A Sourdough Recipe For Complete Beginners
Out of popular request (and my own need to document things) , I decided to write down some of my comments on how I made my sourdough recently – with comments on why so many recipes were maybe a bit tricky for beginners like myself. One of the nice things about sourdough is that it doesn’t spoil very easily, unlike regular homemade yeast bread which is really only edible for a day or two. So here’s a recipe from a beginner for beginners.
One of the tricky things about most online sourdough recipes is that even though they seem simple, they assume you can (or want to) do a bunch of things, like feed a sourdough starter exactly every 12 hrs, deal with extremely sticky dough – and are skilled enough not break it, and so on. These are keys to making an awesome bread (especially for the gram) but if you’re kinda clumsy, want to make a bread in a relatively simple way, that you can maybe even bake once a week, you might think sourdough is not for you after a few failed – and flat – attempts.
So here goes how I made mine recently.
The Sourdough Starter
The starter is usually easy to maintain, but may be more or less tricky to start up to a point where it’s somewhat self-sufficient. This can depend on your flour, location, and so on. Though technically just using white flour and water will work, I found this to be a pretty bad idea. My unproven theory is that white flour is easy for the bacteria and yeasts to consume, which means that if you don’t feed them again right on time, they may end up unhappy – kind of like eating candy for carbs will leave you hungry and grumpy. The optimal feeding window then becomes pretty narrow so if you don’t feed your starter exactly on schedule (and remember, what a recipe says is tested for the writer’s temperature and flour, not yours), you might end up wasting flour for weeks on end. Sure, you can also feed based on what the sourdough starter looks like, but you’d have to be home and look at it.
An important thing here: due to how the sourdough starter is fed (you end up with too much regardless), it really doesn’t matter if you start with 20 g flour or 100g for the bread. It does matter for your pocket and in terms of food waste, so maybe start with 20 g.
My sourdough starter is pretty simple: for the initial mix, use equal amounts by weight filtered (it has to be filtered!) water and flour (the flour is preferably a mix of white and whole wheat and/or rye), and possibly bits of shaved apple or grape. Some bacteria from the apple, or grape can help, and some sugars from the fruit can help start the fermentation. Some internet purists will tell you bacteria & yeast not native to flour will not live in it, or it would have already been there – but that’s wrong, and there’s good scientific evidence for that: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27240218/ . Another way to think of it: probiotics work for humans, they work for sourdough starters too.
Let this rest for 24-48 hours, then mix equal amounts (by weight) starter, flour mix (white and some wheat and/or rye) and water every around every day. Your sourdough is useable when it doubles regularly after 6-9 hrs of feeding, and it’s easy to tell when it doubles with an elastic band. If you’re not home to see that the starter doubled, it usually leaves goop on the sides, so you can tell how high it rose. Just make sure it doesn’t overflow. I’m using tall containers for soup from a Chinese takeout place here.
Okay so the steps are:
Step 1) mix equal amounts by weight flour (mix of white and whole rye and/or wheat) and water (filtered), with some added fruit shavings etc
Step 2) every day, mix equal amounts starter, flour mix, water – by weight. Discard or use in other ways (see below) excess starter.
Step 3) repeat 2) until it doubles a few hours after feeding.
Obviously, you’ll have some excess starter (the weight triples every day if you feed it this way, hence why the initial amount doesn’t matter), and you really only need like 100g of it per bread at most. You can use the excess starter to make cool stuff like scallion pancakes: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/quick-sourdough-herb-and-scallion-pancakes-recipe
I’m not giving any weights for these steps as they don’t matter if you keep the ratio right. You’ll have enough starter to use regardless, and will have some to discard regardless.
Ok, so now that you have a stable sourdough starter, you can put it in the fridge and feed it once every few weeks. When you want to bake, take it out a day or two before, feed properly, once a day, and use when it doubles.
Baking the Bread
Now we have a starter, on to make a bread. What I did for the bread above is I took this recipe and made it more workable for my clumsy self: https://www.kierstenhickman.com/how-to-make-sourdough-bread-one-loaf-recipe/
If you’re able to use the recipe above properly, that’s great, it’s a great recipe. And please take care to remember some of the tricks there: use wet – not moist, wet – hands to deal with the dough, as it’s sticky. Flour things properly when asked. Watch the video on shaping the bread and remember you need to build tension.
I’ve modified this recipe for my own clumsy self a bit:
1) I’ve replaced around 40% of the white flour in the recipe with some form of whole grain flour. An example is to replace the 500g white with 300g white, 100g each whole wheat and rye. Or it can be 200 g whole. Normally you should add more water when replacing white with whole wheat/rye, but I didn’t: I wanted a drier dough that’s easier to manage. Sure it’ll puff up less in principle, but my starter is very active, I’m clumsy, and my kitchen runs hot, so if erring on the side of dry means I’m less likely to end up with goo I can’t manage instead of dough by the end, that’s not a difficult choice.
2) I prefer to not add salt at the beginning and let the flour and water mix without it for 30 min, and then add it then. It leads to better autolysis and an easier to manage dough, even if it’s a short extra step (again, just mixing in salt after 30 min of the first mix).This is really optional though, and there’s some cool experiments here on autolyse: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2017/09/29/using-the-autolyse-method
3) I found it tricky to not deflate my dough when moving it from the final proofing basket into the cast iron pot, as the turning can be a bit difficult. So I put the dough on top of aluminum foil, and put the bowl on top. Downside: no pretty circles like you’d get from a proofing bowl, as you need a glass bowl to see when the dough proofed. Upside: VERY easy to do.
Other than that, just follow the recipe above. I found that my oven needed around 5 more min for each step. I also liked the method of putting the sourdough in a cold cast iron skillet in this recipe, as it doesn’t end up with a crust that’s difficult to bite into. Again, no criticism towards the recipe itself, but if you’re clumsy like myself, and want a bit more whole grain in your bread, these are some nice ways to avoid possible mishaps.
So this is the result. Hopefully your bread will be even nicer!
