First a disclaimer–I love making sourdough bread and probably you will too. But I don’t love it because it’s easy, I love it because it’s hard and requires skill, discipline, practice, and commitment to be good at it. So yes, sourdough is like Alice’s rabbit hole for many people who wander into it’s trap. I went through 80 pounds of flour before I calmed down and started looking at it rationally. My excuse was “I’m doing this to learn, not to eat it–I’ll give it away to friends”. But somehow I gained ten pounds, and it wasn’t muscle from hucking bags of flour around. My bread rarely looked like the lovely loaves in the myriad of YouTube videos about “making sourdough bread the easy way”. Mine was often damp, dense, and not all that tasty. Before a hundred people leap to their keyboards to tell me where I went wrong I promise you, most of the comments telling me what I need to do differently will offer different solutions, and I’ve tried many of them. There are hundreds of ways to fix each problem. They all work, and none of them are a complete solution. I occasionally get the planets to align and produce a glorious loaf. You have to do EVERYTHING right. And what right is, isn’t exactly clear.
But the deepest trap is not the quest for the perfect loaf. It’s the demands of the starter. Sourdough starter is your new pet, as demanding as a cat. You feed it every day–sometimes twice, it poops, grows, and requires “discarding”. You fuss over it, make sure it’s active, and in return it ignores you and does what it wants. Yes, you should name yours. Mine is named Mildred. She’s named after one of two cousins I particularly liked (Mildred and Harriet), but Harriet was already taken by the folks that run Proof, an inspirational sourdough bread bakery in Arizona that grew from two hippies in a garage to multiple locations. So Mildred it is.
In theory you can tuck it in the refrigerator, or let it starve for a while, and then revive it when you want with just one or two days of frantic attention and feeding, hoping to see lots of bubbles and growth like the critter in the vintage movie “The Blob”, which fits entirely too well. Especially for noobs, because most new pet owners feed it too much and retain too much of the original starter. If you keep 100 grams and you’re feeding it five to one, you have 1100 grams of starter after each feeding. A little sidebar: When making a sourdough starter, the “five to one” ratio typically refers to a 1:5:5 feeding method by weight, and always in grams unless you want to drive yourself nuts with ounces and pounds.
- 1 part starter (10 grams)
- 5 parts water (50 grams)
- 5 parts flour (50 grams)
You accumulate mass quantities of discard that you either throw away or make some of the many discard recipes. The fact that there are an endless number of discard recipes tells you all you need to know about how much discard there is to deal with. And when your starter is ready and at its peak, you’re going to make bread. Whether you want more bread or not. Otherwise it will sink back in a sulk, you’ll have to discard most of it and start feeding again, waiting a day or two for it to recover, and then bake another loaf anyway, or continue feeding and discarding pointlessly. So tip #1–for each feed/discard cycle, keep about 10 grams of starter. A five to one feeding will give you 110 grams of active (hopefully) starter which means you have 100 grams of starter to make bread, and 10 grams to feed–perfect.
Another sidebar: Starter is flour, water and SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast) a culinary fermentation culture consisting of lactic acid bacteria, acetic acid bacteria, and yeast. In the case of sourdough starter it’s basically wild yeast that consumes residual sugars in flour and sometimes eats the gluten protein and produces CO2 and ethanol. The symbiotic bacteria consume the ethanol the yeast makes and produce acetic and lactic acid. Unfed starter is simply flour and water with most of the residual sugar gone, so the yeast goes dormant. the bacteria continue producing acids until the ethanol is gone. The acid breaks the gluten strands and you wind up with goo with a layer of water on top of it that has acids and ethanol in it. You can stir it up, feed it a few times, and it will come right back to active life. Most people feed at a three to one ratio. I generally prefer five to one because the time-frame where yeast is active is extended a bit, so I can be a bit sloppy about timing. I make Levain–the very active starter used to make bread–at three to one because I’ll be watching the activity like a hawk and using it at it’s peak.
Where does SCOBY come from? I’m glad you asked. Yes, you can buy starter instead of making it yourself. There are all kinds of folks offering 100+ year old starters online. Some claim to have starters from the time of various European plagues. I’m not sure why that’s attractive. If you buy one of these fabled starters you’ll find yourself expending the same amount of effort, doing the same feed and discard processes, and taking the same amount of time as if you started from scratch. I suspect some of the freeze-dried starters are just a pinch of flour. Even if the starter isn’t a scam, after you’ve fed and discarded 90% of the starter twice a day for the first week, what you wind up with (unless you’re working in a sterile lab) is local wild yeast and bacteria–from the air, the flour, your fingers, anywhere really, with perhaps a microscopic remainder of the vintage starter you paid for. So tip #2–if you can’t find a fellow whackjob who is already making sourdough to mooch a bit of starter from, make your own. It couldn’t be much simpler. Weigh a container (don’t have a gram scale? Get one. The Amazon Basics scale cost about 7 bucks and works perfectly). Choose a container with a smooth interior (jars with narrowed necks and screw threads in the glass are hard to clean) beer pint glasses are perfect. Write the weight on the jar with a sharpie. Put 20 grams of unbleached flour in, add 20 grams of water. Stir VERY well, cover with plastic wrap and set it aside for a day. Morning of day two, dump out all but 10 grams, add 20 grams of flour, 20 grams of water etc. Repeat the process twice a day until your starter bubbles copiously in the time between feedings. In 10 days of this nonsense you should have starter. Yay.
Yes, sourdough is simple. It’s just flour, water, and a little salt. And starter–but starter is just flour and water. What a wondrous thing. But really it’s flour water, time, and work. Lots of time and lots of work. The timeline for a good loaf of sourdough bread is almost two days. Yes, for most of that time it’s resting, proofing, or retarding and you aren’t doing anything–sort of. But it’s always taking some of your attention. The focus and effort required during the active effort times of mixing, shaping, scoring and baking is substantial and you will obsess over any workflow or preparation errors you make while you’re doing each step. Tip #3 — lay out everything you need at each stage. See Timeline below, which list the equiment needed at each step. You say you scored your loaf but you forgot to lay out the scissors to trim your parchment lowering sling? By the time you get the scissors your loaf has started to spread and flatten. Where did you put the oven mitts? Forgot to preheat the dutch oven? You shaped your loaf but didn’t prep the banneton? Well, you just screwed up your bread, didn’t you. One more reason your oven spring is weak and what should be an eight inch high loaf is more like flatbread. And then you need to clean up. I’ve become fairly adept and efficient at the cleanup work, but my refrigerator always has some flour on the handle, there’s dried dough on doorknobs, drawer pulls, and my boardshorts. Cleaning the bowls, scrapers, spatulas, and other implements has to be done immediately and completely or the dough turns to hardened glue which requires furious scrubbing to remove. And don’t forget to scrub the bottom of the sink. Any blobs of dough in the sink harden to concrete. Tip #4–as soon as you finish using your mixing bowl fill it with water and a squirt of detergent. Scrub dough off the rim and any that got on the outside. Put any tools, cups, spatulas, etc. in the bowl to soak. Ignore it for an hour and it’s easy to finish cleaning everything.
Timeline: 0 hour–Make the Levain. My typical Levain (also called preferment) is 20g of starter, 20g whole wheat flour, 40g unbleached all purpose or bread flour, 60g water. If you’re counting, that’s 120g of Levain.
Hour 6: Autolyse your flour. This means mix your flour with water and let it sit. Autolysing is controversial, many folks say it’s pointless, you can skip it and just mix the dough. I find it helpful, so I do it. Pro bakers always do it. Put your mixing bowl on the scale and tare the scale–that means press the button marked “tare” that returns the scale to 0. If you lift the bowl off the scale it will show a minus value that equals the weight of the scale. Taring is super handy. I do it after every step so I don’t have to remember the previous weight. Add 375g water and 500g of your chosen flour. Sometimes I use 50g of whole wheat and 450g of organic, unbleached AP flour straight from Costco. That works as well for me as any more expensive flour. I’m not pooh-poohing the folks that get very serious about what flour they use. They make better bread than I do. I just simply haven’t rolled that far down the rabbit hole. Mix vigorously by hand or with a spatula. Scrape the resulting somewhat dry dough away from the sides and cover the bowl with a damp towel or plastic wrap. Set aside.
Hour 7: Check your Levain to confirm it’s very active. You can spoon a little bit into a glass of water to confirm that it floats, or just look at the container–it should have visible bubbles everywhere. If it doesn’t, either wait a little longer until it does, or just proceed, knowing the perfect loaf remains out of your reach. If you have no bubbles, you’re screwed. Toss the Levain and make a Pain de Mie, a yeasted bread that is the french equivalent of Wonder Bread though it tastes infinitely better (low bar). Look for my recipe or just search Google or YouTube. If the Levain is good, mix the starter into the dough and add 10g of salt (more if you like salty bread, none if you’re from Northern Italy). Mix well. Cover the bowl with a very damp towel or plastic wrap. Set aside for about 6 hours to bulk ferment.
Hour 8-10: Bulk ferment and stretch and folds. For the first two hours do stretch and folds every 30 minutes to develop the gluten. This is the equivalent of kneading the bread dough, but stretch and fold works better with sourdough, especially if you’re doing the somewhat high hydration dough this recipe creates. Check a few times to ensure it hasn’t over-proofed. If it doubles (unlikely) it’s a little overproofed. If you’re already a bread geek you’re probably thinking this is a fairly low hydration level. But don’t forget the 120g of 100% hydration Levain we’re adding. To calculate the hydration level, the Levain is 60g of water and 60g of flour. So the dough is actually 560g of flour and 435g of water. 435/560 = 77 percent. That’s a fairly sticky, relatively high hydration dough and it’s going to be a bit tricky to work with. If you’re a total noob cut the hydration to 60 percent by reducing the water added during autolyse to 275g. It will be MUCH easier to work with. Tip #5–To adjust the hydration level to whatever you want just take the total amount of flour–(autolysed dough plus Levain) 560g in our case, multiply by the desired percentage (say 65%) .65 X 560 = 364 and subtract the water (60g) that is already in the preferment: 364 – 60 = 304g of water
Hour 13: Shape the dough and let it proof until nearly double or one hour, whichever is less. Equipment on hand: Banneton or Colander with towel, rice flour, scraper.
Hour 14: Retard. This just means stick the covered dough in the refrigerator. Make sure it’s well covered, refrigerators are very dry inside. This is an optional step that slows the yeast activity but lets the bacteria keep working. The sour taste is enhanced, and that flavor is why you’re doing all this work. With the hydration level of the bread in this recipe (77%) handling and scoring the dough will be difficult if it isn’t cold, so no, it’s not really optional, is it. I like to retard the dough for about 24 hours.
Hour 30: Preheat your over to 450 with your dutch oven inside. Check your oven temperature. Equipment: Dutch oven Oven thermometer. If your dutch oven is bare cast iron and you oil it to prevent rust, give it a good scrubbing with soap and water before you put it in the oven. the oil will burn and make a mess. If you don’t have a dutch oven you can use a heavy pot or attempt the fake steam oven technique. Just realize that if your oven has a constant vent fan the steam won’t stay in the oven long.
Hour 31: Score the dough on a piece of parchment. Cut away the excess parchment to give you two handles to lower the dough into the dutch oven. Spray with water, bake. Equipment on hand: Scoring razor, parchment, oven mitts, scissors, rice flour, spray bottle with water.
Hour 31.5 Bake. After 30 minutes remove the lid from the dutch oven. Lower the oven temp to 430F. Continue baking until your bread has the color you like.
Hour 32 – 40 Cool the loaf. No, don’t cut it you fool. Yes, you’re dying to see the texture. Yes, warm bread with some good Irish butter is wonderful. Tough, don’t do it. You will literally ruin your loaf. You can get away with short cooling times like two hours with low hydration, yeasted bread. With sourdough you’ll mash the structure, let water escape before it’s had time to integrate with the crumb, and you’ll wind up with wet, gooey bread initially and stale bread on day three. Sourdough continues to cook after you’ve taken it out of the oven. The starch in the crumb undergoes transformations that take time to complete. There’s an optimal time to cut sourdough–just after it has cooled to room temperature. If it’s warm to the touch, wait a little longer. At least 6 hours. Yeah, I know, that’s crazy. You’ll cut it before it’s time–everyone does. The slices will be uneven, the crust will flatten, the bread will be damp at best, gooey at worst.
Is it all worth it? Well, yeah, but seems fair to tell you what you’re getting into. All amateur undertakings that you aim to perform at the expert level require time, effort, patience, and practice to perfect. Using words like “easy” in the title is just clickbait. To paraphrase JFK, we don’t do this stuff because it’s easy, we do it because it’s not. Perfecting your skills is the reward. It’s not the bread, or the rolls, or the discard English muffins or discard pancakes and it’s certainly not the ten pounds you’ll probably gain from eating too much bread. If it was easy, everyone would do it. You’re different. Welcome to the rabbit hole.