Lately I’ve been making some sourdough bread that everybody seems to love. It’s a very simple no-knead recipe that I got from Breadtopia . It took me a few tries to get it right, but now it’s pretty consistent. The ease of this no-knead method does come at a cost: time. You have to let it sit at least over-night, with best results coming after letting the dough sit for 18(!!) hours. You can let it sit as little as 12 hours, but it won’t be as sour.
There are four ingredients:
- Sourdough starter – 1/4 cup
- You can get a good one from Amazon, but there are lots of different choices or you can even make your own.
- White bread flour – 18oz BY WEIGHT
- White bread flour, not “all-purpose” or anything else. You can also substitute some or all for whole wheat flour, but then you’ll have to adjust the amount of water upward a bit.
- Water – 12 oz BY WEIGHT
- Purified is best
- Salt – 1.5 teaspoons
- Ordinary granulated table salt. Not coarse or koshering salt.
You also need some equipment:
- A big bowl. Glass/pyrex works well, but whatever is fine as long as it’s at least 6 quarts or so.
- A proofing basket.
- Dutch Oven or La Cloche
- A scale for measuring the ingredients.
- Various measuring spoons and cups
- A work surface, like a cutting board, that you can flour liberally as needed.
- A bench scraper
- Dough scraper or silicone spatula. (optional)
- Wire rack (optional)
I’ll start with the assumption that you already have a good, active sourdough starter. If not, there are lots of instructions out there on how to buy or make your own and make/keep it active. Basically you should have at least a cup or so and when you feed it with more flour and water it should bubble actively and double in size within 12 hours.
Please note that this is a TWO DAY process, so plan ahead.
- Combine flour and salt in the big bowl and mix a bit.
- Combine sourdough starter and water and mix a bit until mostly dissolved.
- Pour liquid into bowl with dry ingredients.
- Mix around until mostly incorporated and difficult to stir.
- Flour hands liberally and fold dough over itself in the bowl a number of times to fully incorporate all the water and flour together. Scrape down the sides once or twice to try to get the everything mixed together.
- At this point you should have a ball-shaped blob of dough in the bottom of your bowl.
- Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and set aside ON THE COUNTER AT ROOM TEMPERATURE for about 18 hours or so. Do not refrigerate the dough. Yeast action is heavily temperature dependant.
- Come back after 18 hours and check your dough. It should have risen considerably – more than doubling.
- Flour a work surface liberally – I use a large wooden cutting board.
- Turn out the dough and use a scraper or silicone spatula to scrape the dough completely out onto the work surface.
- Gently push the dough out until it’s about 10×15 inches. Try not to massage the dough too much as you don’t want to lose the air bubbles.
- Fold it over twice the long way, like folding a letter. Then fold it once over itself the other direction so that you have a rough square.
- Cover the dough with plastic and let it sit again for 15min while you clean out the bowl and tidy up.
- Use your bench scraper to scrape up the dough into your hands and try to form it into a rough ball without messing with it too much, then dump it into your proofing basket.
- Let the dough sit in the proofing basket for 90min, but also:
- After the dough has been sitting in the proofing basket for 60min, pre-heat your oven to 500 degrees with the dutch oven inside it.
- After the dough has sat for 90min, open the oven with the hot dutch oven, take the lib off, and sprinkle some cornmeal inside. Then carefully invert the proofing basket over the oven and let the dough drop out, then put the lid back on the dutch oven and close the oven door.
- Bake the break for 30min, then take the lid off and turn the oven down to 450. Bake an additional 15min at 450.
- Take the bread out and set it on the wire rack to cool.
