Beginner Weekday Sourdough

I made this recipe about a hundred times when I was first learning to bake. It's easy, tasty, (relatively) quick, and a great way to get started baking delicious sourdough.

Quick Recipe

• 410 g Unbleached white bread flour

• 50 g Whole wheat flour (or Rye flour)

• 10 g Sea salt

• 330 g Water - preferably distilled

• 100 g Mature sourdough starter

• Start by adding the water to a mixing bowl. Then, add your sourdough starter, followed by your flour and salt.

• Use a fork (or a dough whisk, if you have one) to thoroughly mix together until a dough is formed.

• Ferment 8-12 hours, until doubled.

• Turn out onto lightly floured surface.

• Pre-shape into package and cover with overturned bowl for 15 minutes

• Prepare a thoroughly floured banneton if you have one, otherwise line a clean dish towel in a medium-sized mixing bowl and heavily flour the towel.

• Shape the dough into a package again, then flip upside-down into the floured banneton

• Once in the banneton, stretch the sides up to the middle to shape into a boule.

• Cover the banneton with a plastic shopping bag (don't let the plastic touch the dough!)

• Preheat your dutch oven on the middle rack to 500° F, which should take 30-60 minutes. Wait the full 60 minutes, even if your oven pre-heats quicker than that.

• Rip off some parchment paper the width of your dough and get a lightweight cutting board. Unwrap your dough and put the parchment paper on top of the banneton. Put the cutting board on top of the parchment paper, and flip the whole thing over so the dough is right-side-up on top of the parchment paper.

• Take the dutch oven out, uncover it, and then use the cutting board to slide the dough into the dutch oven. Be careful not to burn yourself.

• Use a razor blade or a sharp knife to slash a centered square in the dough. Be confident and make quick movements to prevent the blade from dragging as much as possible

• Cover the dutch oven and bake for 20 minutes at 500° F

• With it still in the oven, uncover the dutch oven and place the hot lid in the bottom of the oven. Turn down the oven to 450° F. Bake for another 17-20 minutes, until it's a light golden brown

• Remove the dutch oven, carefully get the bread out, and cool on a rack for at least an hour

• Enjoy!

Step-by-step guide

If you're just starting out baking, this is the recipe for you. It makes tasty bread, and gives an opportunity to practice some fundamental sourdough baking techniques.

This recipe can be completed start-to-finish in a single 9-5 workday, which makes it a great one to keep in your back pocket for that no-nonsense, use-it-for-everything loaf of bread you keep in the house!

Very little equipment is necessary, and you can work on some of the skill-based building blocks that sets the foundation for more advanced recipes.

https://youtu.be/Db7KJw7yPnI

The dutch oven provides lots of steam during the baking process, which allows the dough to spring up to a nice round shape. It also allows the crunchy crust to become a beautiful golden brown. The interior doesn't dry out as easily because of the high hydration, and the tighter crumb makes this bread good for sandwiches and toast.

Essential Equipment

This is the equipment you absolutely need - there isn't a great way to fudge this recipe without these tools, until you've mastered some advanced baking skills. Think of them as an investment, because we'll use all of these tools for almost every single bread recipe!

• Large (7 qt) cast iron dutch oven

• Digital kitchen scale

• Bench knife

• Parchment paper

• A high-sided 2.5 quart proofing container with a lid

Non-Essential, but useful, equipment

These tools will make this recipe easier, but you can totally make this bread successfully without them.

• A dough whisk (substitute a fork)

• A round banneton (substitue a medium-sized mixing bowl)

• A rubber band that fits around your proofing container

• An ambient thermometer, to measure how warm your kitchen is

Before Making This Recipe

It's important that your sourdough starter is healthy enough to bake with. You're gonna have a real bad time if you get impatient and try to bake sourdough before your culture is ready!

The starter is the most important ingredient. It will determine whether or not, and how quickly, your dough ferments. It determines whether you get a beautiful golden brown loaf of bread, or a sickly-looking pale lump of cooked dough. It determines whether your bread rises once it enters the oven; if not, your bread will come out looking like a frisbee. Make sure your sourdough starter is healthy!

As I discuss in Getting Started With Your Starter, your starter needs to reliably be doubling in size every time you feed it. If it's not doubling within 8 hours after you feed it, you're probably not going to be satisfied with the results when you try to bake with it. Just keep feeding it twice a day until it does double in size within 8 hours.

Almost all sourdough recipes - including this one - use starter when it's mature; in other words, 8-12 hours after you fed it last (at the height of its rise).

That means if you're going to mix the bread in the morning and bake it at night, make sure to feed your sourdough starter the night before you make this recipe (which you should do anyway, if you're feeding it twice a day). By the time you wake up, it should be ready to go.

The Mix: 10 minutes

Start by taking your proofing container and pouring in the 330 g of distilled water. It's always good to pour the water first in bread recipes, for a couple of different reasons:

• If you pour too much, you can pour some back without getting any flour in your water container.

• It's easier to incorporate the ingredients when you add flour on top of liquid instead of the other way around

• You can check the ripeness of your starter using the float test

Add 100 g sourdough starter. If your starter is ready to use for baking, then the starter should mostly float. If it all sinks right to the bottom, your starter might not be mature. Read the section above titled "Before Making This Recipe".

If your starter floats, congratulations! That's the first test, and you passed it. Use a fork as a whisk to quickly dissolve the starter in the water before adding the flour. This makes it more likely for the yeast to be evenly distributed in the final dough.

Add the 410 g white bread flour and 50 g whole wheat (or whole rye) flour. Then, add the 10 g salt on top of the flour.

Mix it all up with your dough whisk, or with a fork. Mix it really thoroughly! This recipe doesn't have a kneading step, which typically helps distribute the ingredients evenly. So even after the flour is incorporated with the water, keep mixing for a minute or so to blend all the ingredients together. When you're done, cover your proofing container with an air tight lid.

Use a rubber band around the container to mark where the dough currently is - we'll be looking at how much it rises to see when it's ready to bake.

Now we wait! Or in my case, go to my day job.

The Bulk Ferment: 6-12 hours

The timing of this part will depend on a whole bunch of factors: the health of your sourdough starter, the type of flours you used, the temperature of your water and of your kitchen, your elevation, the humidity of your kitchen, etc. etc. etc. etc.

The biggest factors here are definitely the strength of your starter, and the temperature in your kitchen. The colder the temperature, the slower it'll be to ferment. The warmer it is, the quicker it'll ferment. Shoot for about 74° F, give or take 10° F.

The main sign you want to look for is your dough doubling in size. This recipe is a great way to play around with the timing of fermentation, and to start getting a feel for the sweet spot between under-proofing and over-proofing the dough. But it does take some practice, and unfortunately no recipe can tell you the exact timing of this part. That's why the proofing container is helpful... if you were using a regular old mixing bowl, it's very hard to determine when it has doubled.

You don't want your dough to rise any more than double, but even if it does, bake it anyway! It might turn out fine, and worst case scenario you'll learn what over-proofed bread looks like!

Turn-out and Pre-Shape: ~15 minutes

When you're ready, lightly flour your counter and gently turn the dough out from the container. Lightly wet your bench knife to prevent sticking, and gently fold the dough in half onto itself. Do this for all four sides, creating a little square package.

Cover your lil' guy with an upturned bowl, and let it rest for 15 minutes.

Shape: ~5 minutes

Dust your banneton generously with flour. If you don't have a banneton, you can use a medium sized mixing bowl lined with a kitchen towel. Dust the kitchen towel very generously with flour.

Do the same thing you did in the last step again, lightly wetting your bench knife and flipping each side of the dough in on itself until it's a little square-ish package.

Then wet your bench knife and your hands again, and quickly scoop under the bread. Flip it upside-down into your banneton or bowl, where it should release from your wet bench knife. Do this part quickly, so the dough touches your hands and bench knife for as short of a time as you can possibly do it - dough has a tendency to stick to everything it touches.

Use a plastic grocery bag to cover the banneton (try to keep the plastic from touching the dough directly). Leave your wrapped package on the counter for 30 minutes.

Pre-Heat Oven: 1 hour

After 30 minutes, start heating up the oven at 500° F with your dutch oven and lid inside the oven. Your oven should take between 30 and 60 minutes to pre-heat... make sure to wait the full 60 minutes, even if it heats up more quickly. If it takes longer than 60 minutes, just continue whenever it's reached 500° F.

Scoring and Loading: 5 minutes

When you're ready, unwrap your banneton from the plastic bag. Place some parchment paper (I prefer the pre-cut circular ones) over the top of your banneton, place a cutting board on top of that, and flip it over. Firmly smack the top of the banneton to release the dough onto the parchment paper. If you used enough flour, it should release without too much trouble. If you used a mixing bowl and a kitchen towel, do the same process without the smacking - just slowly peel off the kitchen towel after it's on the parchment. If you used enough flour, the towel should peel off without sticking.

This part is a little tricky. Get some oven mitts, take out your dutch oven, and place it on your stove. Make sure to close your oven quickly so the heat doesn't escape! Uncover the dutch oven and put the lid to the side. Lift up the cutting board with your dough on it, bring it over to the lip of your dutch oven, and quickly and carefully slide the dough off your cutting board so it plops down into the dutch oven.

Score the dough with a square, put the lid back on, and slide the dutch oven back into the oven.

Scoring refers to slashing the dough with a razor or very sharp knife. This creates the signature patterns you see in bread (like the angular ones on baguettes)! This isn't just an aesthetic step... scoring allows the dough to rise (or "spring") in the oven in a controlled way, by giving the gas inside the dough a path to escape. If you don't score, the gas will build up and burst randomly out the sides of your bread... this is fine and won't affect the taste, but it might not look as elegant.

In this recipe, we expect a decent amount of bursting since we didn't knead the dough or build up gluten strength. That's totally OK! You should still score the top of the dough by slashing a square pattern with your knife or razor.

Bake: 35 minutes

Bake covered at 500° F for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes, grab your mitts again. Quickly open the oven door and remove the lid of your dutch oven, releasing the steam that's built up in there. At this point, your dough should have puffed up a decent amount (called "oven spring"). The dough at this point will still be mostly pale. Put the hot lid in the bottom rack of the oven if you can, otherwise just take it out and leave it to cool on your stove.

Close the oven door, and turn the heat down to 450° F. This will caramelize the crust.

After another 15-20 minutes, your dough should be a beautiful golden brown. When you're ready, take the dutch oven out of your oven, and use a spatula or wooden spoon to pry your bread out. Put it on a cooling rack and let cool for at least an hour before cutting into it.

If you don't have a cooling rack, crumple some aluminum foil into a ball and prop up one end of the bread with it (so it's at an angle).

Enjoy! If you have any questions or comments please let me know in the comment section below!