Simple Basic Sourdough Bread

Version:  1.22, 12.Oct.08 09:04:52

This is a recipe for "1 unit" of a basic, white flour, sourdough bread.  This recipe uses fairly "even" and "round" quantities, and will make 1 small loaf of plain white sourdough bread.  Most typical bread recipes will call for twice or more of this amount of ingredients.  That makes this an excellent recipe for testing and honing your sourdough baking skills and goals.  Some details.  Other issues.

Seeding the Sponge (the afternoon/evening before):

NB: be sure to replace your "usage" & refresh your starter before you put it away.

With a whisk or spoon (wood, metal, or plastic?), mix the flour and water into a thin batter in a suitably large bowl.  Stir or whisk the sourdough inoculant into that mixture.  Seeded and ready for proofing, this 50:50 (by volume) mixture will become the sourdough sponge around which this recipe is built. 

Proofing the Sponge:

Here we start with the pre-ferment step.

Cover; let sit for at least 3-4 hours at 85F or 6-8 hours at 68F; longer if possible even overnight, and longer than that if it's cooler.  For the sake of both consistency and convenience, I do my preferment at ~70-75F (depending on the time of year) for 8-12 hours overnight.  This first proofing time is an interdependent function of the temperature, the nature and history of your starter culture, and to a lesser degree the nature of your flour and water.

Making the Dough (the next morning):

Mix together the salt and the 1-1/2 cups of the remaining bread flour.  You'll use the final 1/2 cup for your work table and to "tune" the final moisture level of the dough.  Whisk them together dry first, then add ALL of the sponge created previously with a spoon until well incorporated.

As you mix it, the dough will progress from very gooey to a really sticky mess!  Add your reserved flour a little at a time and keep scraping the bowl until the dough doesn't want to stick to the bowl quite as much any more.  At some point, it becomes too difficult to mix with a spoon.  By then, directly by hand is much easier.  Turn it out on a lightly floured table and knead it--only a little should be needed--in the conventional manner.  Alternatively, you might want to try what I use; the Flatten&Fold method.  I never use a mixer any more, and I don't knead other then as needed to form or handle the loaf.

At this point you're done putting the ingredients into the dough.  It is also here that you make any final adjustments to this recipe.  Dough too dry?  Add a little extra starter.  Dough too wet?  Add a little extra flour.  As you get more comfortable doing this, you'll find that you can handle remarkably wet dough's.  FWIW; the wetter your dough, the better your bread...

Form the dough into a ball, and cover it with the inverted bowl you mixed it up in.  Go get a cup of coffee as you let it sit like this for at least 15 and up to even 60 minutes.  This step permits the flour and water to completely absorb each other.

If permitted, the activity of the sourdough culture will do the heavy "kneading" for you.  You don't need a fancy power mixer.  All I typically do is flatten the dough ball out.  Then fold in the top, the bottom, and each side in; until I have a sort of square-ish dough-ball.  I turn that folded side down on a little flour, and cover it with the bowl that I originally mixed it in.  This is called the "Flatten & Fold" technique, and is nearly identical to the "Stretch & Fold" technique.  You can use either, or, if physical or convenience issues exist, you can use a mixer.

Wait 30-60 minutes, and do that again.  Do that at least 4-5 more times and that's all the kneading you'll need.  A few cycles more or less won't change much of anything.  Except that the longer and/or more often you do this, the more sour your bread will be.

Final Rise (ferment):

Lightly dust hands and press dough into the shape you want it to become with the flat of the hand from center to edge.  The idea here is to push out or pop any large bubbles--if you have any, you should be able to hear them "pop".
NB: I skip the preceding step, when I want the larger bubbles.

Next, fold the edges into the center, overlapping slightly.  The idea here is to stretch the skin on top and roll it underneath.  Do it gently.  Do it too much and you'll break that skin.  Then you'll have to ball it up again, knead it a little, let it rest some more, and do it again.  This will make a traditional round loaf.  If you want to make bread that's a bit more "sandwich" oriented, form that round loaf into longer, thinner sandwich loaf.  Shape is completely arbitrary, with the "best" shape being whatever works for you.

Transfer your nascent loaf onto a silicon baking mat, or cornmeal or semolina dusted parchment or cookie sheet.
NB: I prefer and now only use one of the new perforated silicon baking mats.  It's much like parchment, except that it's infinitely reusable. Either are better then a plain cookie sheet that can leave a cornmeal or semolina mess and/or have stuck bread.

Adjust baking rack to put bread near the middle of the oven, taking care that the rising dough can not touch the top of the oven.  On the lowest oven rack or oven bottom, place a shallow container to hold water--metal is probably your best selection.  Cover and put into COLD OVEN or other protected, draft free place, and let rise.

I let it rise, uncovered, ~2-2.5 times expanded.  My starter seems to do it in about 4 hours or so at room temp.
[NB: letting the dough become twice as wide AND twice as high, is NOT a doubling; it is a quadrupling!  If you let it rise too high and/or too long, it'll become overextended, weak, and will collapse.  It'll taste okay, it'll just be a bit less fun to eat.]

Some final notes:

Bake:

[Optional step] In a separate pan or kettle, bring to a boil about a cup or so of water and pour into the pan or skillet.  Let the steam envelop and permeate the oven and dough for 10-15 min. before you begin baking.

Turn oven, set to 400F, to "ON"; baking time will be 40-60 min. (depends a bit on moisture and shape of loaf).

"Under-baking" is easy!  The good thing is that it's nearly impossible to "over-bake" your bread.  So leave your loaf in the oven at least 5-minutes longer than you think may be necessary.  Remember, a typical sourdough loaf is much darker than the "regular" bread one might buy in a store.  Obviously, if it starts to scorch, you've left it in long enough.

Since I like my crust a bit more crispy than chewy, I find using only the water in the pan as outlined above to be sufficient.  But if you're a fanatic and need a really, really chewy crust; 5-minutes after you turn on the oven, mist the bread with a sprayer about 3-times.  Do this at 5 minute intervals or until the crust starts to darken.  Just open the door a crack and spray the back, walls, floor, and loaf with more water.  The steam created by the water treatment is what makes the thick, chewy crust that legions of sourdough aficionados crave so much.  Beware the steam--it is hot and will scald!
NB:  My oven is electric with a "folding" bottom element attached at one side.  If and when I do use water, I use an old cookie tray under that element--makes a great water holder.  It's flat and wide, and seems to eliminate the need to "spritz" the oven during baking.  I add boiling water to it; wait 10 min or so with the bread in its baking position, then I turn the oven on and walk away.  50-60 min at 400F seems to be just about right.  Keep in mind that there's a thousand different kinds of ovens out there, and that YMMV...

Bake until crust is very dark brown--about 50-60 minutes for the smallish loaf created by this recipe.  If not browning evenly, turn the bread around after about 20 minutes or so.  Turn oven off, open door, and let bread remain in oven 5 - 15 minutes longer.  Remove from oven, then let cool to room temperature before slicing—about 2 hours.  For a less dark loaf, turn the temp down 25F or so and/or take it out sooner...

All other amounts and types of sourdough bread are made as multiples of this basic recipe.  Derivative breads; whole wheat, rye, and so on, are made from this same basic recipe substituting the specific flour ingredient in order to get the desired results.  Note that using different flours may necessitate some compensation in order to accommodate the abilities of the various flours to absorb the water.  Changing the amount of water by a tablespoon or so, and the flour by 3 tablespoons or so should be more than enough to get you "into the window".

After reading reams of pages and listening to legions of "experts", I've distilled down all of that input and made myself the "expert".  Just like me, everybody that makes SD bread has their own methods, ideas, and goals.  Too many are "hinky" and pointless at best, or slaves to technology and methodology at worst.  What you've just read is mine...


Details:  There are only FOUR ingredients in your basic sourdough bread; flour, water, sourdough culture, and salt.  No sugar, honey, milk, eggs, fruit, cheese, seeds, or any of the other trappings of culinary diversity.  The addition of "adulterants" is done in order to alter the basic recipe in pursuit of some specific result.  This is not necessarily bad, it's just beyond the purview of this simple recipe.

Ferment:  The purpose of using the sourdough culture is to convert flour to gas, sugar, alcohol, and acids for both the rise and taste.  The pre-fermenting is bread-baking techno-geek speak for allowing the culture to work with the flour and water in advance of the primary or main fermenting step also known as the final rise.

I have written these pages to be both an instructive and simple recipe.  There are many links here which I hope will provide the reader with some of the wealth of information that I've gleaned over the years in the pursuit of excellence with this noble and ancient baking art.  Learn how to recognize the state of your starter or "fix" it if it's not well, with a visit to the "Starter Doctor".

Other Issues:  Bread making, especially sourdough bread making, is a simple pleasure based upon a few simple skills.  All you need is flour, water, salt, sourdough starter, a few fingers, and a bit of time.  All of the other things you will see so many knowledgeable folks babble on about, are all unnecessary.  If you read and discuss this craft with too many folks, you may well end up feeling like you're not worthy of dealing in it.  You'll be told that you absolutely need an accurate, digital scale; some will assert that you can't possibly bake SD unless you have a special commercial oven capable of making steam, heating to uncharted temperatures, and so on...  Others will assert that you can only make good SD bread if you use bannetons made of the finest, imported French willow to shape your loaf, specially harvested organic flour milled into the mixing bowl, tiles or quarry stones to bake upon, rice flour for "the perfect" separation, and the list goes on, and on, and on...  But the biggest issues for "must have" equipment is usually a digital scale, followed by the need for a large, powerful mixer.

None of this is true.  It is complete rubbish and, if you'll pardon the expression, a lot of "weenie-wagging".  All of this is done both as an impediment to entry of newcomers (so that you have to "pay" your dues), and in the mistaken notion that they're better (read: closer to being a "professional") baker than you.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Yes, you can bake fine bread if you have a spiffy, new digital scale and a powerful mixer.  But you can bake fine bread without one as well.  A fine new scale or powerful mixer is not a substitute for the knowledge behind the craft. 

While anyone can successfully use a scale for baking, its use is really only necessary for commercial bakers, who need it for matters of scaling up or down to accommodate the days' bread market.  Today they build 132 loaves, tomorrow they might need 87.  It's hard to scale, "Use 3-cups flour, and 1-cup water ..." from 132 loaves one day to 87 the next.  This is most certainly best done by weight.

Nor is it a matter of accuracy.  Both volumetric and mass based measurements suffer from their own errors.  And other than for scaling, neither is "better" or "more accurate" than the other.  Don't let some newsgroup blow-hards try to make you feel less a baker than they, just because they have a fancy scale, or a powerful mixer, or a digital multi-probe, or tiles, and so on...  Learn how to bake bread.  Then you can add, or not, any of the accouterments you feel necessary in order to accomplish that task best for you.

But above all, enjoy what you're doing!

Bon Appétit!