Basic Sourdough Bread: A Step-by-Step Recipe

So you want to bake sourdough. This is the basic recipe, from the very beginning, with video along the way. Once the knack of it clicks, anyone can turn out a genuinely good campagne. Let's bake together. Today's loaf is bread flour only — crisp outside, soft and chewy inside, and light on the palate.

Right. Let's bake some sourdough.

Step 1 — Preparing the sourdough starter

Sourdough is, at heart, flour and water. Mix the two, then keep adding flour and water and stirring for a week or two, and you will raise what is called a sourdough starter. This page picks up from there: what to do with that starter to turn it into a loaf.

Once the culture is alive, keep it in the fridge. The day or the night before you bake, take it out and feed it with flour and water to replace what you are about to use.

What you need:

• Starter90g
• Bread flour (Kitanokaori)45g
• Water (around 20°C)43cc
• Stirrer
• Digital scale

Conditions:

• Date8 April 2020
• Room temperature21°C
• Humidity43%

Since this is the basic loaf, I am baking a white bread with no whole wheat or rye — bread flour only. So I want a starter raised on bread flour alone as well. In fact, whole wheat is usually said to ferment more readily than white flour, because it carries more minerals. But for this loaf I wanted to see how far bread flour alone would go.

1. Add 45g of bread flour and 43cc of water to 90g of starter and mix well.

Aim for roughly equal parts: the existing starter on one side, the new flour and water on the other. Once you are used to it and the culture is lively, you can use rather less starter, and there is no need to measure precisely. The flour and water should also be roughly equal, but with bread flour I find that matching them exactly makes the starter a little too loose, so I hold the water back slightly.

2. Leave it at room temperature.

How fast it rises depends on temperature and humidity, but bubbles usually appear on the surface within one to two hours, and after several hours it will have roughly doubled. This time I started the starter on the morning of the day before baking, and it had tripled within half a day. To bake the next day, I stirred it down, put it in the fridge and went to bed. Stir a risen starter and you will see a web of strands running through it.

If instead you do step 1 on the evening before you bake, you can simply stir it, leave it on the counter rather than in the fridge, and go to sleep. By morning it should have doubled, which is just right.

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Step 2 — Making the dough

What surprised me most about sourdough dough was how easy it is. It bears no relation to the hard work of kneading that the phrase "making bread" tends to conjure. With sourdough there is almost no kneading at all. I had somehow absorbed the idea that bread was mostly about the effort of the knead.

What matters in sourdough is simply this: going slowly, and giving it time.

What you need:

• Starter60g
• Bread flour (Kitanokaori)250g
• Water (around 20°C)165cc
• Salt4g
• Scraper
• Banneton basket (21 × 15 × 8cm)
• Digital scale

Mixing the flour, water and salt

1. Dissolve the salt thoroughly in the water, then pour it over the flour. Think of it as bringing the flour and water together rather than kneading them. Start with the scraper, turning the flour up from the bottom of the bowl. Gradually the two become one thing. Once they are more or less combined, use your hands to gather it into a single mass.

2. Cover the bowl and leave it at room temperature for 30 minutes to an hour. You are not building gluten by kneading; you are building it by waiting.

Mixing the starter into the dough

3. Now work the starter into the rested dough. Begin by stretching the dough out flat. Take hold of an edge and pull — gluten has formed, so it should stretch. Put 60g of starter on the stretched dough, fold it in towards the centre, and keep working it for a while. The hydration is high and it will stick to your hands. Do not worry about it.

4. Cover the bowl and leave it at room temperature for 30 minutes to an hour.

Stretch and fold

5. The first stretch and fold. It is exactly what it sounds like: stretch, then fold. Working around the round of dough, stretch and fold it roughly six to eight times. Not kneading — stretching gently and folding. That is the point.

6. Cover the bowl and leave it at room temperature for one to two hours.

7. The second stretch and fold. The dough has begun to rise, so work more gently than the first time to avoid knocking the air out of it. This time, four to six stretches and folds.

8. Cover the bowl and leave it at room temperature for two to three hours.

Shaping the dough

9. Using the scraper, ease the dough gently out of the bowl onto a floured surface. Flatten it lightly into a rough square, fold it in from all four sides, shape it loosely, and let it rest for 30 to 60 minutes.

10. Finally, stretch and fold about four more times to build tension across the surface, and shape it into an oval. Dust the top with flour and place it in a cloth-lined banneton — turning it over, so the floured surface sits at the bottom of the basket.

11. The final proof. Two to three hours at room temperature should roughly double it.

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Step 3 — Baking

What you need:

• Dutch oven (220mm internal diameter, 100mm deep)
• Baking paper
• Razor blade

1. Put the Dutch oven in the oven and preheat to 250°C.

2. Once it is up to temperature, turn the dough out of the basket onto a sheet of baking paper.

3. Score the top with the razor.

4. Take out the Dutch oven, lower the dough in on its paper, put the lid on, and bake at 230°C for 25 minutes.

5. Take the lid off and bake at 240°C for a further 10 minutes.

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If this is your first attempt at sourdough, the page below walks through everything in order, from raising a starter to the variations you can try afterwards.

Getting started with sourdough bread

Here are the tools and ingredients I use day to day, in case they are useful.

Tools and ingredients for sourdough