This is the best sourdough bread recipe for the absolute beginner. You don't need to know anything about making sourdough to follow this guide. You will need a mature sourdough starter for this recipe which takes about 7 days to be ready or you can get some mature sourdough starter from a friend and make some sourdough bread today!
One important thing you need to know is that making sourdough bread is a two-day process BUT it's not a lot of work. Most of the time is spent letting the dough rest and rise.
Sourdough needs a lot of time for flavor to develop, gluten to develop, and for the sourdough starter to ferment. As they say we make sourdough today so we can eat tomorrow.
How To Make A Sourdough Bread Loaf Recipe
Read on for all my tips on how to make your first loaf of sourdough bread with a nice open crumb and lots of lift!
A few months ago I knew nothing about making sourdough. I only knew that I liked to eat it and that I wanted to make it from home. At first, I was horribly overwhelmed by words like hydration and levain. I got a migraine the first day I tried to make sense of a recipe.
But like most things, once I actually MADE the sourdough bread, I found the steps to be pretty simple and pretty flexible. So just follow along with me and download my sourdough starter workflow pdf to keep you on track.
My Go To Sourdough Bread Recipe
So I have taken everything I learned about making sourdough bread from a homemade starter (if you don't have one, learn to make your own sourdough starter here.
Like most recipes, there are a million different ways you can do something and the one that works for you is the best way. So I hope this recipe works as well for you as it does for me! Please feel free to leave me a comment if you have a question or need clarity on something.
Making sourdough bread is deceptively easy. The ingredients are not complicated. Just flour, water, salt and and active starter. Like most delicious recipes, the confusion comes from the WAY the recipe is prepared. Sourdough is made from a natural yeast that takes time to rise and warmth to be active. You cannot rush it. Read on for a step-by-step tutorial on how to make your own sourdough bread from scratch.
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When I was learning how to make sourdough bread (I still am learning with every loaf) I used what I had on hand. A simple glass bowl, tea towel, cast iron dutch oven, and razor blade for scoring. That worked well for my first ten loaves. So you don't need to order and fancy tools.
The bowl and tea towel or napkinare used to hold your dough in a nice shape overnight in the fridge. While your dough is in the fridge, it rises very little (if at all). The fridge is a great place to keep your dough after it has finished rising and shaping until you are ready to bake it. Cold dough is also easier to score than warm dough.
A sharp knife is needed to score the dough so it can rise! If you don't score deep enough, your bread will not be able to rise or it will split.
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The dutch oven is great because it traps moisture in the pot which helps the sourdough bread to rise taller. After 30 minutes, you take off the lid so that the loaf can brown.
Lame (pronounced lahm) - Sharp, thin razor blade with a handle for easy scoring. I love my lame for scoring delicate wheat patterns into the dough.
Making sourdough bread can be broken down into steps. I will go over these steps in detail below but let's define some words that can sound confusing.
Sourdough Bread: A Beginner's Guide
Sourdough Starter - Made from naturally occurring yeasts, water, and flour that is left to ferment over a period of time in a warm environment (75º-90F). As the yeast ferments, it produces sugar alcohol and gas which causes bread to rise. The starter can have a mild/sweet flavor or it can be very sour and tangy depending on how much time it ferments.
Levain - Technically sourdough starter is a levain but that can be confusing. For the purposes of this recipe, when we refer to a levain we mean sourdough starter that is mixed with fresh flour and water and used at the peak of rising.
Peak - When we say let the levain rise to its peak, we mean don't use the levain until it rises to its highest point and then begins to fall. This is when the yeast is its strongest and is ready to use in dough.
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This can take as little as two hours or up to 8 or more if the room is very cold. Ideally, you would make a levain right before you make your bread and put it in a nice warm spot so it rises quickly. I put mine in the oven with the oven light on and the door cracked or on top of the counter with the dishwasher running.
Autolyse - This refers to the process of combining flour and water together, and giving the water time to absorb into the dough so it becomes flexible. When you first add water to flour to make your dough, it will be very dry, shaggy and tear easily.
After a mere 30 minutes, the water will have hydrated the flour and you will now be able to stretch the dough and start making folds which create the gluten in our dough. We do not knead sourdough as you would knead a traditional dough.
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Float Test - There is some discussion as to how reliable a float test really is but I do it so I will include it in this post. After your levain has reached its peak, remove 1 teaspoon of levain and drop it into a glass of water. Does it float? Then it's ready to use. If it sinks, your levain may not be ready and give it more time to rise.
Hydration - This refers to how much water is in the dough in relation to the flour. I'm really bad at math so I have to break it down like this. If you have 1000 grams of flour and 800 grams of water, that is 80% hydration.
My recipe is 500 grams of flour and 400 grams of water so it's roughly 80% hydration. That's pretty high for a beginner loaf but I have tried to use less water and I find it difficult to do the stretch and folds so I have kept the water at 400 grams.
How To Make Sourdough Bread
Remember, if you change the flour at all, your dough will not be the same consistency as mine. Different flours absorb water in different ways so when you start tweaking this recipe to make it your own, you will undoubtedly have to adjust the water levels.
If you are shooting for a specific hydration level (most use around 75% hydration) then this is a handy sourdough hydration calculator to figure out if your ratios are on track.
Stretch & Fold - This is how we create the gluten in our dough. Because our dough has so much water, you can't knead it or it will get gummy and tough.
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So we use the method of pulling the dough after autolyse to the point of almost tearing and folding it over onto itself to stretch the gluten and create structure without kneading.
Bulk Ferment - This refers to the time that we allow the yeast to devour those starches and begin producing gas (aka bubbles!), causing the dough to rise (usually until it has doubled in size).
The amount of time you allow your dough to bulk ferment really depends on the loaf but I'll give you guidelines as we go. Usually between 3-5 hours in a warm room but it depends on the strength of your starter! You can't rush the rising.
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Shaping - After we do our stretch and folds and bulk ferment, we will pre-shape our sourdough loaf to evenly distribute the bubbles and create strength in our loaf.
This involves doing a few easy folds. One is called a simple book-fold which is similar to how you fold butter into the dough when you're making a croissant.
Secondly, we will roll the dough up like a spiral and tuck the edges underneath to make the top of the dough skin tight. The tighter you can make the dough and the better it holds its shape, the taller your loaf will rise.
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Cold Ferment - After we shape our loaf, we will put it into a bowl with a flour-dusted tea towel or a banneton if you've got one. Then the loaf takes a nice long nap in the fridge and will be ready to bake the next day. The loaf will barely rise at all in the fridge so it is important to put the loaf in the fridge when it's doubled in size and is ready to bake.
Scoring - If you're artistic like
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