How To Make Sourdough Bread

For many of us home bakers, making a good loaf of sourdough bread feels like striving for the World Cup or an Olympic gold medal. It’s the challenge to top all challenges and takes real commitment, but it’s also completely achievable.

Are you ready to take on the challenge of a true sourdough bread? If so — or even if you’re just curious to see what the fuss is about — here’s everything you need to know!

I made my first loaf of sourdough bread over a decade ago with the help of my father (who now owns his own bakery, Brick Oven Bakery in Northfield, Minnesota) and some well-packaged sourdough culture he carried in his suitcase.

He coached me through the basic steps; I was skeptical that something made with just flour and water would turn into delicious bread — but it did, and I was hooked.

I’ve been slowly working on my sourdough game ever since.

Bread-baking

It takes time to coach flour and water into something as beautiful and delicious as a finished boule or batard, and that’s time when I also slow down, breathe a little deeper, and relax into the process.

Sourdough bread is something you learn by doing. You’re not going to make a great loaf by reading a recipe or hunkering down with a cookbook; you’re going to have to get your hands in the dough, and you might have to try it a few times.

Even after making sourdoughs for years, I still get bloopers, like the first loaf I made from Tartine No. 3. Stay with the process, learn to work with the ingredients, and enjoy the adventure.

Sourdough bread is made entirely using wild yeast — with a strong, active sourdough culture of wild yeast, you won’t need any commercial yeast at all.

Wild yeast need a little more coaxing and works more slowly than commercial yeast, so sourdough breads are normally mixed, shaped, and baked over the course of a day, or even multiple days.

Besides giving the wild yeast time to do its job, this long, slow development time helps tease out more complex, nuanced flavors in the finished bread — far beyond those of your average loaf of sandwich bread or no-knead bread.

While the wild yeast is the star of this show, it’s not what makes the bread sour. That distinctive flavor comes from two kinds of friendly bacteria — Lactobacillus and acetobacillus — which grow alongside the yeast in the sourdough culture and help ferment the sugars in the dough.

Before you can make a loaf of sourdough bread, you need to make a sourdough starter. This is a culture of flour and water for growing wild yeast and developing those bacterias.

Having a “ripe,” or fully developed, starter ensures a good rise and good flavor development in your sourdough bread. You can make your own starter in about five days:

• On the first day, mix flour and water into a batter. Let it sit at room temperature overnight. Wild yeast are everywhere — on the flour, in the air, on your hands — and they will quickly start to thrive in this culture.
• Over the next few days, feed the yeast and bacteria by pouring off some of the culture and adding fresh flour and water. You’ll know it’s ready to use to make bread when it becomes very bubbly within just a few hours of feeding, and when it smells sour but fresh.

Once you have a starter, you never have to make one again. I keep mine in the fridge, and I feed it roughly once a week. When I want to make a loaf of bread, I take it out a few days ahead and feed it once a day to strengthen it again.

I highly recommend weighing all your ingredients when making sourdough bread. Not only is this more accurate, but it’s also ultimately easier.

When weighing, all you have to do is dump ingredients in the bowl and watch the scale — plus there’s no guesswork about did I just add the fourth or the fifth cup of flour?

This said, I don’t want this to deter you from trying a loaf of sourdough for yourself. If you’re more comfortable working in cups and tablespoons, those measurements are here for you too.

It’s less accurate, but the recipe is forgiving and a few extra or a few fewer grams here or there isn’t going to affect much.

We already made the sourdough starter, so now we make the leaven, which is ultimately what gets mixed into the dough. It’s made with a tablespoon of your active starter and a specific amount of flour and water.

A tablespoon of starter might not seem like much, but you’ll be surprised at how quickly the yeasts in that tablespoon multiply and make the leaven bubbly!

Make the leaven the night before you plan to mix the dough and leave it on the counter. By the next morning, it should be bubbly and smell slightly sour. You can test that it’s ready by dropping a spoonful into a cup of water; if it floats, it’s ready!

After you’ve mixed the leaven with the remaining flour and water, let it sit for at least 30 minutes or for up to four hours. A few things happen during this time:

• The flour absorbs the water and becomes fully hydrated, which helps gluten formation during the next step.
• Enzymes in the flour start to break down the starches into simpler sugars, which become food for the yeast and bacteria in the leaven and also make the bread more flavorful.

After this resting step, mix in the salt. Salt is necessary for a flavorful bread, but can inhibit the activity during the autolyse step.

After trying a great many different sourdough recipes over the years, I have become a big advocate of the folding method for developing the gluten in the dough, rather than kneading in a stand mixer or by hand.

Folding is not only less labor intensive, but it also gives the crumb of the finished bread a better structure and a nicer network of holes (which are a good thing in the artisan bread world!). After the autolyse, begin folding the dough:

• Grab some of the dough from the side, stretch it up, and then fold it over on top of the dough. Do this a few times around the bowl.
• Let the dough rest about 30 minutes before doing it again.
• After a few rounds, the dough will go from shaggy and clumpy to smooth and stretchy.

Proofing baskets support the shaped loaves during their final rise before baking. You can buy the same kind of rattan or wicker proofing baskets that bakers use, or you can simply use a colander or a mixing bowl.

In either case, line the basket or bowl with a clean dishtowel and coat it generously with flour. Use your fingers to rub the flour into the cloth — this is what will keep the dough from sticking.

Proofing baskets don’t need much maintenance. After you’re done baking, knock out any loose flour, let them dry on the counter, and then store them in a cupboard.

If you bake fairly frequently, you don’t need to wash the dishtowel — in fact, letting the flour build up will help prevent the dough from sticking. Keep an eye out for mold, though, and always let the cloths and the baskets dry thoroughly before storing them again.

Dutch ovens are a boon to home bakers. You need a moist, humid environment during the first few minutes of baking to get a good rise from the dough and to develop the crust, but making that happen in home ovens is tricky and imperfect.

Dutch ovens solve the problem. Dutch ovens trap the moisture evaporating from the bread and create its own steamy environment. Once the initial baking phase is over, you uncover the pot to release the excess steam and let the bread continue baking.

If you don’t have a Dutch oven, you can use any heavy pot with a lid, like a soup pot or even a large saucepan.

This whole process, from mixing the initial dough to baking the bread, is a long, slow, drawn-out affair. You can do it in a day if you’re at home and feel like tinkering around in the kitchen for a few hours, or you can spread the process out over a few days.

There are a few moments in the recipe where you can pause and put the dough or the shaped loaves in the fridge overnight. This time in the fridge actually helps develop the flavors in the dough even more!

This recipe is a modified version of the Tartine bread recipe that Chad Robertson shares in his books Tartine Bread and Tartine No. 3. In my time as a home baker, I’ve gone back to Chad’s master recipe and the variations in these books again and again.

It makes a very wet dough, which might feel unfamiliar to you at first, but it’s actually quite easy to work with. The tradeoff to the extra moisture is a really gorgeous crust and a chewy, well-developed crumb.

I’ve made a few changes to the original recipe, which I feel make the recipe a little more approachable for us home bakers:

• Chad’s recipes make two enormous rounds of bread, so I’ve scaled back this recipe to more human-sized loaves.
• I also modified the amount of leaven created so the full amount is used in the bread (Chad’s original recipe has you discard a portion, which always just seemed wasteful to me).
• Use this recipe as a jumping-off point. I made it with straight all-purpose or bread flour here, but you can swap in some whole-wheat flour or other whole-grain flour. You can also add things like nuts or dried fruit, or experiment with folding in some cooked grains, like quinoa or steel-cut oats.