Jumping on the sourdough bandwagon? Let me help.

With so much extra time on our hands these days and a shortage of yeast at the grocery store, many people are trying to bake sourdough, or naturally leavened, bread for the first time. Working with a sourdough starter and using it to create crusty, artisanal loaves is a worthy and soothing endeavor for these scary and confusing times. But it can be intimidating and confusing at first.

I have been baking naturally leavened bread since 2015 and have been teaching other people how to do it in my classes at the Chicago Botanic Garden for the past two years. Today, I am going to share with you everything I teach my students in my hands-on sourdough classes as well as give you a basic recipe for a sourdough boule.

Sourdough Starter

Made with nothing more than flour, water and salt, sourdough bread is leavened by a fermented starter without any added yeast. If you want to tackle making bakery-style sourdough bread at home, your first task is to acquire a starter. Sourdough starter is a ferment made from flour, water and wild yeast from the air. The natural yeast in the starter is what causes the bread to rise.

You can make a starter from scratch with flour, water, and some fruit juice. There are numerous explanations in cookbooks and online of how to do this.  However, if you start from scratch, you will need at least a week, and possibly more, to create a starter healthy enough to bake with. But there may be an easier way: part of maintaining a healthy sourdough starter is discarding a portion of the starter before feeding it. That means that anyone you know with a sourdough starter will be happy to give you some of theirs – even during a time of social distracing. Here in Chicago, I have heard that the bakery at Eataly gives away starter if you ask and I am always happy to share mine. Lastly, you can buy a starter online.

Sourdough starters need to be fed with flour and water to stay healthy. To feed your sourdough starter, you add equal amounts of flour and warm water. You want a ratio of 1:4 or 1:5 starter to flour and water. So, for example, if you have 20 grams of starter, add 100 grams of water and 100 grams of flour (I use half whole wheat flour and half all-purpose flour.) Stir that mixture together with your fingers, cover loosely and place it somewhere warm. 

After 12 or 16 hours, the starter should be expanded and quite bubbly. But before you start baking with it, test the health of your starter by putting a little in a bowl of water: if it floats, it’s ready. If not, it needs more time and perhaps to be somewhere warmer. This may seem silly, but think of it this way: if the starter isn’t light enough to float in water, how will it make a loaf of bread rise?

You can keep your starter on the counter and feed it daily or keep it in the refrigerator and feed it as little as weekly. How often you should feed your starter depends on how often you want to bake with it and what kind of time you have. The important thing to know is that you need to feed an active starter 12 hours or so before you want to bake with it. For a more dormant starter, it could take longer.

Equipment 

Before you start baking sourdough bread, there are a few pieces of equipment that are worth investing in. One is a kitchen scale. Measuring by weight is far more accurate than measuring by volume. So a digital scale is a very useful piece of equipment to have for all kinds of baking. You will also need a bench scraper for dividing and shaping your loaves. This too is a piece of equipment which has many uses beyond baking bread, such as transferring items from a cutting board to a baking sheet or pan.

Optional equipment includes rattan baskets for proofing the bread. These baskets, which are responsible for the pretty lines on bakery loaves, are called brotform or banneton baskets and are used to support the dough and prevent it from flattening out as it proofs. They come in many shapes and sizes. You can purchase cloth liners for them, or rely on flouring the baskets well to prevent your dough from sticking to the sides.

Also optional, but helpful, is a French tool called a lame, which is an extra-sharp razor that bakers use to slash their loaves prior to baking to release steam. Use the lame to make a plus sign on the top of your loaf, or get creative with different designs, such as a long slash down the middle with a short diagonal slash on either side.

Lastly, you will need something to bake the bread in. Use a vessel with a lid for baking this kind of artisanal loaf because the lid will trap the steam given off by the loaf and mimic a steam-injected professional oven.

Baking with Sourdough

Baking sourdough is a long process. You need to be able to make the dough and work on it periodically over a period of 2 hours, followed by several hours of rise or bulk fermentation; followed by shaping the dough and then proofing it, which I usually do overnight. Instead of kneading the dough, you want to stretch and turn it. In other words, this is a perfect evening, weekend or, you know, global pandemic project.

The results are so worth it. This bread is as good as any you will ever have. Enjoy it plain, slathered with butter, alongside soups and stews, or as the foundation of a sandwich. Every batch comes out a bit different; sometimes more sour; sometimes denser or lighter. That’s the magic of working with a live starter. 

A final tip: keep your dough in a warm place during the rising process. Room temperature is not warm enough. Try putting the dough on top of the stove when the oven is on, in a sunny room with the blinds open, or even on top of the radiator. It’s tricky because you don’t want the dough to get too warm either. The ideal temperature is around 76 degrees. If your oven has a “proof” setting, you can use that as well.

Extra Starter

Part of maintaining a sourdough starter is discarding a portion of it every time you feed it. That waste, even it is just of flour and water, can be painful for fastidious cooks. Luckily, there are many recipes that use excess sourdough starter, including for pancakes, waffles and crackers.