and I still have a lot to learn and practice! Sourdough is a weekly ritual of relearning and practicing for me, and it’s been very meditative, delicious, and of course, very fun. I hope you enjoy this very chill video showing how I made this loaf of bread, and I hope you enjoy experimenting with your sourdough!

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