I strongly believe that we should start in a way that is the simplest possible. It is easy to make things more complex, but it is a lot harder to make them simple once you have invested a lot into learning how to make them hard.
Sourdough bread tends to have an awful lot of making it hard.
My goal is to make nice, delicious bread to feed my family. If you want hearts on Instagram or a ribbon at the Fall Fair, this is not for you. But if you want reliable, healthy, and delicious food, this could not be easier.
I think a large part of making it hard is a hangover from bakeries—they are treated as experts and home bakers look up to them. But really, commercial practices do not translate well for the home baker. We have different goals.
And can I lovingly say I think many of the folks drawn to sourdough are a bit anxious? I don’t think it is just me, I see a lot of people worrying and being very meticulous, and we get into a spiral. The bread needs almost none of that. You can make very nice bread with almost no work. One guy said it is this simple:
- Mix it
- Wait for it to rise
- Bake it
It is really just that easy. The only part that is at all challenging is knowing when you have waited long enough for it to rise.
So I have written this as a step by step recipe, and a process that is completely stripped down and uses as few words as I think is possible.
But what do I do with all the extra words? Every time I tried to write this I abandoned it as it sprawled ever larger.
So I have put it all in the footnotes. The footnotes are unnecessary to baking a nice loaf. They are trivia and rants and deeper dives. Read them if you like, but you don’t need them for the bread.
So here is Ruben’s Could Not Be Easier Loaf for the First Time Baker.
1. Get a starter given to you by a friend. As long as it has been fed sometime recently, you don’t need to worry about feeding it.1
2. Collect these tools:
- a scale
- a container for bulk fermentation2 that is tall and skinny, with straight sides, something 5-6″ in diameter. Glass or plastic, like a vase, or a water jug.
- a banneton, or a bowl with a smooth tea towel
- a Dutch oven, or a large pot with a lid, or a turkey roaster.
- a razor blade, box cutter, or serrated steak knife
3. Collect these ingredients:
- Bread flour, or Canadian All Purpose flour
- Salt
- Water (tap water is usually fine. If you won’t drink it, don’t use it.)
- A bit of rice flour or bran is nice. You can make rice flour in your blender that will be good enough for now. If you don’t have any, don’t worry about it.
4. Mix your first loaf the night before your day off, so you have the day off to pay attention to it as it rises. Once you are comfortable with the process you will be able to shift it to fit your schedule.
Before you go to bed, mix together:
5. Add 500 grams flour and mix with a strong wooden spoon.5
6. Let the dough sit for 15 minutes, then give it 20-30 seconds of kneading in the bowl. You just want to make sure any dry bits of flour have been incorporated.
7. Put that blob of dough into your bulk fermentation container, and kind of tamp it down to flatten the top a bit. Mark the line it is at with an elastic band or a pen.
8. Cover it with a lid, or a plate, or saran wrap or whatever and just leave it on your counter overnight.6
9. Sleep deeply and restfully.7
10. Understand that time does not matter. The sourdough can not tell time, all that matters is temperature. Depending on the temperature of your kitchen you should let the dough bulk ferment different amounts. This is why you marked the line on your (important!) tall, skinny container, because now you can accurately see how much it rose.8
If your kitchen is:
65F/18C, let the dough rise 100% (double)
70F/21C, let the dough rise 70%
75F/24C, let the dough rise 50%
80F/27C, let the dough rise 30%
Those temps should actually be the dough temp, not the kitchen temp, but we are keeping it simple here. If you have a thermometer that will measure the dough, please do so.
11. Time doesn’t matter, the dough just takes as long as it takes,9 which is why you are doing this on your day off. Once the dough has risen the amount suitable to the temperature, tip it gently out on to a lightly floured counter. This is challenging, because our bulk container is skinny, so just be patient and let it come out.
Preshape it by folding the edges into the centre. Don’t google a video of this, it doesn’t matter.
Flip it over so the seam sides are down, flour it lightly, and drape the towel over it.
12. 30 minutes later, shape the dough. Something like the second half of this video from the Perfect Loaf.
Remember, this is not critical to a nice loaf. Don’t worry about it too much.
After you have shaped it a bit, leave it sitting there, right side up, for the new seams on the bottom to seal up again. Let it sit for 5-10 minutes.
13. Line your bowl with your tea towel and dust with rice flour or bran. If you have a banneton, great.
Our bread is made out of flour, so if we sprinkle the banneton with flour, the dough will stick to it. Rice flour does not get sticky, so that is helpful. If you don’t have rice flour or bran, you can dust your towel quite heavily with flour and it will probably be fine.
14. Put your dough ball in the banneton, upside down again, seam sides up. Sprinkle it with rice flour, or heavily with flour.
15. Watch this video on the Poke Test.
Poke your dough now. It should spring back very quickly.
16. Cover it with another towel, and put the whole thing inside a plastic bag.
17. Now just leave it on your counter. This is a great time for a cup of tea.
18. Every half hour or so, give it the Poke Test.
Again, time does not matter. Temperature is what controls how fast your dough is rising. If your house is very cold, this might take eight hours. If your house is very hot, this might take 45 minutes.
19. Once your dough passes the poke test, then put rice flour in your Dutch oven (or soup pot, or roaster). You don’t need to preheat.10
20. Leaving the top tea towel in place, tip the dough out onto the counter, so it is sitting on the tea towel.
21. Slash the dough with your razor, or the steak knife. You want to cut ¼” to ½” deep. Make a curved cut on the shoulder of the dough ball, like you are following the segment of an orange.
Commit to the cut. Don’t hesitate. Prepare yourself for the cut, then just do it and don’t worry about it any further.
22. Gently pick up your dough and set it in your Dutch oven. Put the lid on.
23. Put the Dutch oven on a rack in the lower middle of your oven.
It can be helpful to put another rack a few inches below that rack, and put a cookie sheet on it. This will help keep the bottom from getting too crisp. If you don’t have another rack, don’t worry about it.
24. Turn the oven to 450F, and bake for 30 minutes.
25. After 30 minutes take the lid off, and bake it for another 15 minutes.
26. After 15 minutes, take a look at it. Is it brown enough? If it is, then it is done.11 Give it more time if you think it should be darker.
27. When it is brown enough, put it on a rack to cool.
28. Let it cool for a few hours, then go crazy.
…
This is the simplest, most foolproof way I know how to bake.
There are very few important things:
If you get a starter from a friend that bakes nice bread, you know it will bake nice bread, so you don’t have to worry about that.
By using a tiny amount of starter you get to sleep through the night, and you replace the work of kneading with time. This is lazy no-knead bread.
There are two *critical* proofing milestones.
1. Bulk to the suitable amount of rise for the temperature.
2. Final proof at room temperature until it passes the poke test.
I feel completely confident that a first time baker can make nice bread.
And, an experienced baker can recalibrate, to see how nice their bread can be with almost zero work. You can reset, and ask how much of your process you need to keep.
You can always make things harder—but you may decide this bread is nice enough, and that is all you need. And now you know you can bake nice bread, so you have something to refer to as you start tweaking the schedule so you can bake when it is not your day off.
A note on starter maintenance
How often you feed and at what temperature you maintain your starter will definitely change the species and performance of your starter.
But is extreme laziness good enough? For me, it certainly is.
My starter maintenance is almost nothing. When I bake I use a forkful of starter straight from the fridge. When I have baked enough loaves that I get low on starter I feed it, which turns out to be roughly monthly. I feed the dregs in the jar with maybe 40 grams of flour and 45 of water—the starter is easier to stir into the mixture if it is a bit runnier. After feeding I might leave the starter on the counter for a while to warm up—or I might just put it back in the fridge if I want to go to bed.
The microbes are tough. They have been around for millions of years. I think all of the drama about starter feeding is more about trying to make the dough behave predictably so you can work by the clock—and we already know that we should abandon the clock and watch the dough. Just give the dough the time it needs to rise, and you can also abandon worrying about starter.
An alternate path at step 17 for potentially even greater laziness
What I have described in this recipe is a traditional process that bakers have used for centuries.
In recent years refrigeration has become widespread and it is a powerful tool for bakers to develop flavour, increase acidity, and slow the process to shift the schedule.
As I mentioned in the footnote about bulk fermentation, Tom Cucuzza at the Sourdough Journey has done some very important work, and has contributed enormous clarity to understanding proofing.
So, the microbes like to be warm, and when they are, they work quickly and the dough rises quickly. When you put dough in the fridge the microbes slow down. Cucuzza clarified that the dough will continue to rise from the leftover warmth in the dough—for up to ten hours after the dough is put in the fridge.
So, if your dough is very warm when it goes in the fridge, it will take longer to cool enough to stop the microbes and you will get more proofing. Therefore, you should refrigerate the dough earlier in the process to avoid overproofing.
And if your dough is cooler, it will cool to fridge temps more quickly, and so you should refrigerate later in the bulk fermentation in order to get proper proofing.
This chart from the Sourdough Journey shows how much to proof your dough based on its temperature, followed by an overnight stay in the fridge where the dough completes proofing from the leftover warmth in the dough. So, complete step 16, then put your dough in the fridge. At least eight hours later, take it out, and resume at step 20.
Now, the critical part that Cucuzza notes on that chart is that you must calibrate the rise for your process and kitchen. Maybe you take a little longer, maybe your fridge is a little warmer—if your dough is overproofed, then cut your bulk ferment to 5 or 10% less than the chart says. If it is underproofed, let your dough proof 5 or 10% more. Then bake another loaf and check the proofing again. Once you get it dialled in, Cucuzza says you will not need to calibrate that recipe again.
Also from the Sourdough Journey, this excellent guide on proper proofing.
So, I have only experimented with this leftover warmth proofing a couple of times. It worked pretty well, and I will continue to experiment. It potentially removes one of the last difficult parts from the process, the poke test.
- This is going to be a long footnote. It is rightly an entire post unto itself.
First, I really think a new baker should start with someone else’s starter—preferably a home baker, not from a commercial bakery. Again, many of us can tend towards the fretful, and second-guessing yourself and your starter seems to be far too common. So, begin with a starter that you know makes nice bread.
Now let’s think about the biology. Sourdough starter is a slurry of flour and water used as a life support system for bacteria and yeasts. Bacteria and yeast are hard to kill, as they can slow way down or go dormant or form spores. I have seen two people say they have revived starter that was abandoned in the fridge for five years.
Five years.
And then they fed it, maybe a few times, and their starter started doing its thing.
Personally, I have baked a nice loaf with starter that was last fed almost three months previously. Pretty much every month I bake with starter that has not been fed in a month. So when I say “As long as it has been fed sometime recently, you don’t need to worry about it.” I mean it.
So, all the stridency about how you “must” feed your starter in a certain way and use it exactly at peak is a complete crock of shit.
Starter peak is its own special crock of shit. I think peak is simply when the undeveloped gluten in the starter is blown apart by the gases from fermentation, and it has nothing necessarily to do with the peak population of microbes. If anybody has a study that shows I am wrong, I would love to see it.
Bakeries really care about production schedules and they have high volume, so it makes sense that they feed often and use their starter at a recognizable milestone like peak. They also have space constraints, and staff costs—all of which are different at home. All I want is to make a nice loaf for my family. Not only do I not need to follow bakery practices, when I do follow bakery practices it makes my life actively worse.
↩︎ - Bakeries or large families make more than one loaf at a time, so the first stage of fermentation is done as a giant blob, until the dough is weighed out into individual loaf-sized balls. This big blob stage is called bulk fermentation.
And when we are making one loaf at home, we still call it bulk, to distinguish from the final proof stage after shaping.
Proofing, fermentation, rising, and raising are often used interchangeably.
↩︎ - This tiny amount of starter matters, for reasons I will explain soon.
↩︎ - You will notice there is no autolyze. That is because you don’t need it and it is just another way to spend time on something that you will worry about. Perhaps it will make my bread 1% better. I can’t see the difference, and so I don’t care.
↩︎ - A recipe is a formula and process. With sourdough the tiny variations of flour and water and starter in the formula are not important for your daily loaf—it is the process that makes or breaks you.
↩︎ - You will notice the lack of kneading, stretch and folds, coil folds, and other opportunities to feel like an utter failure.
There are two ways to develop gluten: mechanically with work, or chemically, with time. Kneading is work, No Knead Bread uses time, and stretch and folds use some of both.
I prefer to do some stretch and folds, but if I don’t have time I don’t do any…and the bread is still nice. Will it win a ribbon at the Fall Fair? Probably not—but it only took ten minutes total to make.
Key to this ultra lazy method is the tiny amount of starter. It is this that creates the long overnight ferments without overproofing. As you get comfortable with the process you can increase the starter a bit to shave an couple of hours off the time—or cut it back even more to really stretch out the fermentation.
And, there is currently a concern—which I think is likely overblown—about acidic starter. If you do not feed your starter at its anointed hour it will reward you with crushing acidity and humiliation on your bloodline.
I don’t know. Maybe it does really matter, but I think it matters a lot less often than people of Facebook say. Fortunately the prescription to cure an acidic starter is to give it a huge feed—which is exactly what you do when you mix a tiny amount of old starter into your bread.
↩︎ - Sourdough does not have to be hard.
↩︎ - This is the latest work of Tom Cucuzza at The Sourdough Journey. As he was still developing it, I started using a tall, skinny container and measuring bulk rise, and I found it to be a game changer. This allowed me to standardize the rise so I knew it was consistent and I could focus on other things.
Sourdough has been built up to be so hard, so magical, so otherworldy. In fact, humans have been making it for millennia. There could not be anything more quotidian. But here we in late-stage capitalism, having anxiety attacks over each one of 73 steps in a loaf. Of bread.
Anyhow. Measuring bulk rise is transformative.
↩︎ - If there is one great crime of sourdough recipes on the internet it is this: they give times. Throw your clock into the damn trash.
Time is a product. It is the result. It is not a driving force. The deciding factors are how many microbes you start with (how much starter) and what temperature the dough is. Microbes like to be warm, and if they are they will eat and reproduce and make CO2, which makes your bread rise.
If you start with more microbes, your bread will take fewer hours.
If you keep your dough warm, your bread will take fewer hours.
The amount of time it takes is an outcome, and precious few recipes explain that. So, a new bakers follows the recipe, not realizing their kitchen and the test kitchen are at completely different temperatures and the water was at different temperatures so the dough is a different temperature—and then of course they have a complete disaster of a loaf and they blame themselves instead of the dumpster fire of a recipe.
Deep breath Ruben.
↩︎ - Preheating the Dutch oven may give you a thinner crust. When you are comfortable and are reliably getting nice loaves then you totally should experiment with preheating. But working with a searing hot and heavy Dutch oven is stressful, and the differences are not very large. I still don’t preheat after many years of doing a cold start. A cold start is just so easy.
↩︎ - There is a maddening trend for taking the internal temperature during baking, and it does not matter. ↩︎