A Bread to Rule Them All (Real homemade sourdough bread)

May 27, 2022

A Bread to Rule Them All (Real homemade sourdough bread)

Hi there! I have shared in a previous post how to make bread using a bread machine. You can find it here: http://itsybitsylittlefarm.blogspot.com/2018/12/four-flour-bread.html. While I still make this bread occasionally, I would like to share another bread recipe that, in my opinion, makes the best of all breads. Yes, you heard me right: it is the real-deal. It is the home-made sourdough bread made of nothing but salt, water, and flour. I am yet to buy such a bread in any bakery so far, and you will believe me once you make this bread yourself.

Yeast, you may ask. Well, we will make the yeast ourselves as well from these basic ingredients. But before I explain you the process in gory detail, I would like to refer to two excellent books from which I've learned this recipe. First and foremost, the book called "Tartine Bread" by Chad Robertson. You can purchase it here. Chad has a bakery in San Francisco called Tartine Bakery. It is actually both a bakery and a coffee shop. I actually visited that place in sort of a pilgrimage mission in 2019. Here is a personal photo from the bakery:

The second book that inspired me was "Flour, Water, Salt, and Yeast" by Ken Forkish. Ken also has a Youtube channel where he shares his techniques. I would also love to visit his bakery which I believe is in Portland, Oregon.

Ok, let's get back to the recipe. First of all, you need to have a sourdough yeast, which you can easily make at home. I've shared that recipe in another post, please click this link if you want to learn about it. Now, the night before the day that you will be baking your bread, do the following:

In a glass bowl (with a lid), add 150 grams (5.3 oz) of room temperature water
Add 50 grams (1.75 oz) of sourdough yeast and mix it with the water using a spoon. The water will turn cloudy.
Add 150 grams (5.3 oz) of flour (this can be white flour or a 50/50 mix of white and whole wheat flour) and again mix it well.
Next close the lid of the bowl and cover with a kitchen towel.

What we have done at this point is we created a mixture in which the yeast can multiply and grow in numbers until the next morning. This is called the levain mixture. We will use most of this mixture the next morning when mixing our batch. The unused part will remain as the yeast for our next bread.

In the next morning, check your mixture. It should have been aerated with bubbles on it. If you want to test if it is ready, you can do the so called float test. You take a small piece from this levain and put it in a glass of room temperature water. If it floats, your levain is ready. If not, it needs more time. In my experience, an overnight wait in our kitchen is always sufficient for the levain to be ready. But you may need to give it more time, if your kitchen is cooler than mine (the activity of the yeast highly depends on temperature). Here is a picture of a levain that passed the float test:

Float test passed, yay!

Assuming that all is well, we are now ready to mix our batch of bread. I always make bread using 1 kg of flour (2.2 lbs). The process is as follows:

Add 700 grams (24.5 oz) of water in a large glass bowl (or food-grade plastic)
Add 200 grams (7 oz) of levain.
Add 1 kg (2.2 lbs) of flour. It is up to you if this flour is fully white flour or a mix of white and whole wheat flour (or any other type of flour). I usually use 600 grams (21 oz) of white flour and 400 grams (14 oz) of whole wheat flour. You can also use 300 grams (10.5 oz) of whole flour and 100 grams (3.5 oz) of rye flour, if you like to obtain a darker shade of bread. But I recommend making the majority of the mixture with white flour -- due to its higher gluten content, it helps your bread to become more elastic and rise in the oven.
Mix the mixture with a wooden spoon (or metal if you have to) until no dry flour remains

Pictures below show some steps of this process:

200 g of yeast added to 700 g of water

The water turns cloudy after mixing it with a spoon

Addition of 1000 g of flour

Our goal here is to make the flour particles absorb the water. Do not burn yourself out with mixing, usually a few minutes of mixing is sufficient. You can also use your hands, but at this point the flour will stick to your hands. So I usually use a spoon for this purpose. After this initial mixing is done (for a few minutes until no dry bits remain), cover your bowl and put it aside for about 30 minutes. During this time, the water and flour mixture go through a process known as autolyse. You will notice that mixing the flour after this stage becomes much easier.

After the autolyse period, it is time to add the salt and a bit of more water. I usually use 15 - 20 grams (0.5 to 0.7 oz) of salt for the given flour amount (2% relative to the total amount of flour is the general standard). I sprinkle it over the mixture and then add 50 more grams of water (1.75 oz). This water helps the salt dissolve in the mixture. Now your batch is ready for mixing. As before, our goal is not to burn ourselves out but to mix the batch until the ingredients are well mixed. This usually takes up to 5 minutes at most. I use my hands for this purpose. Try to pinch the dough with your fingers to incorporate the salt as much as possible. The extra water that you added will be absorbed during this mixing. You can tell that the dough is sufficiently mixed when it starts to stick your hands. You can see some pictures of the process below:

After addition of some of the salt

Mixing process

After the salt appears to have been incorporated and the dough starts to seriously stick to your hands you can stop mixing. Your batch is now ready for the bulk fermentation. Make sure to put the lid on for the bowl that you will be using for fermentation (usually the same bowl that you used for mixing). Put the bowl somewhere that is at regular room temperature. You can also put the bowl in your oven (of course do not turn it on!) to create a somewhat more warmer microclimate. This kind of depends on the season also. If it is a warm summer day, it doesn't matter where you put your batch. But if it is a cold winter day, it may be better to put it away from cold air sources like windows.

In the first 1-2 hours of bulk fermentation, you can leave your batch alone. But after this time, it is important to give it a turn every hour or so. Note that a turn does not mean vigorous mixing. It is process where you put your hand on the underside of the dough, pull it away and fold it back on the top. Some example pictures are below:

For a turn pull it from the underside

And fold it back on top

Doing a couple of turns is sufficient. This really takes not more than 30 seconds at most. Just make sure that before you attempt the turns, make your hand wet. This way the dough will not stick to your hands.

Let's talk about the logic of this process for a second. As we do the turns we are helping the dough gain better elasticity. The dough is forming a gluten network and our turning actions is helping the bonds of this network getting stronger. You can actually feels this yourself. During the first couple of turns (in the first 2-3 hours of fermentation), the dough will feel soft and weak. But as the time goes on (in the 4-5th hours), the dough will feel stronger. You will be able to stretch the dough longer before it feels like it will break apart. These are all indications that your dough is developing properly. If you leave the dough alone for 5 hours without any turns, your dough will not develop sufficiently. But if you allow for the same time while giving it turns every hour or so, your dough will be stronger. Think about it: if you just sit on your couch all day, your muscles will be soft and mellow. But if you stand up and do some exercise/stretching every few hours, you will be stronger. I guess the dough is more human that you would have thought.

Also I would like mention that the process is quite forgiving. If you turn the dough every half an hour it works quite well. But if you forget to do it and do every two hours it still works well enough. So I would say a turn an hour is a good target to aim for. So how long this process should last? It is hard to give a precise estimate as this depends on a lot of factors such as the type of your flour, the quality of the yeast, and the room temperature. But in general I let the process continue for about 8 hours. That is if I mixed my initial batch at 9 am in the morning. The bulk fermentation including the turns will have been finished latest at 5 pm. At this point, your dough will have been quite aerated and will have approximately doubled in volume.

Now it is time to ease your dough onto a work surface using a dough spatula. Although the picture below shows that the work surface is floured, I have found out that not flouring is a better idea at this point (we don't want to add extra flour into the dough at this point). Have a look:

The dough eased on to a work surface. Unlike as in the picture, do not flour the work surface at this point.

The dough may feel wet and hard to work with. The feeling takes a bit of experience and initially you may find yourself wondering how to deal with such a wet dough. That's how I felt the first couple of times I made this bread. But you get used to it after a few times. Most importantly, I found that I barely have to touch the dough with my hands at this point. What I do is, I round it up using a dough spatula and then separate it into two. It actually helps if your work surface is not floured: as you round it up with the spatula, the surface tension between the bottom of the dough and the work surface works in your favor. If you add flour at this point due to being scared of handling a wet dough, this flour will not dissolve in the dough and will find itself into the final bread. It happened to me before and it is not a good feeling to have bits of flour inside your bread. So, no flour at this point!

At this point you have two options. You can either bake a single large bread (about 1.7 kg) or divide the dough into two pieces and bake two smaller breads. I usually do the latter but I've tried both. If you make a large bread, the baking time will be slightly longer (more about that later). Below you can see that I've split the dough into two pieces, one rounder and the other is a bit elongated:

The rounder piece

The elongated piece

After you shape your doughs, the next step is to put them in proofing baskets for the final rising. However, before you do so make sure to sprinkle a generous amount of rice flour on the bottom and all sides of the proofing basket. Do not skip this step (or do not use another type of flour -- rice flour is important here as it prevents sticking better). Over time you will learn to judge how much rice flour to sprinkle based on the feel you get from your dough. To put the dough into the proofing basket, you can lift it from the work surface using a dough spatula and the help of your other hand. To prevent sticking to your hand, you can damp or flour your hand lightly. Because the dough is quite wet, do not expect it to hold its shape perfectly. It will spread into the proofing basket as shown in the following pics:

Doughs put into proofing baskets for the final rise.

After you put the doughs into the proofing baskets, make sure to cover them with a kitchen towel (actually my proofing baskets already had a lining cloth so I use it to cover them up. Here is a link to where I purchased mine: https://www.amazon.com/Banneton-Proofing-Basket-WERTIOO-Professional/dp/B07FKC9T3Y?th=1). Try to leave some air space between the cloth and the dough to prevent the rising dough sticking to the towel. I also slightly dampen the towel in order to avoid formation of any crust on the dough surface. Place the proofing baskets in location away from drafts and cool air. The final rising times again depend on the room temperature but I've found about 2 hours to be sufficient. You can wait for 3 hours if you have the time.

Baking

If you have patiently come to this stage, you are about to be rewarded with the best bread of your life. The only hurdle left in front of us is to bake it to golden-brown perfection. To bake our bread, the best method that I've found is to use a Dutch oven. This is thick iron pot with a lid that has excellent heat absorption and retaining capacity. The process can be summarized as follows:

Place a Dutch oven (or two if you are baking two breads simultaneously) inside your electrical oven and turn the heat to 260 degrees Celsius (500 degrees Fahrenheit). You can use the top and bottom heating setting of the oven. Have the lids of the Dutch oven pots closed.
Wait until until the heating light of the oven turns off suggesting that your oven has reached the desired temperature (if you do not have such a light wait for about 25-30 minutes).
Using thick oven gloves on your both hands, take the Dutch ovens out from the oven. Be careful not to burn yourself. Make sure to quickly close the oven door to prevent heat loss.
Open its lid and empty your proofed dough from the basket into the Dutch oven. The dough should come out easily if you have used sufficient rice flour for lining the surface of the basket.
If it doesn't come out easily or gets torn apart, do not panic. Just empty as much as you can and then scrape the dough using a dough spatula (or with your hands) and add it on top of the piece that fell into the Dutch oven. Use more rice flour next time to avoid this unpleasant situation.
Using a share knife or a bread scoring tool, make a shallow cut across the surface of the dough. This is your sign that you make on the bread. Do not worry if this is less than perfect. The reason that we score the dough is to prevent it from bursting in random directions as it rises in the oven. If your dough is wet, scoring it may be difficult but do not worry -- it still works.
Put the lid back on the Dutch oven. Repeat the process for the other dough if you are baking two breads at the same time.
Put the Dutch ovens back to the regular oven.
As soon as you do it, lower the oven temperature down to 230 C (or 450 F). Set the timer to 30 minutes. During this time, the bread will bake in the Dutch oven without losing its humidity because its lid is closed.
After 30 minutes, open the oven door and remove the lids of the Dutch ovens. Quickly close back the oven door.
Bake for another 25 minutes. During this time, your breads will form a golden-brown crust. Because each oven may be slightly different, whether you wait for 20, 25, or 30 minutes depends on your oven and your preferred level of cooking. 25 minutes work ideal in my case.
Now take the Dutch ovens out from the oven and remove the baked bread using a wooden spatula. Again be careful to prevent burning your hands. The bread should come out easily from the Dutch oven. If you knock on the bottom of the bread with your spatula you should hear a thick sound suggesting the bread is well cooked and the air spaces are all formed inside.
Put your bread on a metal rack of some sort in your kitchen with air space in all directions. This is to ensure that the steam can escape easily. If you directly put your bread on a cutting board, your bread will get wet as the steam cannot escapes from the underside.
Wait for at least 30 minutes before you cut a slice and enjoy your bread.

At this point, congratulate yourself as you have managed to cook the best bread in town. Seriously, I've never bought a bread of this quality from any baker and I cannot thank enough to Chad Robertson (author of the book Tartine Bread and of the owner of the Tartine Bakery) for teaching this technique in his book. Your bread will easily last a week without any need for being refrigerated. I can even say that its taste gets better as it ages like a good wine. Lastly, I would like share some pictures of breads that I baked using this technique. I hope you found this post helpful. Do not be intimated by the seemingly long process, it becomes second nature as you do it a few times. Try it and share your experiences in the comments below!