- 500g water
- 180g mature starter
- I often put as much as 200g in, so anything in between should be fine.
- 730g flour
- When you're first making sourdough, just have all of your flour be bread flour. Play with mix ratios later.
- 20g kosher salt
- I recommend Diamond Crystal. It's finer and dissolves faster than Morton. And it's cheaper!
- A cast iron dutch oven (enameled is preferable, but not required)
- A large bowl to mix in, and preferably another container (could be a bowl or not) to proof in, though you could technically do both in the one bowl. Here's what I use for my proofing container. (Warning: the lid is sold separately 🙄).
- Mix everything together. I've found that the easiest way to do this is to mix the starter into the water thoroughly with a whisk, and THEN add the flour and salt.
- Mix that till there's no more dry flour. It's going to be sticky and annoying and is my least favorite step in making bread.
- OPTIONAL: If you want a less-simple approach that will get slightly better / more predictable results, wait till step 5 to add the salt, since salt is kind of inhibitive to the yeast early on. If you do this, you can reserve some of the water (say, 25-50g) and dissolve the salt into that. That'll make it easier to mix into existing dough.
- Transfer to an oiled bowl (I just use regular old cooking spray), and cover the bowl.
- Fill a small pot or saucepan with hot tap water and put it in your oven. Turn on the oven light. Put the bowl in there next to the pan. This will create a surprisingly good proofing temperature/humidity.
- Do this step four times (which will take a total of 2 hours):
- Wait a half hour.
- Take the proofing container out and remove the lid / cover.
- Grab the dough by opposite sides
- Lift, and let the dough stretch down on either side (the thumb side and the pinky side) of your hands
- Set the dough back down into the bowl so the stretched out sides fold back over themselves.
- Rotate 90 degrees and do the same thing again.
- That's it.
- Give the dough another 2-4 hours of bulk proofing in the oven. (If after 2 hours it hasn't grown much, keep giving it a half hour at a time to get its act together.)
- Coat a portion of your counter with flour (I use all-purpose because I have way more of that).
- Shape your loaf. (I'm not going to waste time descsribing that here. I'll get you some youtube videos for reference.
- Put your loaf, seam side up (you'll know what that means after you watch the videos) in your proofing basket.
- Put your proofing basket in something that will trap moisture in without actually touching the dough. I ususally use a garbage bag that I fluff up so there's some air in it.
- Put it in the fridge to let the dough "retard" or "cold ferment" overnight.
- Keep it in the fridge till like a half-hour before you want to bake. Longer retard == more sour.
- Turn it out onto a lightly floured piece of parchment paper. This is when the "seam side up" part makes sense because the seam will now be down on the parchment paper and your pretty basket lines will be on the top.
- Put a dutch oven in your oven and bring your oven up to 500 with the dutch oven in there.
- Once it's up to temp, take our your dutch oven and place your loaf inside. At this point you can score the top of your loaf. This is to allow the loaf to rise higher and have a looser, airier crumb.
- Reduce your oven's heat to 475, put the lid back on your dutch oven, and put it back in.
- Bake for 20 mins at 475.
- Reduce temp to 450, remove the dutch oven lid, and bake for another 35 minutes.
- Remove from oven and put the loaf on a cooling rack.
- Wait at least an hour before slicing, unless you plan on eating it all right then and there. Hahaha.