If you follow me on Instagram, you must regularly see me making sourdough bread (it usually makes more than one person drool by the way ^^). I had also asked you if this is the type of unsweetened recipe you wanted to see on the blog and you answered yes with enthusiasm! I'm not yet a specialist but it's been a year now since I started my starter and I'm ready to give you some tips! Plus my partner Cuisine et Cocotte sent me a great Dutch oven le creuset to bake my bread, so I'm now at the top!

As I was telling you, I started making sourdough bread almost a year ago now. After leaving my job, I was thinking about what I could do next. I've always loved growing things, so as I had some time I thought it was the opportunity to learn about baking. I'm warning you, making sourdough bread is a bit long and complicated at first but with experience it becomes much easier. And the game is SO worth it.

My Starter

But first let me introduce you to Charles, my 8-month-old starter (yes it's customary to name your starter) :

His godparent is Rogerio (@titareco on Instagram) who saved his life several times! To start it (Charles that is, not Rogério!), I followed the method from ni cru ni cuit which worked pretty well (I started it with wheat flour but rye flour is much more effective).

Making Your Starter

Day 1:

• In the morning: put 25 g of flour and 25 g of water in a sterilized glass jar. Mix well and leave at 26-28° (for example put it on a radiator in winter)
• In the evening same thing: add 25 g of flour and 25 g of water (so you have 100 g of starter)

Day 2:

• In the morning: remove 50 g of mixture and store it somewhere if you want to keep it (for example to make pancakes). Indeed, to make the mixture ferment into starter we will, with each feeding, double the amount of water and flour (we talk about 1:1 ratio). If we didn't remove some of the mixture before, we would end up with an astronomical amount at the end of the 3 days (and that's not the goal). So we always add 25 g of water and 25 g of flour.
• In the evening: same and we continue until the starter forms little bubbles!

From this point on, you can only feed it once a day. You will also see that when you feed it, the starter will double in volume then go back down (you can put a rubber band around the jar to indicate the initial amount). When your starter has done this operation at least 3 times, it's ready to be used.

Then you will need to feed it 1 or 2 days before using it (a bit earlier if you're just on quantity since we double the proportions each time). Once your starter starts to go down you can use it to make bread.

Making Your Sourdough Bread

To make a bread you will need about 140 g of starter for 500 g of flour. I used Maryse & Cocotte's method for a long time but now I add a tiny bit of yeast to my dough. It's less traditional but I find the crumb more airy and the bread better as a result.

For the flour I put a bit of whatever I have on hand (the one in the photo was half whole wheat flour half seed mix). From T65 onwards it works very well (you can go higher but the bread will be more whole grain and more compact).

Here is the basic recipe I use:

• 500 g of T80 organic wheat flour
• 310 g of water at 20°
• 140 g of liquid starter
• 1 g of fresh baker's yeast
• 10 g of salt

At first, we mix all the ingredients avoiding the starter and yeast being in direct contact with the salt (which has the effect of killing them and making them ineffective).

Gently knead with the hook at slow speed for 10 minutes (the gluten will develop and the dough will come together). Increase the speed slightly and continue kneading at speed 5 for 5-6 minutes. The dough should be smooth and eventually detach from the bowl. It should look like this:

It should be slightly sticky and elastic. Resist the temptation to load it with flour to make it less sticky, that's a bad idea! It will be hard to work with otherwise.

The "Folds"

Next, we turn out the dough onto a lightly floured work surface. We will work it a bit to develop the gluten and give it body. A bit like with brioche dough we will give it "folds". Using a bench scraper or dough cutter, we take the back of the dough ball to fold it over the front (basically we take the north side to fold it to the south).

You will see that the dough will immediately gain volume. Give the dough a quarter turn and repeat, 3-4 times. The dough should end up looking like this:

The Rise

Well the hardest part is done! If you want to make small loaves, this is when you cut the dough ball in 2 (if like me you have a 2 liter Dutch oven for example). Then you gently put each dough ball in a rising bowl for 4 hours at room temperature. Just like brioche, sourdough bread requires 2 rises: one to create the flavors and the other to develop them (and you'll see the sourdough rise is loooooong).

Shaping

We turn it out a second time and this is when we move on to shaping (and this is where our Dutch oven will help). The goal is to try to remove as little air as possible that is already trapped in the dough. So we gently remove it from the bowl.

You can give it one or two more folds like we did above. This time we will do the fold in 2 steps: we start by folding the back of the dough to the middle then the middle to the front (a bit like when you roll a duvet to store it!).

And here instead of struggling to shape, we place the dough ball directly in the Dutch oven with parchment paper:

If you don't have a Dutch oven (which I did before), the simplest is to put a clean kitchen towel in the bowl and place your dough ball in it with the seam on top. For cooking, you will turn the bowl upside down onto the hot oven rack and all that's left is to score the bread and bake it.

I don't overthink it, I put the Dutch oven in the fridge overnight and I bake at 230° C the next morning. I preheat the oven for about half an hour before putting it in. By the way, to have a really crispy crust, I recommend putting a ramekin of water in the oven to humidify the air.

Small knife cuts to score and help the bread develop and after 30 minutes at 230° C (for a dough ball of 250 g of flour) from the oven tadaaaa:

The smell that emanates from the kitchen at this moment is just INDESCRIBABLE!

You just have to be a little patient before enjoying your bread: since the dough is fermented you have to wait 2 hours for the gas to escape before you can eat it.

Sourdough Bread in Dutch Oven