If I subscribed to the “everyone else doing it” approach to life, I could have found myself in all sorts of scrapes. Had I been the type to follow along with the crowd blindly, my teenage years would have been littered with mishaps and missteps—I might have shoplifted tote bags from the boutique next to the soft pretzel stand in the mall, or decided that accepting a red Solo cup filled with something called “Jungle Juice” proffered by a boy with good hair in a faded Nantucket red baseball cap was a good idea.
Whether out of fear (sometimes) or cowardice (sometimes) or bravery (occasionally) or sheer gut instinct (also, occasionally), we all increasingly learn to stick to the courage of our convictions as we get older. That inner voice gets louder and louder as the years pass.
Don’t get me wrong—I’ve made my fair share of ill-advised poor decisions based on peer pressure including (but not limited to) the choice to ever wear a tube top, considering vending machine brown sugar Pop Tarts a reasonable pre-soccer practice meal, watching Silence of the Lambs to impress a boy, and piercing my upper ear cartilage. No one’s perfect!
Mostly though, I learned to take increasing pride in doing what everyone else wasn’t doing: growing up on a farm, skipping the sorority bicker in college, going away for a semester in high school, openly admitting to liking school, and so forth.
But let’s fast-forward to the present day. The ever-increasing influence of social media, and the digital world, makes it harder and harder to separate out your own voice and desires from a constant stream of information from other people. Though this tends to be something I try to work against, sometimes it’s absolutely wonderful to do what everyone else is doing.
And what is everyone doing right now? Baking sourdough bread!
I could wax poetic for pages about the power of baking bread: how it grounds you, how it makes you use your hands, how it empowers you to nourish yourself with nothing but flour and water and salt and a bit of muscle. How it requires—nay demands—your presence and attention, requiring you to abandon the chatter in your mind and give into the feel of sticky dough between your fingers, sensing the shift as it softens and stretches, becoming elastic and smooth beneath the heel of your hand.
But no words can give you the exact sensation—and regardless of how anyone tries, you need to experience bread baking for yourself just once to understand what the fuss is about. If you haven’t done it much (or at all), I suspect it will seem both thrilling and new, and at the same time, calmly and quietly elemental.
So how do you begin? There are so many resources online, and in books, for teaching you to build and care for a sourdough starter and then to bake bread with it.
If you’re like me, you’ll probably find this wealth of information overwhelming rather than useful. I despise the feeling of searching for a recipe or cooking technique—say, banana bread—and finding hundreds of options. Where to begin? How to differentiate between them? Am I supposed to spend hours reading them to discern the difference? Can someone please just give me a reliable, excellent recipe?
This is when it’s helpful to have cookbooks and blogs (and friends! and mothers!) that you really trust and can turn to rather than sifting through the internet trying to make decisions about something you don’t actually know much about—hence needing the guidance to begin with. This plagues me especially when it’s a baking technique in question, rather than a cooking one or a recipe. I know there are lots of ways to bake things like bread, but presumably there should usually be a general consensus on how to go about it.
That all being said, I’d recommend the following primers on sourdough: Claire Saffitz in the New York Times, the King Arthur Flour sourdough guide (with follow-up articles on timing here and troubleshooting here), and Maurizio Leo’s excellent Perfect Loaf blog.
Start there, if you’ve never attempted sourdough before. There are two parts here to tackle: creating the starter and creating bread. I’ll speak to the bare bones of it here, but go ahead and read those articles for much more information and details and answers to common questions.
The Sourdough Starter
-You’ll need your own sourdough starter, and you’ll need to start feeding it to get it active and thriving before you use it. You have three options:
1. You can use fresh sourdough starter (buy it from King Arthur Flour or a few other places online, or find a friend who has one. You can also try asking—in a non-pandemic moment—a local bakery to give you a bit of theirs which is how I got mine).
2. You can use dried sourdough starter (I’ve never tried this). It’s basically fresh starter that is dried out and dormant.
3. You can create your own by mixing flour and water and letting it sit out. Read how here.
-Once you’ve created your starter, you’ll need to feed it regularly to keep it alive. If you’re baking a lot, you can leave it out at room temperature and feed it daily, but this does use up quite a bit of flour. You can also leave it in the refrigerator and feed it weekly, or so. Starters are actually quite resiliant—I just rescued mine from the refrigerator of my apartment after one full month without feeding, and it’s still fine!
Feeding: You can use any flour really, but I recommend all-purpose flour or rye flour. Make sure to use lukewarm water, and mix it really well. I feed my starter by discarding all but about 20-40g of starter (I’m not that exact and you don’t need to be either), then I feed it with about 80g of flour and 80g of water.
Discard: Don’t actually throw out that discard! It’s perfectly good for baking. If you search “sourdough” here on my website, you’ll find lots of great ways to use it, from pumpkin bread to biscuits to chocolate cake.
The Bread
Once you’ve got your starter going, you’ll learn to notice the trend of its activity. After you feed it, it’ll get bubbly and grow larger—it’s typically most active after about 4 hours. This is when you want to use it to make bread, or anything you need “yeast” for. After about 8 hours, it’ll start to decline in activity, and usually you’ll want to feed it again after 12 hours.
People will talk about “stiff” versus “liquid” starters, which means how loose your starter is. This depends on the proportion of flour to water when you’re feeding it. I feed mine with an equal amount of flour and water, but if I used more flour than water, it would be a stiffer starter.
Okay, okay, enough already, you’re thinking. Can we make some bread already?
Yes! Let’s! Here’s how to make a basic loaf.
(Sidebar: I’m going to write another post soon—if people are interested (email me or comment and let me know if this is useful and I’ll do more sourdough writing!)—about tools, because I will say that bread baking is one area where investing in some specialty tools really is worth it, in my opinion. You can make excellent bread without them, but they help immensely to improve the end result.)
Basic Sourdough Bread
4 cups (480 grams) all-purpose flour, plus more as needed
1 3/4 teaspoons salt
1/2 cup (100 grams) ripe sourdough starter
1 1/3 cups (303 grams) room-temperature water
In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour and salt.
In a separate mixing bowl (a larger one), whisk together the sourdough starter and water, stirring until no bits of starter remain.
Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients and stir (a wooden spoon is helpful here) until it just comes together. You don’t want to see major dry spots, but don’t worry about getting everything perfectly combined; it’s okay for it to look shaggy and not smooth.
Cover the bowl with plastic wrap (or some reusable cover, lid, or damp tea towel) and let it sit at room temperature for 1 hour.
After 1 hour, uncover the bowl and fold the dough over onto itself a few times. The best way to do this is to grab the dough with your hand (or use a dough scraper), starting at the top of the bowl furthest from you, and pull it over onto itself towards the bottom of the bowl closest to you. Turn the bowl 90 degrees and repeat, doing 4 folds in total.
Cover the bowl again and let it rest at room temperature overnight (aim for 8 to 10 hours).
After this rise, scoop the dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Using your hand or a dough scraper, repeat the four-time folding motion, shaping the dough into a ball as you go, leaving it seam-side down. Cover the dough lightly with a flour-dusted tea towel and let it sit for 1 1/2 hours, or until puffy and almost doubled in size.
(It’s nice to let the shaped dough rise on a piece of parchment paper or another floured towel, as this will make it easier to move into the pot. However, if you have one, transfer to dough into a well-floured banneton or brotform—which are just a wooden baskets (coiled cane or woven wicker) made for proofing bread dough. It helps the bread to keep its shape nicely, and also gives that cool swirled pattern you can see on my loaf. You can buy them lots of places online. If you don’t have one, or don’t want to buy one, you can also just line a mixing bowl or colander with a lightly flour-dusted tea towel.)
Just before the end of the rising time, preheat your oven to 450°F. Once risen, carefully transfer the dough to a Dutch oven or other heavy lidded pot. You can bake it freeform on a parchment-lined baking sheet but it won’t keep as tight of a shape.
Using a very sharp knife or bread lame, slash the top of the loaf once, making a 1/2 cut down the center. (Feel free to get fancier if you like!)
Cover the pot with the lid and bake the bread for 20 minutes, then remove the lid and bake for another 25 to 30 minutes, or until the crust is a deep golden brown all over. If you have a digital thermometer, the internal temperature of the loaf should reach 210°F. Remove from the oven and flip out onto a rack to cool completely before slicing.
**Note: You don’t have to use a lid, but it helps to create a crackly, chewy crust. There are some other neat tricks for creating steam in your home oven, which I can talk about in another post if people are interested!